The Reckless Decade has been sitting on my backlog for a while now. Thanks for encouraging me to move it up the list.
I have been reading Thoreau's Axe, Caleb Smith's excellent book. The subtitle is Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, which you might guess from the title is about nineteenth-century culture. He reads a passage about attention from Principles of Psychology where James talks about "piercing the shell of lethargy," which is just marvelous.
I take Smith's larger point to be similar to yours. The experience of relating to new cultural technologies started long, long before the iPhone and ChatGPT, and the ideas first expressed more than a hundred years ago, are as relevant today.
The Reckless Decade has been sitting on my backlog for a while now. Thanks for encouraging me to move it up the list.
I have been reading Thoreau's Axe, Caleb Smith's excellent book. The subtitle is Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, which you might guess from the title is about nineteenth-century culture. He reads a passage about attention from Principles of Psychology where James talks about "piercing the shell of lethargy," which is just marvelous.
I take Smith's larger point to be similar to yours. The experience of relating to new cultural technologies started long, long before the iPhone and ChatGPT, and the ideas first expressed more than a hundred years ago, are as relevant today.