There’s an episode of Doctor Who in which the eponymous time-traveling Doctor finds himself in an alternate timeline, where it’s always 2:02pm on the 22nd of April, 2011. Other things are amiss too: pterodactyls are chasing children through the park, the War of the Roses has just entered its second year, and on TV, Charles Dickens is explaining the plot of his upcoming Christmas special: “All I can say now is it involves ghosts and the past and the present and the future all at the same time.”

Holy Roman Emperor Winston Churchill, evidently feeling disquieted, summons the Doctor.

“Something has happened to time,” he says. “That’s what you say, what you never stop saying. All of history is happening at once. But what does that mean? What happened? Explain to me in terms that I can understand: what happened to time?”

***

In the 21st century that you and I live in, pterodactyls are extinct, the Wars of the Roses happened in the 1400s, and Charles Dickens never got the chance to appear on television. But Emperor Churchill’s question feels no less relevant: what happened to time? Or, rather, what’s happening to time? And, since ideas about time and place are so integrally linked, what’s happening to time and place – time in places, places in time?

It’s not necessarily that time and place have changed their (slippery, shadowy) shape. It’s that our view of them is shifting – or, more specifically, our tools for viewing them are shifting. Take Facebook, which, as Nathan Jurgenson writes, “fixates the present as always a future past.” Or take the Fitbit, a device that tracks every step you take, feeding back data on how far you’ve walked, how many calories you’ve burned. It’s just a fitness tool – ostensibly an intensely personal thing, a thing about you and your relationship to your body, your bodily relationship to the world. But, as Malcolm McCullough writes, “[p]lace begins with embodiment. Body is a place, and it shapes our perceptions” – and the Fitbit is part of a larger context, too, a proliferation and assimilation of devices and applications which fix us always in time and space, which force questions about what it means to be able to freeze time, excavate the layers of a place, make memories as they’re happening.

Craig Mod writes about this in a piece on “the Data Mind”:

Walking is different than biking or driving down a street. Heads stuck in smartphones, we miss the humanity of the scenes we pass. Yet using that same technology we can call up with atomic granularity the time and place of a meeting with a dear friend years back. Sometimes those two spaces collide – technology creating an almost psychic, projected awareness of the here and now.

The language we use to describe the uses and implications of this kind of technology is heavily couched in temporal and geographical language. The here is affected by the now, as the now is affected by the here. And place, as the cultural geographer Doreen Massey writes, is “here and now. It won’t be the same ‘here’ when it is no longer ‘now’.” It’s crowded by ghosts and memories, complicated by what James Donald describes as a “simultaneity of past, present, and future”, a “temporal tangle that defines the ‘now’ that we inhabit.”

So what exactly is technology creating an awareness of if “the here and now” is so slippery? What’s here? What’s now?

***

It’s a good time to be thinking about this, maybe, given all the recent interest in the app Snapchat, which allows users to share pictures and videos which disappear from the recipient’s device, irrevocably, after a period of time. I still don’t understand what the point of Snapchat is, exactly, or why I would want to actually use it, but perhaps that doesn’t matter: perhaps its point, if it has to have one, is to act as metaphor, or as catalyst for conversation. Certainly there’s been a spate of good writing about it recently, so I think it’s probably earned its keep in the lexicon of essayists and theorists (and, in the case of this post, amateur bloggers). “A photograph is made of time as much as it is of light,” writes Nathan Jurgenson:

- a frozen shutter-speed-size gap of the present captured within a photo border. There’s always the possibility that the next photo you take will one day be lovingly removed from a box by some unborn great-grandchild; the Polaroid developing in your hands might come to be pinned to someone’s bedpost in posterity. To update that to more contemporary terms, your selfie on Instagram might be a signpost for the future you of what it was like to be this young.

On Snapchat, images have no such future. Fittingly, its logo is a ghost.

The symbolism of the ghost is loaded; I’m reminded of Steven Conner, writing that “[a] haunted place has become stuck in time, or time has been scored into it”, or, for that matter, of Edward Thomas, writing about Oxford in 1903: “The past and the dead have here, as it were, a corporate life. They are an influence, an authority; they create and legislate to-day…as I walk, I seem to be in the living past.” It’s a reminder that although something may disappear (and everything disappears eventually) it isn’t necessarily erased: that’s what memory’s for. The temporary photograph may lose its form, become disembodied (or re-embodied), but it may still leave an imprint. The temporary photograph was made to be shared, and sharing has the potential to be a form of remembering, or at least a form of noticing, a way of heightening “awareness of the here and now”.

