In the middle of another fine post, Mark Fisher notes

The “twitchy, agitated interpassivity” I describe – from which I’m far from being exempt myself – it is what Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention” It’s not a simple matter of opposing pleasure to duty. As digital addicts we are much like Matt Dillon’s junkie in Drugstore Cowboy, “working harder than a construction worker on overtime”. The constant craving to be connected, or to click through to the next link, or to check to see if mail has arrived, is intensely demanding: cyberspace is a hard taskmaster, and one that is never satisfied (and which, similarly, leaves us feeling dissatisfied any drained). Increasingly, I find reading books to be a refuge from digital twitch, and, in that way, more enjoyable – than ever. (That’s one reason that I greet the rise of ebooks with something of a shudder.) [Emphasis mine]

The word “shudder” calls up the right mix of fascination & repulsion here, and the right internal queasiness; I’d wager it’s something most screentext-savvy readers feel. This is more than a reactionary reflex, or a mourning period for the tactile qualities of the real object. It is a desire to re-evaluate the function of the book — a chance to consider the “dumb” object as an alternative to a perpetually linked and socially-aware space. But the cost of production won’t allow books to be any more (or any less) than a luxury item, a psychological stillness afforded to a particular class of consumer.

—

Everything Mark Fisher writes is highly recommended, incidentally, especially his recent book Capitalist Realism. That one’s put out by Zer0 books, who also publish Owen Hatherley and Nina Power and a host of other (primarily British) writers blogging about politics, aesthetics, and philosophy.