Download or read book Boredom Studies Reader written by Michael E. Gardiner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boredom Studies is an increasingly rich and vital area of contemporary research that examines the experience of boredom as an importan – even quintessential – condition of modern life. This anthology of newly commissioned essays focuses on the historical and theoretical potential of this modern condition, connecting boredom studies with parallel discourses such as affect theory and highlighting possible avenues of future research. Spanning sociology, history, art, philosophy and cultural studies, the book considers boredom as a mass response to the atrophy of experience characteristic of a highly mechanised and urbanised social life.
Download or read book Out of My Skull written by James Danckert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one likes to be bored. Two leading psychologists explain what causes boredom and how to listen to what it is telling you, so you can live a more engaged life. We avoid boredom at all costs. It makes us feel restless and agitated. Desperate for something to do, we play games on our phones, retie our shoes, or even count ceiling tiles. And if we escape it this time, eventually it will strike again. But what if we listened to boredom instead of banishing it? Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood contend that boredom isn’t bad for us. It’s just that we do a bad job of heeding its guidance. When we’re bored, our minds are telling us that whatever we are doing isn’t working—we’re failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective. Too many of us respond poorly. We become prone to accidents, risky activities, loneliness, and ennui, and we waste ever more time on technological distractions. But, Danckert and Eastwood argue, we can let boredom have the opposite effect, motivating the change we need. The latest research suggests that an adaptive approach to boredom will help us avoid its troubling effects and, through its reminder to become aware and involved, might lead us to live fuller lives. Out of My Skull combines scientific findings with everyday observations to explain an experience we’d like to ignore, but from which we have a lot to learn. Boredom evolved to help us. It’s time we gave it a chance.
Download or read book The Culture of Boredom written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives.
Download or read book On Boredom written by Rye Dag Holmboe and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we say that we are bored? Or when we find a subject boring? Contributors to On Boredom: Essays in art and writing, which include artists, art historians, psychoanalysts and a novelist, examine boredom in its manifold and uncertain reality. Each part of the book takes up a crucial moment in the history of boredom and presents it in a new light, taking the reader from the trials of the consulting room to the experience of hysteria in the nineteenth century. The book pays particular attention to boredom’s relationship with the sudden and rapid advances in technology that have occurred in recent decades, specifically technologies of communication, surveillance and automation. On Boredom is idiosyncratic for its combination of image and text, and the artworks included in its pages – by Mathew Hale, Martin Creed and Susan Morris – help turn this volume into a material expression of boredom itself. With other contributions from Josh Cohen, Briony Fer, Anouchka Grose, Rye Dag Holmboe, Margaret Iversen, Tom McCarthy and Michael Newman, the book will appeal to readers in the fields of art history, literature, cultural studies and visual culture, from undergraduate students to professional artists working in new media.
Download or read book Boredom written by Peter Toohey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book to argue for the benefits of boredom, Peter Toohey dispels the myth that it's simply a childish emotion or an existential malaise like Jean-Paul Sartre's nausea. He shows how boredom is, in fact, one of our most common and constructive emotions and is an essential part of the human experience. This informative and entertaining investigation of boredom--what it is and what it isn't, its uses and its dangers--spans more than 3,000 years of history and takes readers through fascinating neurological and psychological theories of emotion, as well as recent scientific investigations, to illustrate its role in our lives. There are Australian aboriginals and bored Romans, Jeffrey Archer and caged cockatoos, Camus and the early Christians, Durer and Degas. Toohey also explores the important role that boredom plays in popular and highbrow culture and how over the centuries it has proven to be a stimulus for art and literature. Toohey shows that boredom is a universal emotion experienced by humans throughout history and he explains its place, and value, in today's world. "Boredom: A Lively History "is vital reading for anyone interested in what goes on when supposedly nothing happens.
