Sunday, 30 November, 2008

I spent a busy day at home preparing for Xmas and reading WCVS papers.

Culture of Fear by Frank Furedi raises two critical questions for the voluntary sector: by what right can we claim to speak for anyone and how can we ensure that our voices add to the common good? Furedi makes clear that the sector as a whole is not doing brilliantly well.

James Gleick’s Faster – the acceleration of just about everything provides a comprehensive description of the many ways in which the world is speeding up. Gleick's conculsion is that boredom is a modern condition that can exist only in the context of a wider mania or glut. Before the 20th century there was no word for "boredom" and Samuel Johnson charmingly referred merely to "the languishment of attention" - although this surely demonstrates that "boredom" did exist but simply lacked a convenient label.