Rebooting digital wellbeing in the wake of the “techlash”

Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures, apparently. I have to admit, I was very excited to read this article when I stumbled on it. I’ve done some futurology projects on a couple of occasions, and

21st-century digital evangelists had a lot in common with early Christians and Russian revolutionaries.

Much of the internet feels terrible. But using the web to learn an offline hobby can give you a glimpse of a healthier relationship with your digital devices.

A nice, even-handed discussion of tech critique as well as technomessianism.

Contains Henriette Avram's scathing rebuttal of Ellsworth "computerators" Mason.

The following is a repost from the blog of the John W. Kluge Center. The author is Dan Turello who manages the Kluge Center senior chair competitions including the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology and the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations. I’m here with Dame Wendy Hall, […]

"Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" and other classics by Virginia Lee Burton capture a bias in the way people look at technological innovation.

Students in anthropology Professor Mark Kenoyer's Ancient Technology and Invention course were working recently under a beating hot sun at the outdoor UW–Madison Experimental Archaeology Lab near Picnic Point.

Vallor pointed out that technology has been part of the human story from its very beginning, and that from the earliest tools developed, our technological enhancements have had social and ethical impact. As Vallor put it, “The ways we use technology have always shaped our affordances for moral life.” She argued that “it is absolutely incoherent to be anti-technology and to be a human being”—but no, she is not a tech-infused-Silicon-Valley-apologist; she is adamantly opposed to what she calls “technocratic disengagement from human values other than efficiency, productivity, and innovation for its own sake.”

Last week the NY Times ran the sort of op-ed on digital culture that the cultured despisers love to ridicule. In it, Jane Brody made a host of claims about the detrimental consequences of digital m…

Mechanisms matter in technology criticism.

The internet makes us less confident in our brains — and that’s not a bad thing.

In early 1999, during the halftime of a University of Washington basketball game, a time capsule from 1927 was opened. Among the contents…

In 1860s Manhattan, young men and women in search of some excitement could duck into a little stationery shop uptown, open the unmarked notebook on the...

Defending your rights in the digital world

Below is my closing keynote, "Libraries Meet the Second Machine Age" given for the 2015 Library Technology Conference on March 19, 2015 at St. Paul, MN.  I want to send big thanks to the conference steering committee who invited me and those who watched and shared my keynote either on-site or onlin