ABSTRACT
An early draft of this chapter was written in Kathmandu, and reflected on the privileges that can allow a professional academic to decamp to picturesque locations from time to time, and still be ‘at work’. Contemporary communication media don’t only allow official work to colonise more of what might have once been leisure time, they also turn leisure into productivity, taking Baudrillard’s thesis of the romanticised producer-consumer to a counter-intuitive new level. Lockdown prevented the reader from gathering for performances, and from being present with each other, but many performances were made, and shared. Critics such as neuroscientist Susan Greenfield fear the changes this may provoke in the brain because of the role of dopamine in cyclic processes where screens call the reader back again and again to their stimulation, potentially suppressing activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with planning and risk-calculation.