Jurgenson writes:

The photograph, for all its promised immortality, always hinted at death…Documenting the present as a future past, as conventional photographs do, asserts the facts of change, impermanence, and mortality. The temporary photograph does the opposite: It interrupts the traditional photographic fixation of the present as impending history by posting a present moment that’s not concerned with the past or the future. As such, the temporary photograph is necessarily less sentimental and nostalgic. By being quick, the temporary photograph is a tiny protest against time.

Is it fair to extrapolate all this from an app which, according to its creators, is primarily about “the beauty of friendship – […] the lightness of being”? Maybe not fair, but certainly possible. Of course, the temporary photograph is concerned with the future: it’s concerned with evading it, concerned with being gone before the future arrives. What’s happened to time, maybe, is that we’ve dared to think we can somehow manipulate our perception of it. But we’re still left with this uncomfortable fact, this understanding of the temporary photograph as a moment in time and therefore – tiny protest though it may be – very much of time. “The past is a projection as well as a determinant of the present,” writes James Donald – and every future will be a present and a past.

***

Place is the convergence of not just past, present, and future, but also of “past as projection and determinant of present”, “present as future past”, and so on: it’s the form that the temporal tangle takes. That is to say, as Malcolm McCullough writes: “Life takes place”. Life takes place: it occurs, and it occurs somewhere specifically – the kitchen, the city, the hillside, the library, the field. Place is also, as the geographer Patricia Price writes, “a processual, polyvocal, always-becoming entity”. It’s subject to shifts of mood, memory, and other equally unstable processes. It’s subject to the same pressures of time that human life is. Places age; they show cracks in the ground or erosion of cliff-faces instead of wrinkles under the eyes, in gleaming new buildings where once lay the buried dead or a fallow field – not erasing history but building on it, literally – but they do age. The temporary photo doesn’t age: the temporary photo attempts to train our attention on an isolated present, if such a thing exists – the here and the now, coexisting, on the verge of disappearing (it’s possible, too, that we ascribe more meaning to what’s fleeting than less). The Fitbit turns our understanding of mortality on its head: all that data collected, all those healthy miles logged, and for what? For the hope, maybe, that we can be briefly free in the city, briefly and powerfully in place – never mind the future, the weight gained and lost, the breath quickening and slowing. We’re doing it to improve ourselves, but also to be ourselves.

The question, then, isn’t so much, “what is technology doing to our sense of time? – it’s, “what is technology allowing us to say about our sense of time?” If technology has the power to create a “projected awareness of the here and now,” or to fixate “the present as always a future past”, what does a future-past-present actually look like, geographically? How much of the here and now is actually neither here nor now?

I don’t know – “All I can say now is it involves ghosts and the past and the present and the future all at the same time.”

❧

First, let’s get a few things out of the way: I’m a white American female. I went to a private liberal arts college. I’m a (struggling) writer. I’m in my mid twenties. Very probably if the target market for Girls took singular physical form it would look exactly like me. I also understand that a portrayal of a world in which everyone is like me is ridiculous. I understand the exclusionary, maybe dangerous implications of such a portrayal, and I understand the need for criticisms of it: that Girls is too self-centered, too small-minded, fails to represent or even acknowledge huge swathes of society, emphasizes a certain kind of privilege. But this is, nevertheless, the show we’ve been given: the show in which four straight white college-educated chicks from comfortable economic backgrounds try to forge a life for themselves in a big city.

So. The point of Girls, as its name, I guess, is meant to indicate, is that the women depicted in the show are still uncomfortable about their “adult” status. They’re wriggling around in this tight new skin, trying to figure out how to be. They’re all grown up, except they’re not, because no one ever really is. That’s the joke, right? That we’ll still be thinking, “but I feel like such a fraud!” even when we’re successful, when we’re experts, even when we’re in our thirties, or our nineties, for that matter. We’re always still kids, always just faking it.

The anxieties that the women in Girls experience are, largely, anxieties of comparison – the virgin is uncomfortable because her peers are mostly not virgins; the writer is peeved that someone she took a writing workshop with in college has already been published. Some of them are my anxieties, too: when Marnie worries that she’s barren because she’s been sexually irresponsible a few times and has never gotten pregnant, I’m forced to acknowledge that, however irrational it sounds when it’s actually said out loud, I’ve had this exact thought; I know what it’s like to think that way about things entirely beyond your control. Again it’s about comparison; all the anxiety boils down to this fear of having to deal with a situation which is unique or un-mappable, a situation that our worst enemy or our best friend isn’t also in: why is what’s happening to her not happening to me? how do I deal with something different?

