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It is possible to ignore such dangers—say, by convincing yourself that you are a massively skilled multitasker—but it is equally easy to magnify their power until resistance seems futile. We should rather remember that it is possible and, really, necessary to do what David Foster Wallace recommended to the graduates of Kenyon: to be “conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Alan Jacobs
Pascal would also tell us that the stakes are high, quite high. “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries,” he writes. “For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”
Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet
The Convivial Society
This machine-approximated version of bokeh signifies amateurism rather than craft. Hobbyists who dislike such technological tricks might seek out older digital cameras, or they might flee back to film. But the new iPhone cameras, more than most users realize, are forging a template that is reshaping the nature of image-making along with our expectations of what a photograph should be.
Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?
newyorker.com
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