The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom
Reimagining our relationship to boredom by curating meaning with art, philosophy, and an ethic of care.
Description
The spiritual crisis of the twenty-first century is overload boredom. There is more information, content, and stimulation than ever before, and none of it is waiting passively to be consumed. The demands exceed our capacities.
The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom makes the case that withdrawal and resistance are not our only options: we can choose kēdia, an ethic of care. Rather than conceiving the world of information as external, Sharday Mosurinjohn turns to the sensational and emotional, focusing on the ways the digital age has radically reconfigured our interior lives. Using an innovative method of affective aesthetic speculation, Mosurinjohn engages the world of art, literature, and comedy for a series of unexpected case studies that make strange otherwise familiar scenes of overload boredom: texting, browsing social media, and performing information work. Ultimately, she shows that the opposite of boredom is not interest but meaning, and that we can only make it by curating the overload.
The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom is a bold and original intervention for the present condition, unsettling the framing of existing work around technological modernity and its discontents.
Reviews
“Sensitively and intelligently composed, The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom advances scholarship on contemporary boredom and digital life, whilst imaginatively exploring an ethics of care through which we might create and curate meaning in an overload age. An indispensable text for understanding the present condition” Ben Anderson, Durham University