The Collective Beast

The crowd is our domain « Overland literary journal: “In her article ‘Driven to distraction’ (Overland 199), Cate Kennedy critiques contemporary internet culture from the perspective of the creative writer. While not opposed to the internet as such, Kennedy seeks to demonstrate that Web 2.0 technologies and the activities they facilitate (such as social networking, blogging and video-sharing) are rendering us permanently impatient, disinhibited yet isolated and unable to concentrate. Kennedy finds these effects, which centre on the pursuit of immediacy at the cost of profundity, and the conquest of time and space at the expense of substance, to be the inverse of the disposition required for creative activity.”