In a smart and emotional article in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan concludes:
There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls.
He is bordering the territory I explore in my forthcoming book, Inside the Flame, tracking the erosion of human interaction, of rich sensory experiences created by spending our lives bombarded with, and connected to electronica. Worse—it’s addictive, and even though my book is devoted to direct discovery of the tactile world, I admit that I spend far too much time lurking around the political miasma-du-jour, celebrity break-ups, cinema backstories, and just about anything Zappos wants to tempt me with. (to be continued)
