The Frailest Thing↗

Dr. Melvin Kranzberg was a professor of the history of technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the founding editor of Technology and Culture .

I once had a discussion with students about the desirability of instantly acquired knowledge or expertise. It was a purely hypothetical discussion, and I don’t quite remember how we got around to it.

David Nye is the author of American Technological Sublime (1995), a classic work in the history of technology. Except that it is not merely a work of history in the strict disciplinary sense.

Having worked through the essays collected in this volume, one may be tempted to conclude that the title question finally dissolves into a debate about semantics and taxonomies.

Introduction Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a sustained, if modest, scholarly conversation about the relationship between technology and religion.

“Man’s temples typify his concepts. I cherish the thought that America stands on the threshold of a great awakening.

Ubiquitous realities tend to fade from view. They are, paradoxically, too pervasive to be noticed.

Some time ago, I confessed my deeply rooted Arcadian disposition.

I’ve been of two minds with regards to the usefulness of the word technology .

1. Don’t be a Borg . The development, deployment, and adoption of any given technology does not unfold independently of human action. 2.

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.

“Who are the humanists, and why do they dislike technology so much?” That’s what Andrew McAfee wants to know .

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation. The traditional date marking the beginning of the Reformation is October 31, 1517.

One of the first things I wrote on this blog nearly eight years ago, on an “About” page that has since been significantly abbreviated, was that we should aim at neither unbridled enthusiasm for...

In “Why Silicon Valley Can’t Fix Itself,” Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel critically engage with one response to the tech backlash, the emergence of Center for Humane Technology.

In 2015, former Google and Uber engineer, Anthony Levandowski, founded a nonprofit called Way of the Future in order to develop an AI god and promote its worship.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, which brought the Great War to an end.

Gary Marcus has predicted that within the next two to three decades we would enter an era “in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems.

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.

In The Human Condition , Hannah Arendt wrote, “What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence.

In an editorial at Wired , “Today’s Apps Are Turning Us Into Sociopaths,” Evan Selinger provides an incisive critique of an app that promises to automate aspects of interpersonal relationships.

I don’t ordinarily take my cues from John Mellencamp’s lyrics, but … consider: “A million young poets Screamin’ out their words To a world full of people Just livin’ to be heard” The story of...

Transhumanism, a diverse movement aimed at transcending our present human limitations, continues to gravitate away from the fringes of public discussion toward the mainstream.

An essay adapted from Nick Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies , appeared on Slate’s “Future Tense” blog with the cheerfully straightforward title, “You Should Be...

Writing about “technology and the moral dimension,” tech writer and Gigaom founder, Om Malik made the following observation : “I can safely say that we in tech don’t understand the emotional aspect...

In the mid-twentieth century, Hannah Arendt wrote extensively about the critical importance of learning to think in the aftermath of a great rupture in our tradition of thought.

I’ve continued to think about a question raised by Frank Furedi in an otherwise lackluster essay about distraction and digital devices.

In November 2016, The Atlantic posted a video showing an audience of two-hundred or so reacting fervently, some with Nazi salutes, when Richard Spencer came on stage and proclaimed, “Hail Trump, hail...

On NPR’s Here and Now , Derek Thompson of The Atlantic discussed the problem of “fake news.” It was all very sensible, of course. Thompson impressed upon the audience the importance of media literacy.

At first glance, this may seem like a question with an obvious and straightforward answer, but it isn’t. Vision plays a trick on us all.

In an excerpt from her forthcoming book , Who Can You Trust?

Last week the NY Times ran the sort of op-ed on digital culture that the cultured despisers love to ridicule.

Where do we look when we’re looking for the ethical implications of technology? A few would say that we look at the technological artifact itself.

In a twitter thread that was retweeted thousands of times, the actor Kumail Nanjiani took the tech industry to task for its apparent indifference to the ethical consequences of their work.

“Questioning AI ethics does not make you a gloomy Luddite,” or so the title of an article in a London business newspaper assures us.

It is frequently observed that developments in technology run ahead of law and ethics, which never quite catch up. This may be true, but not in the way it is usually imagined.

I wrote the title post for this collection of essays you are now reading in 2014.

It is almost impossible to read about the ethics of autonomous vehicles without encountering some version of the trolley car problem .

One of the more puzzling aspects of technology discourse that I encounter with some frequency is the tendency to oppose legal, political, and economic analysis of technology to ethical analysis.

Andrew Keen is not an Internet enthusiast, at least not since the emergence of Web 2.0.

We live for the moment because the moment is what an image captures. It’s not uncommon, I presume, to snap a picture again and again in the often vain attempt to get it just so.

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.

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.

1. Social media are the fidget spinners of the soul. 2.

In Letters From Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race , written in the 1920’s, Romano Guardini, related the following experience: “I recall going down a staircase, and suddenly,...

In September of last year, psychologist Jean Twenge published a widely-discussed essay in The Atlantic titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

When I wrote the About page for this blog I cited an article by Alan Jacobs from several years ago in which he likened blogs to commonplace books.

