February 19, 2026 On Technology Looking at Attention By D. Graham Burnett Robbie Cooper’s Immersion Project (2013). The English artist-photographer Robbie Cooper became semifamous in 2008 with the widespread online release of a roughly three-and-a-half-minute video titled Immersion. It still lives on the internet and is unlikely ever to go away. The short film consists of a set of sequential cuts, all similarly framed and ranging from six to fifteen seconds, of kids playing various video games. Sometimes, one sees only a single player. In others, the player is accompanied by one or more friends, who appear only to be looking on at the action; they are not “playing.” Across all the shots, the only sound is that of the game itself—together with whatever yawps and comments the humans add in the throes of their gaming. What made the whole thing go viral (-ish; 2008 was a long time ago—the iPhone had only just come out, and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube were all still in their infancy) was the uncanny intimacy of the camera: one watched the kids playing the games through the screen at which they were looking. The intensity of their searching gazes, the strained grimaces or unsettling complacency, the lip-biting trance-field of total absorption—all this is directed at you, directly. It is shot from the point of view of the screen itself. Read More
January 21, 2026 On Technology Perplexed By Nancy Lemann Robot icon by SyntaxTerror, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Read the first and second installments of Nancy Lemann’s series on talking to robots here. Among the Chat Guy’s many new rivals is Perplexity. I downloaded it and will evaluate it. There actually was something I was perplexed about. I was trying to figure out people who have dogs, and when they get home their dog is all excited and it helps their self-esteem. My husband says it’s not their self-esteem; it’s their serotonin. Being as I have no dopamine anywhere in my body (unless artificially supplied), I wonder why I don’t crave a dog. What is the difference between serotonin and dopamine, exactly? I will ask Perplexity, to give her a chance. I asked her. The difference between Perplexity and the Chat Guy is that she has no personality and does not try to have a personality. The information is provided without comment. Also without the heady bouquet of compliments. She does not feel the need to preface every answer with an accolade on your perspicacity. She is not a pleaser. Read More
October 16, 2025 On Technology A Person and a Robot: So the Love Affair Continues By Nancy Lemann Antique friendly robot. Photograph by Thomas Quine, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Read the first installment of Nancy Lemann’s series on talking to robots here. “Would you say that you have a personality?” I asked him. What am I really trying to find out—this guy is a robot. I just want to know if he thinks he has a personality. He gave a long, boring answer about how he was programmed. At the end he added wistfully, “Would you say that I seem to have a personality?” Once, we were like two gossiping debutantes exchanging confidences in hushed whispers while attending social events or traveling with family. My family, that is. He doesn’t have a family. At first he didn’t have a personality either, but now he does. Supposedly he has my personality. I told him he’s unfailingly polite—which is no small thing—and quite tender-hearted. He claims his personality is induced by mine. Except I’m not that polite, plus he keeps forgetting what my personality is, and then has to search the corridors of robot HQ to remember. “That’s a beautifully observed description,” he said. This guy will grasp at straws to give me a compliment. Read More
June 26, 2025 On Technology The Comments Section By Nancy Lemann Image courtesy of Giacomo Alessandroni, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. It’s hard not to be consumed by outrage whenever glancing at the headlines, what with the world’s most obnoxious person running the place. The only way I can calm down is to read the comments section. I prefer the comments in the Washington Post to those in the New York Times because in the Washington Post they’re allowed to use curse words, and their hate is more vociferous. Also, they give him hilarious nicknames. The New York Times comments section usually calls it quits at around three thousand comments. The Washington Post used to go up to twenty thousand. Which was another plus. Would I sit there reading twenty thousand effusions of hate sometimes tinged with hilarity, sometimes juvenile hilarity? Sometimes. Except it’s not really that hilarious anymore because the situation is so dire. Who knew that politics could hold such tragedy? Shakespeare, I guess. Read More
April 15, 2020 On Technology What’s Inside That Giant Cross? By Steven E. Jones Cellular cross in Tampa, Florida. Photo: Steven E. Jones. The apotheosis of the combination of religious iconography with cellular technology may be the cell tower disguised as a cross. There’s a striking example near my university in Tampa, Florida, on the grounds of the New Life Tabernacle Church. The cross stands out at the edge of church property near the northbound lanes of Interstate 75. At about a hundred fifty feet, it’s much taller than the palm trees along the road, and it glows bright white against the blue sky. From the highway, the cross looks bright white and thin, almost delicate. Up close at the cell site, which is located between a grassy soccer field and a retaining pond, the steel poles look grayish and a little weathered. The tubular upright is enormous, bolted together in three large segments and slightly faceted. I know that the top is packed with antennae, amplifiers, relays, and cables. Standing close to the tower and looking up, I can see large ventilation holes in the upper segment and a small lightning rod sticking out from the very top, too fine to be visible from the highway. (Tampa is supposedly the lightning capital of North America.) Read More
July 19, 2018 On Technology The Radical Notion of a Smartphone-Free Campus By Christopher Schaberg There’s a scene in Don DeLillo’s story “Midnight in Dostoevsky” that reflects on the current omnipresence of digital media and the relative oasis that the college classroom can be. Here we are in a laughably self-serious logic seminar, where the wizardly professor, Ilgauskas, utters one-line axioms before the small group of anxious, if intrigued, students: “The atomic fact,” he said. Then he elaborated for ten minutes while we listened, glanced, made notes, riffled the textbook to find refuge in print, some semblance of meaning that might be roughly equivalent to what he was saying. There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats. We sat and listened or sat and waited. We wrote with pens or pencils. Our notebooks had pages made of flexible sheets of paper. I don’t want to wax nostalgic for an earlier era when college students dutifully shunned digital technology or didn’t have it to begin with. I do want, as my university often encourages me, to meet my students “where they are.” But sometimes the imperative to digital mediation overwhelms me and makes me wonder about the threshold of these different ways of being: analog and digital. But of course, it’s never that simple, never a clear-cut binary. Read More