Changing the subject : art and attention in the Internet age / Sven Birkerts.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Birkerts, Sven, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Internet--Social aspects.

Internet.

Art and technology.

Literature and technology.

Technological innovations--Social aspects.

Technological innovations.

Digital media--Social aspects.

Digital media.

Thought and thinking.

Physical Description:

256 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2015.

Summary:

"In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art. Over the next two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has reluctantly allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life... In Changing the subject, he examines the changes that he has observed in himself and others-- the distraction induced by reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of "hive" behaviors. "An unprecedented shift is underway," he argues, and "this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation." He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and contemplates the countering energies available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are a threat to creativity."--Page 4 of cover.

Contents:

On or about

The lint of the material

Serendipity

The room and the elephant

You are what you click

The hive life

"I'll take Hell in a handbasket for five hundred, Alex"

"It's not because I'm a cranky Luddite, I swear"

André Kertész on reading

Notebook: reading in a digital age

Bolaño summer: a reading journal

It wants to find you

The Salieri syndrome: envy and attachment

Idleness

Emerson's "The poet"- a circling

The still point

Attending the dragonfly.

ISBN:

1555977219

9781555977214

OCLC:

898419567