Download or read book Boredom and Academic Work written by Mariusz Finkielsztein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing the notion of boredom into the academic context, Boredom and Academic Work proposes a fresh sociological perspective on boredom and academic work alike. It invites a reader to reflect on the essence of boredom and the nature of academic work from the sociological perspective. It constitutes methodological and conceptual guidance for all those interested in their own emotions both at work and outside. It also provides an original, interactional and essential definition of boredom and a novel standpoint for observing academic work, both in its systemic and practical level, and shows how the academic system influences its subjects' well-being, motivation, emotions, and practices. Covering various approaches from the qualitative methodology, linguistics, sociology of work, emotions, and higher education, and telling a story of research and teaching university staff, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas and the general academic public as well.
Download or read book Boredom and Art written by Julian Jason Haladyn and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boredom and Art examines the use of boredom as a strategy in modern and contemporary art to resist or frustrate the effects of consumerism and capitalism. This book traces the emergence of what Haladyn terms the will to boredom in which artists, writers and philosophers actively attempt to use the lack of interest inherent in the state of being 'bored' to challenge people. Instead of accepting the prescribed meanings of life given to us by consumer or mass culture, boredom represents the possibility of creating meaning: ‘a threshold of great deeds’ in Walter Benjamin’s memorable wording. It is this conception of boredom as a positive experience of modern subjectivity that is the main critical position of Haladyn's study, in which he proposes that boredom is used by artists as a form of aesthetic resistance that, at its most positive, is the will to boredom.
Download or read book The Space of Boredom written by Bruce O'Neill and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Space of Boredom Bruce O'Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O'Neill shows how the city's homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O'Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest's homeless, O'Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement.
Download or read book Dependent Distracted Bored written by Susanna Paasonen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach to understanding the culture of ubiquitous connectivity, arguing that our dependence on networked infrastructure does not equal addiction. In this book, Susanna Paasonen takes on a dominant narrative repeated in journalistic and academic accounts for more than a decade: that we are addicted to devices, apps, and sites designed to distract us, that drive us to boredom, with detrimental effect on our capacities to focus, relate, remember, and be. Paasonen argues instead that network connectivity is a matter of infrastructure and necessary for the operations of the everyday. Dependencies on it do not equal addiction but speak to the networks within which our agency can take shape.
Download or read book Towards a General Theory of Boredom written by Elina Tochilnikova and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through comparative historical research, this book offers a novel theory explaining the emergence of boredom in modernity. Presenting a Durkheimian topology of cross-cultural boredom, it grounds the sociological cause of boredom in anomie and the perception of time, compares its development through case studies in Anglo and Russian society, and explains its minimal presence outside of the West. By way of illustrative examples, it includes archetypes of boredom in literature, art, film, and music, with a focus on the death of traditional art, and boredom in politics, including strategies enacted by Queer intellectuals. The author argues that boredom often results from the absence of a strong commitment to engaging with society, and extends Durkheim’s theory of suicide to boredom in order to consider whether an imbalance between social regulation and integration results in boredom. The first book to scientifically explain the historical emergence and epidemic of boredom while engaging with cutting edge political debates, Towards a General Theory of Boredom will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory, social psychology, and sociology.
