“Questioning AI ethics does not make you a gloomy Luddite,” or so the title of a recent article in a London business newspaper assures us. The most important thing to be learned here is…| L.M. Sacasas
As promised in the last post, I’ve put together what you might think of as a “best of” collection—The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking About the Meaning of Technology. It is an e-book consisting of 100 entries written over the span of this blog’s history. These entries amount to a little over 10% of … Continue reading The Best of “The Frailest Thing”| L.M. Sacasas
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. The context of digital communication is disembodied immediacy characterized by distributed, algorithmically constituted presence. 2. Communication in oral societies is agonistically toned, pugilistic. Print fosters cool, detached expression. Digital … Continue reading Nine Theses Regarding the...| L.M. Sacasas
Not much has been going on here for the past four months or so. Not sure that will be changing anytime soon, but I did want to let you all know about a conference at which I’ll be speaking this coming Friday just in case you happen to be in or near Washington D. C. … Continue reading Conference on Democracy and the Internet| L.M. Sacasas
I’ve developed a four-step strategy for making Twitter morally useful. Step One: Compose your tweet It will be best to do this with as little reflection and revision as possible. Simply compose your tweet as you are led by external circumstances and internal dispositions. N.B. Quote tweets can be especially instructive for the purposes of … Continue reading How to Make Twitter Morally Useful in Four Steps| L.M. Sacasas
For a time, I taught an English Lit survey class. I often made it a point to observe, in cursory fashion, how the language we call English evolved from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare and finally to Austen, say, or Elliot. The point was to highlight how language evolves over time, but also to observe … Continue reading Language in the Digital Maelstrom| L.M. Sacasas
Having been invested in a variety of sports since my youth, I’m basically down to baseball as I come into middle age. I should just go ahead and admit that I have a somewhat romanticized relationship with the sport, which began when, late in my childhood, I started listening to the New York Mets play … Continue reading Baseball, Judgment, and Technocracy| L.M. Sacasas
Very early on in the life of this blog, memory became a recurring theme. I write less frequently about memory these days, but I’m no less convinced that among the most important consequences of digital media we must count its relationship to memory. After all, as the filmmaker, Louis Bunuel once put it, “Our memory … Continue reading Time, Self, and Remembering Online| L.M. Sacasas
In his most recent newsletter, sociologist Mark Carrigan mused about the question “What does it mean to take Twitter seriously?” My initial thought, upon reading the titular question, was that we take Twitter seriously when we reckon with its corrosive effects, both on public discourse and on our psyche (to say nothing of our souls). … Continue reading Devil’s Bargain| L.M. Sacasas
I recently caught a link to a brief video showing a robotic hand manipulating a cube. Here is a longer video from which the short clip was taken, and here is the article describing the technology t…| L.M. Sacasas
In a twitter thread that has been retweeted over 17,000 times to date, the actor Kumail Nanjiani took the tech industry to task for its apparent indifference to the ethical consequences of their wo…| L.M. Sacasas
Dear readers, In the early years of this blog, I made it a practice to post something thematic on Thanksgiving Day. I thought it might be apropos to revive that practice today with a twofold purpos…| L.M. Sacasas
I’ve continued to think about a question raised by Frank Furedi in an otherwise lackluster essay about distraction and digital devices. Furedi set out to debunk the claim that digital devices…| L.M. Sacasas