by Chris Horner
They all want it: the ‘digital economy’ runs on it, extracting it, buying and selling our attention. We are solicited to click and scroll in order to satisfy fleeting interests, anticipations of brief pleasures, information to retain or forget. Information: streams of data, images, chat: not knowledge, which is something shaped to a human purpose. They gather it, we lose it, dispersed across platforms and screens through the day and far into the night. The nervous system, bombarded by stimuli, begins to experience the stressful day and night as one long flickering all-consuming series of virtual non events.
The result is that we find it hard to focus, to concentrate on one thing for longer than about 3 minutes. The repeated dispersal of attention, the iterated jumps and clicks of the wired individual making it harder to gather our dispersed attention in order to do anything like genuine contemplation or the relaxed appreciation of what we view or hear. It’s a familiar complaint: the spaces of leisure that might once have been the beyond the reach of of work, of consumption and gossip, are erased.
I want to suggest a few things here. One is that something has gone strangely awry with the possibilities of leisure, another that there is an existential problem that is connected to the diversion and dispersal of desire. Finally, that there are some important things the subject of all this digital attention needs to do, and that that is more than just disconnecting (although that might be a good idea too). Read more »
One day, I used to say to myself and anyone else who’d listen, I’m going to write a book called ‘everything you know about these people is wrong’. I have given up on the idea, and I expect anyway that someone else has already done it. What prompted the repeated thought was the way in which so little of what well known thinkers and artists did or said is actually reflected in public consciousness,
Novels set in New York and Berlin of the 1980s and 1990s, in other words, just as subculture was at its apogee and the first major gentrification waves in various neighborhoods of the two cities were underway—particularly when they also try to tell the coming-of-age story of a young art student maturing into an artist—these novels run the risk of digressing into art scene cameos and excursions on drug excess. In her novel A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil, second edition 2018), Andrea Scrima purposely avoids effects of this kind. Instead, she concentrates on quietly capturing moments that illuminate her narrator’s ties to the locations she’s lived in and the lives she’s lived there.
