Author: Michael Sacasas

Michael Sacasas received an MA in Theological Studies from Reformed Theological Seminary and is currently pursuing a PhD in Texts and Technology at The University of Central Florida. His research and writing focus broadly on the relationship between technology and culture with a special interest in how bodies interact with tools to shape experience. His writing has appeared in The American, The New Inquiry, Mere Orthodoxy, and Cyborgology. He blogs at The Frailest Thing.

Perspectives on Privacy and Human Flourishing

I’ve not been able to track down the source, but somewhere Marshall McLuhan wrote, “Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.” The unfolding NSA scandal has brought privacy front and center. A great deal is being written right now about the ideal […]

Conscience of a Machine

Gary Marcus has predicted that within the next two to three decades we would enter an era “in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems.” Marcus invites us to imagine the following driverless car scenario: “Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school […]

Living for the Moment in the Age of Memory Abundance

The most famous section in arguably the most famous book about photography, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, dwells on a photograph of Barthes’ recently deceased mother taken in a winter garden when she was a little girl. On this picture, Barthes hung his meditative reflections on death and photography. The image evoked both the “that-has-been” reality […]

What Motivates the Tech Critic

Some time ago, I confessed my deeply rooted Arcadian disposition, and I added, “The Arcadian is the critic of technology, the one whose first instinct is to mourn what is lost rather than celebrate what is gained.” This phrase prompted a reader to suggest that the critic of technology is preferably neither an Arcadian nor a Utopian. […]