In March of 2015, I was invited to attend a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Cultur e led by Alan Jacobs, which focused on his 79 Theses on Technology .

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the pre-cellular days of household phones. One line for everyone, and only one person on the phone at a time.

At The American Scholar you can read William Deresiewicz’s lecture to the plebe class of 2009 at West Point.

By one of those odd twists of associative memory, John Caputo’s little book, On Religion , came to mind today. Specifically, I recalled a particular question that he posed in the opening pages.

In 2008, Nick Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” , touched off a lively and still ongoing debate about the relative merits of the Internet.

When she published her NY Times op-ed, “The Flight From Conversation,” Sherry Turkle was quickly dismissed and lampooned by critics. Clearly Turkle had struck a nerve.

You remember Plato’s famous allegory of the cave . Plato invites us to imagine a cave in which prisoners have been shackled to a wall unable to move or turn their heads.

In The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life , Goffman suggested that we understand our social interaction by analogy to the theater.

Technology and consumerism coalesce to create disposable reality.

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, Ivan Illich, and Albert Borgmann.

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.

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 Steele wrote in Tatler that recently he had been to...

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 noticing that about 1/3 of people walking, crossing...

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...

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.

It looks like I may be getting a traffic citation in the mail within the next few days.

According to Langdon Winner , neither ancient nor modern culture have been able to bring politics and technology together.

In April of 2015, Microsoft released a “bot” that guesses your age based on an uploaded picture. The bot tended to be only marginally accurate and sometimes hilariously (or disconcertingly) wrong.

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

Recently, Nathan Jurgenson tweeted a short thread commenting on what Twitter has become. “[I]t feels weird to tweet about things that arent news lately,” Jurgenson noted.

Algorithms, we are told, “rule our world.” They are ubiquitous. They lurk in the shadows, shaping our lives without our consent.

Facebook is coming for your children. Is that framing too stark? Maybe it’s not stark enough.

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

There’s a passage from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism that has been cited frequently in recent months, and with good reason.

If you want to understand the status of algorithms in our collective imagination, Ian Bogost proposes the following exercise in his recent essay in the Atlantic : “The next time you see someone...

One of the better known aspects Michel Foucault’s work is his genealogy of prisons in Discipline and Punish .

I’ve chosen to take my debates on Twitter. I’ve done so mostly in the interest of exploring what difference it might make to take in the debates on social media rather than on television.

Writing about two recent patents by Google, Sydney Fussell makes the following observations about the possibility of using a “smart” environments to create elaborate architectures for social...

“The arc of digital media is bending toward epistemic nihilism.

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

1. The context of oral communication is one’s immediate audience characterized by precisely delineated embodied presence. The context of print is a discursively constituted individual interiority.

“‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” lamented John Donne in 1611.

“If the idea of progress has the curious effect of weakening the inclination to make intelligent provision for the future, nostalgia, its ideological twin, undermines the ability to make intelligent...

What shape does a well ordered life take and how does one achieve such a thing?

The most famous section in arguably the most famous book about photography, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida , dwells on a photograph of Barthes’ recently deceased mother taken in a winter garden when...

When we’re not using nostalgia as a term of derision, we use it to name a twinge in the gut that somehow blends melancholic longing with happy recollection.

I’ve been thinking, recently, about the past and how we remember it. That this year marks the 20th anniversary of my high school graduation accounts for some of my reflective reminiscing.

Early in the life of this site, which is to say about eight years ago, I commented briefly on a story about five scientists who embarked on a rafting trip down the San Juan River in southern Utah in...

Steven Pinker and Jason Hickel have recently engaged in a back-and-forth about whether or not global poverty is decreasing.

Very early on in the life of this blog, memory became a recurring theme.

I have suggested that it’s good to occasionally ask ourselves, “Why do we read?

I’m back. In fact, I’ve been back for more than a week now. I’ve been back from several days spent in western North Carolina.

Maybe deleting Facebook is something akin to taking monastic vows in medieval society. Stay with me.

Information overload is a concept that has long been used to describe the experience of digital media, although the term and the problem itself predate the digital age.

Writing in the Times, Kevin Roose describes how he recently arrived at a better working relationship with his smartphone.

Rochelle Gurstein captures in lovely prose a handful of thoughts I have attempted, with less eloquent results, to express myself.

In the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible if you prefer, there is a story about a king and his excesses and a prophet who, as we would say today, spoke truth to power.

“I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face.

What does it mean to be a tourist? I thought about this often while spending two weeks out of the country being just that, a tourist.

It would be impossible to find human cultures that were not also tool-using cultures. For as long as there have been human beings there has also been technology.

My thinking about authenticity is sporadic and owes more to serendipity than to any conscientious scholarly endeavor.

I was in Amish country last week. Several times a day I heard the clip-clop of horse hooves and the whirring of buggy wheels coming down the street and then receding into the distance–a rather...

I recently caught a link to a brief video showing a robotic hand manipulating a cube.