Sublime

“What is the place of reading, and of the reading sensibility, in our culture as it has become?”

become aware of my own blurred boundaries, seized by the suspicion that I am not forming new opinions so much as assimilating them, that all my preferences can be predicted and neatly reduced to type, that the soul is little more than a data set.

The psychological impact of the Internet on day-to-day living.

My current-day interaction with the internet seems to contain ever fewer of these portholes and chance encounters. If the internet is a superhighway, it feels like there are fewer exits, and you’re expected to keep traveling to the same places over and over again, based on your past behavior (and purchasing history). In fact, the highway always see

Interactive media technologies are, at least in one sense, anticontextual. They open the field to new widths, constantly expanding relevance and reference, and they equip their user with a powerful grazing tool.

This stems from the structure of the web — it’s a tangle of links, a jumble of interconnected ideas. It fractalizes our attention, nudging us to leave fragments of our mind trapped in open tabs like a thousand tiny horcruxes — open loops feeding off our attention until they wither away, replaced by our latest distraction.

There’s a bottleneck here:

The disinclination I feel about the digital future is stronger, more certain, but the fear grows from the same root. I see the situation in Faustian terms, as an either/or. To embrace the microchip and all its magic would be to close myself off from a great many habits and attitudes, ones that define me to myself; I would have to reposition myself