Abstract
One need look no further than a recent spate of corporate slogans to see around us a global, instant-access world, in which prior limitations of time and space are gleefully cast aside. Vodafone and Dell computers urge us to “Make the Most of Now” or “Get More out of Now,” respectively, as if the current moment were too confining. And not only is our “now” now somehow insufficient, but our immediate spatial locale, too, seems wanting. For, with a kind of proselytizing fervor, CNN demands we “Go Beyond Borders!;” Boeing, meanwhile, fills us with visions of “Forever New Frontiers;” and AT&T seeks to give us what we all really need: the whole planet in a little parcel—“Your World. Delivered.”
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Notes
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, “If I could live without the thought of Death” The Golden Book of Sonnets (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1913), 195.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).
Dimitri Christakis, et al. “Problematic Internet Usage in Us College Students: A Pilot Study” BMC Medicine 9, no. 1 (2011): 1–6.
Larry Rosen, iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 64.
Erin Sullivan, “Insomnia,” The Lancet 371 (2008): 1497.
Alice Philipson, “People Sleeping Two Hours Less Than in 1960s Risking Serious Health Problems,” The Telegraph, (May 2014). Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10826999/People-sleeping-two-hours-less-than-in-1960s-risking-serious-health-problems.html.
David K. Randall, Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012), 237.
Elijah Wolfson, “The Rise of Ambien: Why More Americans Are Taking the Sleeping Pill and Why the Numbers Matter,” The Huffington Post, (November 2013). Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elijah-wolfson-/ambien_b_3223347.html.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 16, trans. Anthony Ludovici, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 33–34.
A. Dennison Light, How to Cure Insomnia or Sleeplessness (London: Health & Vim Publishing Co., 1911), 6.
James Edwin Miller, T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922 (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 177.
See also Barbara Sicherman, “The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32 (1977): 33–54
Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)
Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).
Eluned Summers-Bremner, Insomnia: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 10.
Mitchell Mannering, “Thomas A. Edison and His Triumphs,” National Magazine 41 (1914): 458.
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© 2014 Lee Scrivner
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Scrivner, L. (2014). Prologomenon. In: Becoming Insomniac. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268747_1
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