Newsletter #7

On Pre-Internet Life

Is 37 still considered “mid-thirties”?

What We’ve Lost to the Internet

I was recently browsing the new books at my local public library and the title of Pamela Paul’s latest work arrested my attention: 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet.

I’ve thought about this subject a lot through the years. Since my junior or senior year of college, I’ve been contemplating how modern technologies reorient our experience of the world. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and later Technopoly began to frame my perspective, but I continued to delve deeply into the literature commonly known as “tech criticism.” Of course, behind many of these popular works are the more serious ones, often described as the philosophy of technology and media ecology. You encounter important thinkers as diverse as McLuhan, Ong, Illich, Borgmann, etc. These and others fueled my interest, culminating in my first thesis. But oh, how much the digital landscape has chan…