The sorrows of the digital age include—distraction, lack of focus, continual serial partial attention and the loss of individuality. All of this is, for me, bound up with reading and spirituality. Here’s what I’ve been following lately on this subject.
Distraction, Attention, Technology and Individuality: A Bibliography
The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew B. Crawford, (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015).
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, (Penguin, 2009)
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris (Simon and Schuster, 2014)
Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It by Thomas de Zengotita (Bloomsbury, 2005)
Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free by Damon Young (Melbourne University Publishing, 2008)
Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age by William Powers (Harper Collins, 2010)
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (W.W. Norton,2011)
The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr (W. W. Norton, 2014)
Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle (Basic Books, 2010)
iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming its Hold on Us by Larry Rosen(Palgrave MacMillan, 2012)
Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans by Simon Head (Basic Books, 2013)
Being There: Putting Brain, Body and the World Together Again by Andy Clark (Bradford Books, 1997)
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch (Penguin, 1999)
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schull (Princeton University Press, 2012)
The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the US and South Africa by Jeffrey Sallez (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009)
The Culture of the New Capitalism by Richard Sennett (Yale University Press, 2013)
The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism by Richard Sennett (W.W. Norton, pb. 2000)
You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)
Ancient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information by Malcolm McCullough (MIT, Cambridge, 2013)
Silence: The Power of Quiet In a World Full of Noise by Thich Nhat Hanh (Harper One, 2015)
Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains by Susan Greenfield (Random House 2015)