How 24/7 life is rewiring our brains
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2019
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A group of artists look at how our modern hyper-connected always-on lifestyles are affecting our behaviour and interfering with our sleep.
Their work has been brought together in an exhibition at London's Somerset House, called 24/7: A Wake-Up Call for our Non-Stop World. Manuela Saragosa takes a tour with director and co-curator Jonathan Reekie.
Plus the Canadian artist and author Douglas Coupland tells Manuela how he religiously guards his sleep hours in the name of creativity, and how he remembers the moment he realised his brain was being rewired by the internet back in the 1990s.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Sprites I by Alan Warburton, showing at Somerset House; Credit: Alan Warburton via Somerset House)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, what the 24-7 non-stop hyper-connected world is doing to us. |
| 0:12.0 | Every time there was a break, everybody went to sleep. On their desk. On their desk or under their desk or basically at their workstation. |
| 0:20.4 | Their desire for sleep was so great. |
| 0:22.9 | An exhibition in London wants us to slow down, stop and reflect. |
| 0:27.6 | The artist and novelist Douglas Copeland gives us his take. |
| 0:31.0 | Is sleep the last frontier of capitalism? |
| 0:35.3 | What is sleep? |
| 0:36.1 | How can we invade sleep? How can we spread sheet it? How can we invade sleep? |
| 0:37.6 | How can we spread sheet it? |
| 0:39.1 | How can we make it turn into money, basically? |
| 0:43.6 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:58.1 | Peaceful, isn't it? |
| 1:01.3 | Once upon a time it was normal to wake up to this sound, |
| 1:03.6 | but not in our 24-7 world. |
| 1:09.2 | We consume content, shop, communicate via our screens at all hours of the day and night. |
| 1:13.2 | In the 24-7 world, sleep is a luxury. It may well be the last frontier. After all, as Netflix tweeted in the US, sleep is my biggest |
| 1:19.1 | enemy. But I'm not outside. I'm indoors at an exhibition in Somerset House in central London. |
| 1:26.0 | I'm Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg and I'm an artist. |
| 1:29.5 | And we are standing in your exhibit in the exhibition called 24-7 wake-up call for our non-stop world here at Somerset House. |
| 1:39.5 | And it's essentially, it's a room. |
| 1:42.4 | You've got the dawn chorus coming out of speakers attached to the ceiling |
| 1:46.4 | and there's lighting to imitate the sort of changing light from night today. Well we're just standing |
... |
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