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The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom |
eBook Available
Reimagining our relationship to boredom by curating meaning with art, philosophy, and an ethic of care.
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 kedia, 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.
The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom makes the case that withdrawal and resistance are not our only options: we can choose kedia, 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.
Details
184 Pages, 6 x 9
4 photos
ISBN 9780228011538
August 2022
Formats: Cloth, Paperback, eBook
“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
Sharday C. Mosurinjohn is assistant professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University.
Figures ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: The Spiritual Significance of Boredom 3
1 A History of Boredom as a Spiritual Crisis 15
2 The Disaffect of Overload Boredom 30
3 Habritual Texting: Why We Are Addicted to Boring
Conversation 47
4 Uncertainty and Shared Entropy in Overload Culture 69
5 Information Enchantment: The Mystifying and the Kēdic 82
6 Conclusion: Overload Boredom and a Hermeneutics of Care 102
Epilogue: For Boredom 109
Notes 113
References 137
Index 155
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: The Spiritual Significance of Boredom 3
1 A History of Boredom as a Spiritual Crisis 15
2 The Disaffect of Overload Boredom 30
3 Habritual Texting: Why We Are Addicted to Boring
Conversation 47
4 Uncertainty and Shared Entropy in Overload Culture 69
5 Information Enchantment: The Mystifying and the Kēdic 82
6 Conclusion: Overload Boredom and a Hermeneutics of Care 102
Epilogue: For Boredom 109
Notes 113
References 137
Index 155
