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    Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface
    Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface
    Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface
    Audiobook5 hours

    Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface

    Written by Mark Kingwell

    Narrated by Adam Lofbomm

    5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Are you bored of the endless scroll of your social media feed? Do you swipe left before considering the human being whose face you just summarily rejected? Do you skim articles on your screen in search of intellectual stimulation that never arrives? If so, this book is the philosophical lifeline you have been waiting for. Offering a timely meditation on the profound effects of constant immersion in technology, also known as the Interface, Wish I Were Here draws on philosophical analysis of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage. Without moralizing, Mark Kingwell takes seriously the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world. While scrolling, swiping, and clicking suggest purposeful action, such as choosing and connecting with others, Kingwell argues that repeated flicks of the finger provide merely the shadow of meaning, by reducing us to scattered data fragments, Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text trends captured by algorithms. Written in accessible language that references both classical philosophers and contemporary critics, Wish I Were Here turns to philosophy for a cure to the widespread unease that something is amiss in modern waking life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 30, 2019
    ISBN9781541401655
    Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface
    Author

    Mark Kingwell

    Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His most recent works are Singular Creatures: Robots, Rights, and the Politics of Posthumanism (2022), The Ethics of Architecture (2021), On Risk (2020), and Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (2019), which won the Erving Goffman Prize in media ecology. His columns and essays appear in the New York Times, Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, the Literary Review of Canada, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Harper’s, among others.

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