I sense a theme through a bunch of recent articles. There is this lament in the New York Times for the lost attention spans of the youth, blaming the web and other modern technologies for students’ inability to read whole novels, focus in class etc. It’s not a bad article, despite some shortcomings.

For more detail, Henry Jenkins interviews Linda Stone (part two here), who coined the term “continuous partial attention.” She argues there is a scale of attention, and multi-tasking is sometimes appropriate, and not always bad. This passage is especially intruiguing:

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Here’s the first of three essays on BoingBoing articulating the case for being a stoic. The stoics were Greek and Roman philosophers who believed in the elimination of negative emotions through reason. The author – William B. Irvine, who not coincidentally has a book out on stoicism – makes a rather compelling case for taking a second look at the Stoics, if after your first look you dismissed them as grouchy buzzkills. He also gives some useful examples of stoic mental exercises. Enjoy the thrills of visualizing the deaths of your loved ones!¹

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