Attention Spans

I guess you can’t simply blame technology for the reduced length of attention spans.  In other news, at some point a bad attention span was as short as ten pages long:

Literary criticism doesn’t exist in Denmark.  The recipe for newspaper reviews is: if I have written fifty-three sheets, the review will be one column at most, but if I write a ten-page pamphlet the review will fill a whole issue, maybe two.  And naturally this effrontery is much appreciated in a small town, for of course there are at most only two or three authors who suffer because of this; all the others benefit from a big work being treated as a trifle and a pamphlet as something of much importance.

- Søren Kierkegaard, 1847

Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay.  New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

The Art of Faithfulness

Back when I first encountered it, it had only 30,000 official subscribers, but now The Art of Manliness has doubled its tally of official readers.  The Art of Manliness has developed a major following on the Internet and it’s rare now for me to encounter a guy who hasn’t visited the site at least once.  In the past year Art of Manliness has gone from a blog to a complete social network with memberships, give-aways, and the chance that a reader could eventually become a writer and dispense his manly knowledge and wisdom to the rest of the men-in-training.  You’ll learn a dozen different ways to start a fire, why safety razors and straight razors are better than Mach 3s, which books you should read (a good list), and you’ll get a lot of great advice for making important decisions.

The Art of Manliness, for all its Web2.0 frills, is a reiteration of all the books on manliness that preceded the Internet Age.  Even the best of fathers can’t pass down every bit of wisdom he’s discovered or inherited, which hopefully means that it’s too habitual to be verbalized.   But in any case, books and films (both instructional and literary) have patched the gaps in each generation, and now the Internet has made its contribution.