If you take all of our technological innovations of the past two decades—certainly those in the fields of computing and communications—you cannot fail to see that their collective tendency is to breach the wall of isolated selfhood and to swamp us
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
The inception of The Edge comes at a time when we haven’t yet found a healthy relationship with technology. Online we’re more interconnected than ever, but at what cost? The beauty of life and human nature can’t be captured in a photo or 140 characters. So why do we try? According to the Pew Research Center about a quarter of U.S. adults say they a... See more
Grant Plotkin • The Story Behind The Edge
Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting ... See more
Derek Thompson • The Anti-Social Century
The upshot of device-mediated encounters is that they may be benign in single instances but collectively they are alarming. The larger question is where we are headed with such encounters. How do they impact our capacity to love, to be present to one another, to sort out what deeply matters about oneself and life? What impact do they have on human ... See more
Kirk Schneider • Tech-vexed: how digital life threatens our capacity for awe | Aeon Essays
We might say, then, that the conditions of pervasive digitization have rendered the full range of human experience a text to be interpreted. Condemned to preform ever more baroque hermeneutical maneuvers we are deprived the satisfactions of a naive experience of reality. Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of unreality that plagues ... See more
L. M. Sacasas • The Hermeneutical Imperative - The Convivial Society
For those who ask, with Gauguin, “Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?”—and who feel that the answering of those questions is the grand mission of the species—the prospect of a collective life in an electronic hive is bound to seem terrifying.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Today, we are rapidly becoming ‘tech-vexed’ – my word for the gradual yet relentless seduction of computerised life. The COVID-19 pandemic simply accelerated a trend: many of us are now more intimately connected to smartphones than to nonmediated relationships with people. The net result of this insular life is that relationships with ourselves and... See more