Lee Rourke on the upside of boredom

From an interview with Lee Rourke at bookslut:

Can boredom ever lead to anything good, and if so, what?

Again, not that I read him that much, it was Bertrand Russell who said that “boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.” Not that I’m in any way shape or form a moralist, or The Canal imparts any form of moral guidance, but if I imagine that we could simply break things up into things that are deemed “good” and “bad” then I would concur with Russell and argue that good things happen when we try to embrace boredom rather than fight it. I think boredom, when we allow its indifferent space into our lives, can lead to a greater perspective on things; it allows us the mental sovereignty to observe and ponder things at a slower pace, away from modern distractions, which are only designed to quicken time anyway. It always amazes me that people want time to move quickly, to speed things up every day of their lives, to wile away their evenings and weekends doing things that are considered exciting and solely designed and conceived to pass the time for them, and then, when all this is over, at the end of there lives — what a surprise! — they wonder to themselves why things have passed them by so quickly. What’s all that about?

Only (dis)connect

The year in review: ‘How should we rate 2008?’ by | Prospect Magazine January 2009 issue 154

Mark Cousins film critic

Overrated The most overrated event of the year, though it was a process rather than an event, was the spread of wireless internet. Everywhere’s a hot spot now. I want far far more cool spots, where I can feel the bracing reality of a place. Offline is a brilliant, endangered species. Similarly, online identity is overrated. So many people went on Facebook this year, half heartedly, as if it’s an obligation. It’s no longer fun to have a digital self.

Jury’s out on this one. Is internet connection so addictive that we can no longer be trusted to switch off?

Content, content everywhere…

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Wide and thin – strange to see same metaphor used for information overload and product development.

Nicholas Carr in conversation with Michael Krasny on KQED.

[audio:http://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/forum/2008/08/2008-08-21b-forum.mp3]

Identity corrosion

iD: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century by Susan Greenfield review | Non-fiction book reviews – Times Online

Lady Greenfield posits three types of identity. Those who are “Someone” locate themselves in relation to others, changing and responding as they gain experience. Those who are “Anyone” are characterised by action, not reflection, and have a more rigid caste of mind. Those who are “Nobody” are the hedonistic young, forever receptive to new stimuli but lacking the ability to assign any meaning to them. She fears that we are all becoming Nobodies.

In this nightmare world, the demarcation between individuals will become blurred as biotechnology is used to reshape faces closer to the desired ideal, and electronics obliterates the gap between the real and virtual worlds. Age will have no meaning as the limits on reproductive life are removed through IVF and genetic engineering. We will all look the same, think the same, and behave the same, bouncing unreflectively through life like a pinball in a penny arcade.

If I don’t find this wholly persuasive, it is because I mistrust predictions of the future based on a snapshot of the present. Much of what Lady Greenfield says about reality TV, the decline of a shared culture, and the relative ignorance of the young are common currency among those of us in middle age. But to extrapolate this into despair at the disappearance of human individuality might be to stretch an idea beyond its natural limits.

The best exemplars are the Japanese hikikomori – young men, predominantly, who have withdrawn from society and spend their time locked away in their rooms in symbiosis with a screen. There are said to be a million of them.

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