Description

In the Technology Issue we’re not so much looking into new gadgets as old Adams, and all the pixilated projections of him on our LCD screens. We look back at the dawn of the Walkman and the revolution of personal listening; we look forward to the age of personalized search engines and news sources. We have writing on holodecks and hovercrafts; we also have writing on professional bloggers, flip phone users, porn watchers and distracted parents. We have new poems from the brilliant Dick Allen, and an interview with Pulitzer finalist and acclaimed author of The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr.

Through it all, we find that our searches continue, not for more bits of information, but for a way out—from our habitual distractions, from our handheld courtrooms and our own inner-prosecutors, from “The Entire History of Me.” With all our new-fangled devices, we continue to need the one thing that’s already been given—real love in the age of easy likes. Not only a black mirror, but a clean slate.

I hope this issue is a good reminder.

Contents

What 1,792 Blogposts Have Taught Me about the Internet by David Zahl

The Confessional

Automatic for the People: A Conversation with Nicholas Carr

Me, Myself and iPod by Jady Koch

Sending Morse Code, a poem by Dick Allen

Is Google Searching Me? Knowledge and Discovery in the Internet Age by Ethan Richardson

For the Record: On Our Bookshelf, Tech Reads, Sci-fi Consequences

All in All: Childhood, Security Objects, and Grace in the Digital Age by Stephanie Phillips

Revisiting the Second Grade Classroom, a poem by Dick Allen

Distracted Parents and the Media of Our Discontent by Ian Olson

Unreconciled and Disembodied: Why Sex on the Internet Sucks by Sarah Condon

Surfing the Net, a poem by Dick Allen

Time to Pull Over: Algorithms, Self-Driving Cars, and an Unkind Word about Fear by Bryan Jarrell

Mixed Messages: A Sermon by Aaron Zimmerman