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Perspectives on Privacy and Human Flourishing
I’ve not been able to track down the source, but somewhere Marshall McLuhan wrote, “Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”...
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The Tourist and the Pilgrim: Essays on Life and Technology in the Digital Age
A few days ago, I noted, thanks to a WordPress reminder, that The Frailest Thing had turned thee. I had little idea what I was doing when I started blogging, and wasn’t even very clear on why I was...
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Thinking and Its Rhetorical Enemies
In one short post, Alan Jacobs targeted several Borg Complex symptoms. The post was triggered by his frustration with an xkcd comic which simply strung together a series of concerns about technological...
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Et in Facebook ego
In Nicolas Poussin’s mid-seventeenth century painting, Et in Arcadia ego, shepherds have stumbled upon an ancient tomb on which the titular words are inscribed. Understood to be the voice of death, the...
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Your Click Will Have Come From the Heart
For the first time since 1517, when Martin Luther kicked off the Protestant Reformation, indulgences are in the news. As the start of the Roman Catholic Church’s 28th annual World Youth Day in Rio de...
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Louis C.K. Was Almost Right About Smartphones, Loneliness, Sadness, the...
“I think these things are toxic, especially for kids …” That’s Louis C.K. talking about smartphones on Conan O’Brien last week. You’ve probably already seen the clip; it exploded online the next day....
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The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Nature of Education
Over the last couple of months, Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier have been trading shots in a debate about the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. Pinker, a distinguished scientist...
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The Would-Be Assassin and the Camera
It’s not uncommon to hear someone say that they were haunted by an image, often an old photograph. It is a figurative and evocative expression. To say that an image is haunting is to say that the image...
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Flame Wars, Punctuation Cartoons, and Net-heads: The Internet in 1988
I remember having, in the late 1980s, an old PC with a monochrome monitor, amber on black, that was hooked up to the Internet through Prodigy. I was on the Internet, but I had no idea what the Internet...
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When Silence is Power
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt wrote, “What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence.” She went on to add, “Power is actualized only where word...
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Promethean Shocks
Consider the image below. It was created in 1952 by Alexander Leydenfrost for the 50th anniversary issue of Popular Mechanics. I thought of this image as I read Thomas Misa’s brief discussion of the...
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Walter Ong on Romanticism and Technology
The following excerpts are taken from an article by Walter Ong titled, “Romantic Difference and Technology.” The essay can be found in Ong’s Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the...
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Technology, Moral Discourse, and Political Communities
According to Langdon Winner, neither ancient nor modern culture have been able to bring politics and technology together. Classical culture because of its propensity to look down its nose,...
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What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Technology?
I’ve been of two minds with regards to the usefulness of the word technology. One of those two minds has been more or less persuaded that the term is of limited value and, worse still, that it is...
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Choice and the Machine
“Choice manifests itself in society in small increments and moment-to-moment decisions as well as in loud dramatic struggles; and he who does not see choice in the development of the machine merely...
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Utopias of Communication
“The more any medium triumphed over distance, time, and embodied presence, the more exciting it was, and the more it seemed to tread the path of the future … And as always, new media were thought to...
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Technology, Speed, and Power
Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book, Future Shock, popularized the title phrase and the concept which it named, that technology was responsible for the disorienting and dizzying quality of the pace of life in...
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A Nineteenth-Century Chinese Perspective on Western Technology
In 1895, the French poet and critic, Paul Valéry, took a stroll along the seashore with a friend from China. In Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance,...
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The Transhumanist Promise: Happiness You Cannot Refuse
Transhumanism, a diverse movement aimed at transcending our present human limitations, continues to gravitate away from the fringes of public discussion toward the mainstream. It is an idea that, to...
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Why A Life Made Easier By Technology May Not Necessarily Be Happier
Tim Wu, of the Columbia Law School, has been writing a series of reflections on technological evolution for Elements, the New Yorker’s science and technology blog. In the first of these, “If a Time...
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