Abstract:
"In the phrase popularized by Sherry Turkle, our relationship with technology has increasingly made us "alone together." Instead of engaging in conversation, we instead look down and fiddle with our devices. This is the topic of Samuel McCormick's engaging and innovative book The Chattering Mind, which is the first to try and explain how a seemingly unproblematic form of communication--everyday talk--became a problem and a source of anxiety. McCormick traces the conceptual history of this notion from Kierkegaard's theory of "chatter" to Heidegger's recuperative discussion of "idle talk" to Lacan's treatment of "empty speech." Beyond these thinkers, McCormick takes us all the way to our digital present, where small talk on social media has become the basis for big data. McCormick argues that many of the best solutions to today's "overconnection" await discovery in the experience of overconnection itself and in the democratization of big data. Drawing on past thinkers, McCormick presents an ambitious analysis that gives us the tools with which to best face our present, shape our technological future, and think through the everyday silences and the volumes they speak"--
