Some scholars and social critics say the simple answer is that society has traded one set of preoccupations for another.
"My suspicion is it isn't that the use of technology is making us dumber; instead it's a very human set of preoccupations and anxieties," she says.
Several books later, he continues to suggest in the central essay of this volume that the interpretation of any body of writing will follow most of these venerable procedures.It was this set of preoccupations that led, all those years ago, to Empson's charge of "neo-Christianity".
These American Buddhists, drawn East in part by a rejection of Gilded Age ostentation, recognized a set of preoccupations like those they knew already — Whitman's vision of a self that could shift and contain multitudes, or Thoreau's secular withdrawal from the race of life.
In the last 50 years, a new set of preoccupations with sociability and psychology has emerged to replace the old evolutionary ethics of eugenics and human competitiveness.
Drawing on insights from the 'social studies of accounting' literature, Pflueger describes how accounting 'does not just find things out but makes them up', as particular tools impose certain sets of 'preoccupations and objectives' in order to make things knowable.
Mantel has no consistent, easily identifiable set of novelistic preoccupations — unless it's the persistence of evil in a world that doesn't always recognize it — and no fallback kit of stylistic tricks.
While the Trump campaign has not yet actively cooperated with the Oath Keepers, the shared set of ideological preoccupations between them, as well as the Tea Party, are clear.
They show processes of accounting, for example, to necessarily entail the imposition of a specific set of ambitions, preoccupations and objectives to make things know-able and account-able in a specific and often novel way [ 55, 56, 71, 72].
Technology and the economy have converged to create a set of priorities and preoccupations that are unique to our times.
It involves a degree of healthy self-esteem and a worldview that sets petty preoccupations against a wider canvas.
