Description

By Luis E. Juárez Avena

Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection Tung-Hui Hu (2022) 288pp., $US25 hardback, MIT Press, London, ISBN: 978-0-262-04711-1

Contrary to common sense, the experience of being lethargic is to be recommended in this digital age. Lethargy is a paradoxical plexus of non-actions, feelings, non-gestures and attitudes. When one sees lethargy as a feeling, it has negative connotations, just like melancholia, acedia and idleness. These experiences are part of a history of economic and religious morals that values productive and spiritually oriented actions. Moreover, these experiences have been directed at healing psychological and corporal malaise. As such, lethargy was a memory illness consisting of forgetting about oneself and turning into a non-productive body or disconnected soul. However, compared with burnout, which is an occupational phenomenon, digital lethargy describes the fragmented subject whose data are capitalized (pp.xxii–iv).

page: 125 – 129
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 39, Issue 2
SKU: 390206