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April 26, 2021: Dennis Glover, author, "Factory 19"

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Tonight: Dennis Glover, author, "Factory 19"

Links:

• Factory 19, by Dennis Glover, published by Black Inc. (Buy the book here, and not Amazon!)

• DennisGlover.net: "Dennis Glover is an Australian writer and novelist. The son of factory workers, Dennis grew up in the working class Melbourne suburb of Doveton before studying at Monash University and King’s College Cambridge where he was awarded a PhD in history. He has worked for two decades as an academic, newspaper columnist, policy adviser and speechwriter to Australia’s most senior political, business and community leaders."

• Dennis Glover interview on NPR with Scott Simon (November 2017) about his novel The Last Man in Europe.

• Living Like It's 99: No Social Media, No Smartphone (by Gregory Alvarez, Feb 19, 2021): "Technology and progress are awesome things, but they have their bad side too. The funny thing is that we are so addicted to them that it requires a tremendous effort just to realize it. ... Life is not just more peaceful without a smartphone, it has great effects on your productivity too. ... Opening your phone every time you are bored kills your creativity and imagination. I’ve been on both sides of the mirror, and this side is better. Don’t take my word for it, just try and see for yourself. After 3 years without social media and 2 years without a smartphone, I can tell you that I may go back to social media one day, however I will never have a smartphone again."

• From He Quit the Internet 2 Months Before the Pandemic (by Charlie Warzel in the NYT, March 10, 2021) - about Aron Rosenberg turning off all digital devices for a year:

That’s when he saw a change. Most obvious was his ability to engross himself in books for long periods of time. Academic texts that had previously felt onerous were unlocked. He started following the trail of endnotes and exploring more obscure works that he might have otherwise overlooked.

“I realized just how much reliance on the internet caused me to privilege what was simply new over more durable ideas,” he said. He began rereading books and articles, and found himself drawing connections he’d missed before. It dawned on him that for most of his life he’d been engaged in what some scientists refer to as “surface reading,” a superficial way of absorbing ideas that results in low retention. With his brain less clouded by digital input, he was able to engage in “deep reading,” which is believed to lead to better comprehension and increased empathy.

The article also quotes Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude about a village getting its first phone: “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay.”

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