Download or read book Red Storm Rising written by Tom Clancy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1987-07-01 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the Jack Ryan series comes an electrifying #1 New York Times bestseller—a standalone military thriller that envisions World War 3... A chillingly authentic vision of modern war, Red Storm Rising is as powerful as it is ambitious. Using the latest advancements in military technology, the world's superpowers battle on land, sea, and air for ultimate global control. It is a story you will never forget. Hard-hitting. Suspenseful. And frighteningly real. “Harrowing...tense...a chilling ring of truth.”—TIME
Download or read book The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom written by Sharday C. Mosurinjohn and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Play Anything written by Ian Bogost and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How filling life with play-whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds -- forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient age Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games. Play Anything, reveals that games appeal to us not because they are fun, but because they set limitations. Soccer wouldn't be soccer if it wasn't composed of two teams of eleven players using only their feet, heads, and torsos to get a ball into a goal; Tetris wouldn't be Tetris without falling pieces in characteristic shapes. Such rules seem needless, arbitrary, and difficult. Yet it is the limitations that make games enjoyable, just like it's the hard things in life that give it meaning. Play is what happens when we accept these limitations, narrow our focus, and, consequently, have fun. Which is also how to live a good life. Manipulating a soccer ball into a goal is no different than treating ordinary circumstances- like grocery shopping, lawn mowing, and making PowerPoints-as sources for meaning and joy. We can "play anything" by filling our days with attention and discipline, devotion and love for the world as it really is, beyond our desires and fears. Ranging from Internet culture to moral philosophy, ancient poetry to modern consumerism, Bogost shows us how today's chaotic world can only be tamed-and enjoyed-when we first impose boundaries on ourselves.
Download or read book How to Be Bored written by Eva Hoffman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the latest installment of the acclaimed School of Life series, learn how to make peace with your down time—and even benefit from it. Lethargic inactivity can be debilitating and depressing, but in the modern world the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. We live in a hyperactive, over-stimulated age. Uninterrupted activity can seem exciting, but it can also leave us emotionally disorientated and mentally depleted. How can we recover a sense of balance and a richness in our lives? In How to Be Bored, Eva Hoffman argues for the need to cultivate curiosity and self-knowledge and to relish moments of unplugged idleness and non-virtual contact with others. Drawing on psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and a wide range of literature, she emphasizes the need to understand our own preferences and purposes and to replenish our inner resources. This book aims to make readers more vigorously engaged in their lives and to restore a sense of depth and meaning to their experiences.
Download or read book Methodologies of Affective Experimentation written by Britta Timm Knudsen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-27 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an era of experimentation – both if we look at the broader social world of politics, media and art and at the narrower context of academic knowledge production. This collection consists of 14 chapters by leading scholars in affect studies. They explore the affective dimensions of experimental practices related to, for example, activism, the COVID-19 pandemic, populism, sustainability, patient communities, music streaming, Jamaican dancehall, gangs, leadership, tourism and minority youth cultures. Experiments are understood as intentionally crafted milieus aimed at (re)presenting unnoticed aspects of the world, as non-linear processes with unpredictable outcomes, and as ways of giving the future a provisional form. The collection responds to a pressing need to understand the intersection between affect, experimentation and sociocultural change by offering empirical strategies to explore how, and with what consequences, experimentation is affective.
Download or read book The Upside of Downtime written by Sandi Mann and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are we living in an age where we are more boredom-prone? Or are other people boring us? Or could we be that boring person?! In our current information age, we are constantly connected to technology, and have so many varied ways to spend our leisure time that we should all surely never know what boredom feels like. Yet, boredom appears to be on the rise; it seems that the more we have to stimulate us, the more stimulation we crave. In a quest to relieve our boredom, we engage in dangerous risk-taking - from extreme sports to drugs to gambling to anti-social behaviour, or we overindulge in shopping or eating. The Upside of Downtime explores the causes and consequences of boredom in the fast-paced twenty-first century. Parents are desperate to keep their children entertained during every waking moment, the education system is geared towards interactivity, and attention spans are dropping as we use multiple devices at all times. But the world of work can be increasingly repetitive and routine, and we are losing the ability to tolerate this everyday tedium. Using Sandi Mann's own ground-breaking research into boredom, this book tells the story of how we act, react and cope when we are bored, and argues that there is a positive side to boredom. It can be a catalyst for humour, fun, reflection, creativity and inspiration. The radical solution to the 'boredom problem' is to harness it rather than try to avoid it. Allowing yourself time away from constant stimuli can enrich your life. We should all embrace our boredom and see the upside of our downtime.
Download or read book Wish I Were Here written by Mark Kingwell and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
