Yes, the sorrows of the digital world indeed. Mommy on the cell phone while walking with her baby daughter in the park on a beautiful morning, the guy driving seventy-five texting and staring at his lap. Generals and Billionaires running the show on Twitter. You get the drill.
My bibliography of books about distraction, focus, silence, and our digital world keeps expanding. Most recently—books about our four dimensional being, the revenge of “analog” and the Internet as magic. We now have a digitally distracted authoritarian President-elect and a mad manic news media whose attention and focus is minimal.
With the whiff of Fascism in the air, God help us. We’ll need focus, attention and resistance to survive.
The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford, (Farrar Straus 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 Shelly Turkle (Basic Books, 2010)
Life on the Screen by Shelly Turkle (Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 1995)
The Second Self by Shelly Turkle (MIT Press Edition, 2005)
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Shelly Turkle (Penguin Press, 2015)
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 Press, 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)
The Internet is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015)
Mediated Memory in the Digital Age by Jose van Dijck (Stanford University Press, 2007)
Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human World, Richard Rhodes, ed., (Simon and Schuster, 1999)
Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut by David Shenk (Harper Collins, 1997)
Growing up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott (McGraw Hill, 2009)
The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing it All” Gets Nothing Done by Dave Crenshaw (Jassey-Boss, 2008)
Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson (Prometheus Books, 2008)
In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise by George Prochnik (Doubleday, 2010)
The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael Lynch (Liveright Publishing Company, 2016)
In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy by Michael Lynch (MIT Press, 2012)
Kaplan, Robert. “Being There: Put Down Your Smartphone—the Art of Travel Demands the End of Multitasking.” Atlantic Magazine, November 2012.
I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works: Why Your World, Work and Brain are Being Creatively Disrupted by Nick Bilton (Crown, 2010)
The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)
The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts (Bloomsbury, 2014)
The Call of Solitude: Alonetime in a World of Attachment by Esther Buchholz (Simon and Schuster, 1997)
The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life by Kenneth S. Gergen (Basic Books, 1991)
The Cult of Information: A Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Art, Intelligence and the Lost Art of Thinking by Theodore Rozak (University of California Press, 1994)
Amusing Outselves To Death by Neil Postman (Viking Penguin, 1985)
Technopoly by Neil Postman (Vintage Books, 1993)
Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century by Neil Postman (Vintage Books, 2000)
Staying Sharp: 9 Keys for a Youthful Brain through Modern Science and Ageless Wisdom by Henry Emmons(M.D.) and David Alter (Ph.D.) (Simon and Schuster Touchstone Books, New York, 2015)
The Cyber Effect: A pioneering psychologist explains how human behavior changes online by Dr. Mary Aiken (Spegel and Grau, Random House, 2016)
The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World by Laurence Scott (Wm. Heinemann Ltd., London 2015; pb. W.W. Norton, 2016)
The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World by Adrain Gazzaley and Larry Rosen (MIT Press, 2016)
“Tristan Harris Believes Silicon Valley is Addicting us to Our Phones. He’s Determined to Make it Stop.” by Bianca Bosker, Photographs by Olaf Blecker, The Atlantic (Tech Issue, November 2016)
The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sacks (Perseus Public Affairs, 2016)
Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art by Virginia Heffernen (Simon and Schuster, 2016)