| DISTRACTED The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age Maggie Jackson Bill McKibben (Fwd.) Amherst: Prometheus Books, June 2008 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-59102-623-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-59102-623-7 | 327pp. | HC | $25.99 | |
| Page 16: | "Yet alongside the voracious debates about the disorder festers a discomfiting realization..." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "vociferous"? I don't think she means "all-consuming." Some other word beginning with "v"? Vituperative? Vexacious? |
| Page 37: | "Nevertheless, he made important contributions to paleontology and continued to write, developing in exile his concept of the noosphere..." |
| Punctuation: S/B "noösphere". |
| Page 40: | "Around 1900, the spaces between ourselves and the world was filled by apparatuses, instruments, technologies and all sorts of entertainment." |
| Number: S/B "were filled". |
| Page 48: | "I had missed the point: the virtual counts. We take the faceless at face value now." |
| Upwind Johnson would not be pleased; the girls would stop chasing him, give up trying to see his face. |
| Page 105: | "When you drive up to the pump and tell the attendant to fill up your tank," notes Rapaille, "it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate for him to ask, 'which one?'" |
| There's an attendant?!? |
| Page 108: | "One medieval London monk, writing fearfully yet with grudging respect for the Mongol tribes then ravaging Russia, described their horses as so dreadfully huge that they had to be mounted with stepladders and so vociferous that they devoured branches and even whole trees." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "voracious". It's curious the way these words are interchanged, here and on page 16. |
| Page 130: | "Our world is no more risky than in the past." |
| I question this. |
| Page 138: | "...half of viewers completely fail to notice a woman in a gorilla suit who calmly walks through the group, briefly pausing to pound her chest." |
| What if she's in a bikini? |
| Page 155: | "Print is an 'act of perceptual self-denial,' a 'trickery,' asserts rhetorician Richard Lanham, calling for a new knowledge-making system based 'on the edge of chaos.'" |
| Great branching K-lines!!! ["...of Boolean chasteness."] |
| Page 173: | "...and half never attain a focused perspective on the topic at anytime during the process..." |
| Missing space: S/B "at any time". |
| Page 175: | "Once upon a time, stories grew out of fabric of our spirit." |
| Missing word: S/B "the fabric". |
| Page 192: | "Like the student in E.T.A. Hoffman's 1817 short story 'The Sandman' who falls in love with his physics professor's 'daughter'— in actuality, the old man's beautiful, masterwork automata—..." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "automaton". Or is this a gender reference? (cf. "Helen O'Loy," a 1938 short story by Lester del Rey.) |
| Page 198: | "In 2004, Microsoft quietly patented the human body as a 'personal area network,' or 'computer bus,' hoping to one day use the skin's conductivity to transmit data." |
| "Your body is a wonderLAN..." |
| Page 205: | "The body isn't meat, it's the reservoir of our humanity. And there will never be a prosthesis for the human spirit." |
| "Luminous beings are we—not this crude matter!" Never say never about technology. |
| Page 209: | "Before Odysseus passes the entrancing song of the Sirens, for example, he orders his sailors to plug their ears with wax and lash him to the mast so that he could listen to their false promises of endless wisdom but not act upon them." |
| Like most who have not studied Greek mythology, I suspect, I thought the appeal of the Sirens was a sexual one. But this excellent Wikipedia article makes it clear that their songs appealed to the spirit, not to the flesh. |
| Page 221: | "...80 percent of movies produced befoe 1930." |
| Missing letter: S/B "before". |
| Page 238: | "I have stood vigil lakeside with a grieving father..." |
| S/B "vigil at lakeside". It simply sounds better. |
| Page 246: | "The protagonist is dopamine D4 receptor, a gene built to handle the interneuronal flow of the neurotransmitter dopamine..." |
| Word order: either this S/B "dopamine receptor D4", or the acronym in the next sentence is wrong. |
| Page 257: | "This means that for the first time, we can attack attention deficits head-on, by boosting attention." (Emphasis in original) |
| Missing comma: S/B "that, for the first time". |
| Page 273: | Chapter One Endnotes: "1. Ella Cheever Thayer, Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (New York: W. J. Johnston, 1880), p. 44. |
| Mis-indexed: S/B "p. 29". I did not check other entries, and only found this mistake by chance. |
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