As part of this technology safari, I've tried to pay attention to how people live and work in this high-tech age.

And we seem to do it by living in a state of perpetual distraction.

It's somehow appropriate that many of us in this Online Leadership seminar are multi-tasking. At least half the class of 20 have laptops, Treos or Blackberries. Most everyone else has a cell phone
clipped to their waistband or purse (I think I saw maybe two Old World yellow legal pads in the entire room, and one of those was mine even though I also have a laptop and Treo). There are so many mobile devices set to vibrate in this class that if they all went off at once they might trigger an earthquake.

There is, of course, high-speed Internet access in all the hotel rooms. And there is a business center off the hotel lobby with computers as well.

Two papers are delivered to my hotel door every morning: USA Today and The St. Petersburg Times.

CNN is on around-the-clock in the hotel's breakfast/lounge area.

Our bus driver wears one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear.

And then this morning, I read an editorial in the St. Pete paper by Thomas L. Friedman (New York Times News Service). He was riding in a taxi in Paris recently and calculated that he and his driver had been together about an hour and between them had been doing six different things: The taxi driver was driving, talking on his ear-phone and watching a video from his dashboard. Friedman was riding, working on his laptop and listening to his iPod.

Friedman's editorial goes on to quote technologist Linda Stone, who says we're suffering from an Internet-age disease called "continuous partial attention."

Says Stone: "We're so accessible, we're inaccessible. We can't find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise..."

This is the fragmented world, then, that mass-market newspapers find themselves competing in. Everyone wants to "break through" with their message. How will we do that? And if we do, do we have any hope of holding anyone's attention for very long?

In yesterday's Poynter sessions we dissected one way to do that: citizen-generated content. The theory goes like this: what we have to say doesn't carry as much weight anymore. People are multi-tasking, pulling in pieces of information simultaneously from Treos and laptops and Bluetooths and CNN and satellite radio and Web sites....and newspapers. But if we give them a voice, if we make room on our printed pages and on our Web pages for their thoughts, their videos, their playlists, they'll be much more likely to pause, to interrupt the constant flow of noise, and give us some time. And if we're lucky, they might even do it again. And again.

The state of the newspaper industry reminds me of these last few days before elections: everyone has an ad running on TV, everyone has a campaign sign in the front yard, every candidate is ringing doorbells and working the Rotarian circuit. Everyone has a pitch.

Newspapers are just one of dozens of candidates out on the election trail. Will readers listen to our pitch, or are they too busy partially paying attention?