Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface

摘要

In late 2019,I reached out to the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) asking if I might be able to review Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell's latest work, Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface. The journal's book review editors promptly responded, letting me know a copy would be sent via mail. Several months later, I received an email from the journal's book review editors asking if my book review was close to being ready for submission. In reply, I explained that, for whatever reason, I had never received the book, but I would nevertheless read it and write a review given that my institution's library has a digital copy. I am contextualizing these events because I could not help but keep them in mind as I scrolled through Kingwell's interrogation of boredom and the Interface. Although his latest work is undeniably an interesting read, I found myself occasionally leaving the text window to reply to emails, read unrelated newspaper articles, and browse loosely related pages on Wikipedia. In a very real sense, I regularly caught myself living through the condition of Kingwell's analyses.