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121 " The difference, then, between your brain’s personalization and Google’s is that the Google experience is really a hybrid of your brain’s choices and a corporation’s. "
― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World
122 " The inventions of writers and artists are forged through dissatisfaction. That discrepancy between the world we walk through and the world inside of us encourages some to try to build a bridge (in the shape of a book about talking bunnies or an impressionistic painting). A perfectly happy artist would be a failure. "
123 " Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing—to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having coffee—because whoever can do nothing, letting his thoughts go where they may, must be at peace with himself.”53 "
124 " The endgame is this: Without absence in our lives, we risk fooling ourselves into believing that things (a message from a lover, the performance of a song, the face of a human body) matter less. De Beers hoards its diamonds to invent a scarcity that equals preciousness. Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that’s lacking breaks—a swarm of noise blanketing the valuable data beneath. "
― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
125 " The poet Kenneth Goldsmith, for one, taught a course at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time on the Internet,” in which digital distraction was mandatory because he wholeheartedly believes that the Internet’s frenetic state can jumpstart new arenas for creative writing. A surrealist, “electronic collective unconscious” can produce new work, he says, “in ways that aren’t yet recognized as literary. "
126 " Each technology drops its own lens over your eyes. And who can say that the social media lens is any less viable than the printing press lens? "
127 " Every expert, every scientist, and every friend I spoke with had a device in his or her pocket that could funnel a planet’s worth of unabridged, incomprehensible clamor. Yet it was absence that unified the elegies I heard. "
128 " Sebastian de Grazia believes the wise use of “spare” time is not just a product of civilization but a litmus test for that civilization’s success. He writes: “Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing—to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having coffee—because whoever can do nothing, letting his thoughts go where they may, must be at peace with himself. "