Negative Space: technology changing society
- Apple markets round wheel
- “Not enough corners,” say pundits.
- Cell phones: threat to public safety
- Cell phones are a part of the decentralization of our society; they are a severe threat to those who prefer centralization and restricted channels of access.
- The Cellphone Problem in horror roleplaying
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Modern technology makes isolation, both physical and informational, much more difficult. Game masters in modern games need to recognize that isolation is too much like a railroad, and prepare adventures accordingly.
- Future Snark
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Why does the past get the future wrong? More specifically, why do expert predictions always seem to be “hand your lives over to technocrats or we’ll all die?”
- iPods and the future of social interaction
- The iPod--as part of the decentralization of media control--allows us to carve our own spaces, rather than having the “crass commercialization of public space” force us into marketing spaces of someone else’s design.
- The lost tradition of unannounced visits
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Once upon a time, if you were in the area of a friend, and you had extra time, you’d just drop in for a visit. You wouldn’t call first—phone calls were expensive. You wouldn’t text—there were no texts. You’d just show up. And you’d be even more likely to do this on holidays.
- The odd expectations of typewriter users
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People who buy typewriters fall into two camps: those who want them to be like computers, and those who don’t recognize computers when they talk directly in their ear.
- Refrigerator Revolution Revisited: 1942 Cold Cooking
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Iceless refrigeration had come a long way in the fourteen years since Frigidaire Recipes. And so had gelatin!
- Revolution: Home Refrigeration
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Nasty, brutish, and short. Unreliable power is unreliable civilization. When advocates of unreliable energy say that Americans must learn to do without, they rarely say what we’re supposed to do without.
- To the ends of the earth
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Why don’t we see any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? And will we survive long enough to make ourselves known to the universe?
More Information
- Refrigerators Through the Decades
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“If you’ve ever been without power in your house, you know just how suddenly keeping the food in the refrigerator cold becomes a necessity. Can you imagine living in a time before refrigerators? Warm summer months meant that families would gamble with safe food consumption, and any families living in poverty were rarely able to afford ice.”
