Discourse around technology is interesting. I've been reading a lot of essays on technology, digital media, and the digital humanities over the past few weeks.

Discourse around technology is interesting. I've been reading a lot of essays on technology, digital media, and the digital humanities over the past few weeks. The upsides of the future seem to get perpetuated a lot more than the downsides. In one of the papers that's at the forefront of my mind, the New London Group's "Multiliteracies for a Digital Age" essay, they call out the good -- more collaboration, more opportunities for a utopia, etc. While they do mention downsides, they kind of get drowned out. People want to be optimistic -- there's a bunch of core human ideals and one of them is that things will improve. As such, technological downsides and pitfalls either get called out and responded to by tin-foil-hat types, or just fall away until it's a bit too late (thinking randomly of Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" here...)