Net Loss : The Inner Life in the Digital Age: Quarterly Essay 72 - Sebastian Smee

Net Loss

The Inner Life in the Digital Age: Quarterly Essay 72

By: Sebastian Smee

Paperback | 26 November 2018 | Edition Number 72

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We live in an age of constant distraction. Is there a price to pay for this?

In this superb essay, renowned critic Sebastian Smee explores the fate of the inner life in the age of the internet. Throughout history, artists and thinkers have cultivated the deep self, and seen value in solitude and reflection. But today, with social media, wall-to-wall marketing and the agitation of modern life, everything feels illuminated, made transparent. We feel bereft without our phones and their cameras and the feeling of instant connectivity.

It gets hard to pick up a book, harder still to stay with it.Without nostalgia or pessimism, Sebastian Smee evokes what is valuable and worth cultivating- he guides us from the apparent fullness of the app-filled world towards a more complex sense of self, and the inner life. If we lose this, Smee asks, what do we lose of ourselves?

"Every day I spend hours and hours on my phone ... We are all doing it, aren?t we? It has come to feel completely normal. Even when I put my device aside and attach it to a charger, it pulses away in my mind, like the throat of a toad, full of blind, amphibian appetite."Sebastian Smee, Net Loss

About the Author

Sebastian Smee is the art critic for the Boston Globe. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011, and was runner up in 2008. He joined the paper’s staff from Sydney, where he worked as national art critic for The Australian between 2004 and 2008. Prior to that, he lived for four years in the UK, where he worked on staff at The Art Newspaper, and wrote for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Financial Times, Prospect Magazine, and The Spectator. In London, Smee developed a friendship with the artist Lucian Freud and went on to write essays accompanying four books on Freud’s work. He is the author of the popular Boston Globe column Frame by Frame, which explores individual art works in New England’s museum collections. He teaches non-fiction writing at Wellesley College.

Quarterly Essay