Changing the Subject Quotes

“The new dispensation—near-perfect retrievability—reorients us, not so subtly altering our expectations and our way of encountering our reality. It feeds the great illusion of our competence, our mastery, even as it pampers us and gives us a sense of being catered to (the psychological implication being that we’re worthy). These new assumptions”
― Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

“A man who never asks himself any questions had better not try asking others. In the centre of his being a teacher should have a sense of justice and a great capacity for dejection. Teachers in a place like this, where education is taken seriously, should always bear in mind that they are the central problem, that we would provide the students with a liberal education if we merely gave them the privilege of looking on while we educated ourselves”
― Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

“Attention paid to the life, to the fact of life, to events and people, their enormous mattering--all the things that could not be more obvious when we're brought awake, but that really do get slurred away by distraction, sometimes for long periods, so that when the feeling does come back again, it seems like something that needs to be marked, sewn a la Blaise Pascal right into the lining of your coat--where you will always see it and remember”
― Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

“Imagination is linked as much to an awareness of the insufficiency of the world as we find it as it is to fantasy; it grows from a desire to assert contrary or alternative worlds in the face of the given.”
― Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

“The primary material conditions for the making of beauty have not changed. But the frame of attention, and the context of mattering—these have.”
― Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

“It sounds so good: the futurism of The Jetsons meets the self-actualization of Abraham Maslow.”
― Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age