Cigarettes, cycling, gawking, gandering, and imbibing. These are a few of the forms of distraction or "distributed attention" that Petra Loeffler--a film and media scholar currently teaching media philosophy at Bauahus University -- discusses with us in this episode. Drawing examples from her recent book Distributed Attention: A Media History of Distraction, Dr. Loeffler explains the rise of distraction as a bourgeois pastime in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, its transformation into an object of scientific fascination and mass entertainment during the nineteenth-century, and its persistence as an object of medical, political, and philosophical preoccupation in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Music courtesy STEREO TOTAL -- creators of a carnivalesque delight for the ears.

Image courtesy Diaphanes Verlag.

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