The Frailest Thing: Technology and Society

56 Resisting Disposable Reality Technology and consumerism coalesce to create disposable reality.

57 Kevin Kelly, God, and Technology As I have read and thought about technology and its cultural consequences, I have especially appreciated the works of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Jacques Ellul,...

58 The Borg Complex: A Primer I coined the term “Borg Complex” on a whim, and, though I’ve written on the concept a handful of times, nowhere have I presented a clear, straightforward description.

59 Conquering the Night: Technology, Fear, and Anxiety Tim Blanning begins his review of Craig Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire: A history of the night in early modern Europe as follows: In 1710, Richard...

60 Disconnected Varieties of Augmented Experience In a short blog post, “This is What the Future Looks Like,” former Microsoft executive Linda Stone writes: “Over the last few weeks, I’ve been...

61 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...

62 Our Little Apocalypses An incoming link to my synopsis of Melvin Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology alerted me to a piece on Quartz about a new book by an author named Michael Harris.

63 Consider the Traffic Light Camera It looks like I may be getting a traffic citation in the mail within the next few days.

64 Technology, Moral Discourse, and Political Communities According to Langdon Winner , neither ancient nor modern culture have been able to bring politics and technology together.

65 Machines, Work, and the Value of People In April of 2015, Microsoft released a “bot” that guesses your age based on an uploaded picture.

66 A Lost World Human beings have two ways, generally speaking, of going about the business of living with one another: through speech or violence.

67 Finding A Place for Thought Recently, Nathan Jurgenson tweeted a short thread commenting on what Twitter has become.

68 Resisting the Habits of the Algorithmic Mind Algorithms, we are told, “rule our world.” They are ubiquitous. They lurk in the shadows, shaping our lives without our consent.

69 Facebook Doesn’t Care About Your Children Facebook is coming for your children. Is that framing too stark? Maybe it’s not stark enough.

70 Democracy and Technology Alexis Madrigal has written a long and thoughtful piece on Facebook’s role in the last election .

71 Superfluous People, the Ideology of Silicon Valley, and The Origins of Totalitarianism There’s a passage from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism that has been cited frequently in recent...

72 Algorithms Who Art in Apps, Hallowed Be Thy Code If you want to understand the status of algorithms in our collective imagination, Ian Bogost proposes the following exercise in his recent essay in...

73 Eight Theses Regarding the Society of the Disciplinary Spectacle One of the better known aspects Michel Foucault’s work is his genealogy of prisons in Discipline and Punish .

74 Presidential Debates and Social Media, or Neil Postman Was Right I’ve chosen to take my debates on Twitter.

75 The World Will Be Our Skinner Box Writing about two recent patents by Google, Sydney Fussell makes the following observations about the possibility of using a “smart” environments to create...

76 Digital Media and the Revenge of Politics “The arc of digital media is bending toward epistemic nihilism.

77 The Myth of Convenience I once suggested that the four horsemen of the digital apocalypse will be called Convenience, Security, Innovation, and Lulz.

78 Nine Theses Regarding the Culture of Digital Media 1. The context of oral communication is one’s immediate audience characterized by precisely delineated embodied presence.

79 Orality and Literacy Revisited “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” lamented John Donne in 1611.