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Multitasking, or "continuous partial attention" as Linda Stone has called another form of attention-splitting, or "hyper attention" as N. Katherine Hayles has called another contemporary variant,2 are not necessarily bad alternatives to focused attention. It depends on what is happening in our own external and internal worlds at the moment.

As students become more aware of how they are directing their attention, I begin to emphasize the idea of using blogs and wikis as a means of connecting with their public voice and beginning to act with others in mind. Just because many students today are very good at learning and using online applications and at connecting and participating with friends and classmates via social media, that does not necessarily mean that they understand the implications of their participation within a much larger public.

ut how to participate in a way that's valuable to others as well as to yourself, I agree with Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins, and others that participating, even if it's no good and nobody cares, gives one a different sense of being in the world. When you participate, you become an active citizen rather than simply a passive consumer of what is sold to you, what is taught to you, and what your government wants you to believe. Simply participating is a start. (Note that I am not guaranteeing that having a sense of agency compels people to perform only true, good, and beautiful actions.)

I don't believe in the myth of the digital natives who are magically empowered and fluent in the use of social media simply because they carry laptops, they're never far from their phones, they're gamers, and they know how to use technologies. We are seeing a change in their participation in society—yet this does not mean that they automatically understand the rhetorics of participation, something that is particularly important for citizens.

Critical consumption, or what Ernest Hemingway called "crap detection," is the literacy of trying to figure out what and who is trustworthy—and what and who is not trustworthy—online. If you find people, whether you know them or not, who you can trust to be an authority on something or another, add them to your personal network. Consult them personally, consult what they've written, and consult their opinion about the subject.

Finally, crap detection takes us back, full circle, to the literacy of attention. When I assign my students to set up an RSS reader or a Twitter account, they panic. They ask how they are supposed to keep up with the overwhelming flood of information. I explain that social media is not a queue; it's a flow. An e-mail inbox is a queue, because we have to deal with each message in one way or another, even if we simply delete them. But no one can catch up on all 5,000 or so unread feeds in their RSS reader; no one can go back through all of the hundreds (or thousands) of tweets that were posted overnight. Using Twitter, one has to ask: "Do I pay attention to this? Do I click through? Do I open a tab and check it out later today? Do I bookmark it because I might be interested in the future?" We have to learn to sample the flow, and doing so involves knowing how to focus our attention.

Who can seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had gone there to receive?

The researcher was talking about what some refer to as the “Bamboo Ceiling”—an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership. The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation

It’s racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It’s simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and “pumping the iron of math” is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.

Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics. LEAP has parsed the complicated social dynamics responsible for the dearth of Asian-American leaders and has designed training programs that flatter Asian people even as it teaches them to change their behavior to suit white-American expectations. Asians who enter a LEAP program are constantly assured that they will be able to “keep your values, while acquiring new skills,” along the way to becoming “culturally competent leaders.”

The law professor and writer Tim Wu grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father, which allows him an interesting perspective on how whites and Asians perceive each other. After graduating from law school, he took a series of clerkships, and he remembers the subtle ways in which hierarchies were developed among the other young lawyers. “There is this automatic assumption in any legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor,” he says, and then goes on to define the word coolie,a Chinese term for “bitter labor.” “There was this weird self-selection where the Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.” By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that. “White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.” This idea of a kind of rule-governed rule-breaking—where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in an innate cultural sense—is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions in practice. LEAP appears to be very good at helping Asian workers who are already culturally competent become more self-aware of how their culture and appearance impose barriers to advancement.

If the Bamboo Ceiling is ever going to break, it’s probably going to have less to do with any form of behavior assimilation than with the emergence of risk-­takers whose success obviates the need for Asians to meet someone else’s behavioral standard. People like Steve Chen, who was one of the creators of YouTube, or Kai and Charles Huang, who created Guitar Hero. Or Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer that he sold to Amazon for about a billion dollars in 2009.

though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.

Schools have consequently endeavored to teach children how to read and write at younger and younger ages, but Bell says that’s problematic because children mature and learn at very different rates. It also steals time away from more developmentally appropriate activities for young children.