On the other hand, there’s this scene, with Marnie and an artist. They’ve left a gallery opening to go for a walk together; they’re standing at an entrance to the High Line. She’s got a boyfriend, but she’s flirting, or fawning – it’s difficult to tell exactly which. She tells the artist she’s not going to kiss him. He tells her he might scare her the first time he fucks her, because, “I’m a man, and I know how to do things. See ya later.”

Cut to Marnie, marching through the gallery to the bathroom, locking herself in, reaching under her dress to touch herself.

What? Is this an earnest commentary on what people our age are meant to feel – turned on by the firm promise of real adulthood, of real men (or women)? Is it a commentary on the ridiculousness of the way we’re condescended to? Or is it just a really, really bad call on Dunham’s part? So yes: Girls is hit or miss, sometimes downright awful; it relies on shorthand in the form of caricature; it’s self-consciously self-conscious to a painful extent; it’s got moments – like the Marnie/artist scene – which are utterly baffling.

Sometimes it’s hit and miss in the same moment. The very first episode – and therefore the series – opens with Dunham’s Hannah, at a restaurant, being told by her parents that they can’t continue to support her financially. There’s a disconcerting instant – why are her parents supporting her? they’ve just been congratulating her on how well her job is going – before we understand that the job in question is an internship – unpaid, of course. The scene is indelicately handled; Hannah’s infantile responses – “But I’m your only child, it’s not like I’m draining all your finances!”, or, “This is nuts. I could be a drug addict. Do you realize how lucky you are?” – do seem to warrant her mother’s final pronouncement: “No. More. Mo-ney,” she says, slowly, as if speaking to a baby. The scene seems to condense all kinds of potential (and potentially serious) problems and anxieties into a single, glib instance; it worries me how easily this could be construed as proof of the idea that there’s a prevalence of whiny, lazy privilege amongst people under the age of 30.

Which I think is largely how it’s been read, either critically (gosh those twentysomethings are entitled!) or sympathetically (yeah, I’m four years out of college and still doing unpaid internships!) – both of which are valid but rather surface interpretations. Because the meat, the heart, is this: here we see, laid bare, the two-faced self, the self that understands intuitively the role of marketing even in times of desperate insecurity, the self split by a desire to look good and a desire to acknowledge a sinking, desperate kind of doubt. One face tells one story, the other another: there’s the young woman, two years out of college, working at a publishing house in New York City, writing a book, being positively encouraged to continue, making it; and then there’s the young woman, two years out of college, without a job, without a book deal or a finished manuscript, relying on her parents in order to sustain herself, adrift. They’re the same person, and neither version is any truer than the other, really.

And this is where Girls does get it right. Last year, after the first episode had aired, and every writer, blogger, and clown with a pen had rushed to dissect it, I tweeted this:

“Wow, just fell down the “responses to HBO’s Girls” rabbit hole. Almost feel like I don’t need to see the show – like it’s been created to be ‘viewed’ remotely, via the medium of hype/criticism.”

I have, now, obviously, seen the show, but I don’t think I was wrong: I think the beauty of it, if you can call it beauty, is that it exists beyond its material form. It’s viewable even if you never watch it.

There’s a point in the third episode where Hannah, back from a reunion with an ex-boyfriend, sits on her bed, composing a tweet. We see the screen as she sees it, the empty box, the potential.

“You lose some, you lose some,” she writes. Delete.
“My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy,” she writes. Delete.
“All adventurous women do,” she writes. Tweet.

So we literally see Hannah editing (or creating) her own image, forging a version of herself designed explicitly for consumption. What she decides to tweet is not revelatory or even meaningful on its own – but the expression that forms on her face as the words appear on the page suggest Hannah feels she’s hit just the right note. “I am busy trying to become who I am!” Hannah tells her parents at the start of the show, and here we see the evidence of this: we see her, hard at work, trying to become the person she is. And even if no one else is listening, she’s said the kind of thing that person would say.

This performance isn’t notable in itself – we do it all the time, even those of us who never touch a computer or a smartphone, who revile “social media”. But to see it acted out like that is, I think, notable. Perhaps Girls is not significant for being devoid of color, or for having been written by someone who was just 12 when Sex and the City first aired: perhaps it’s significant simply for being the first show of its kind, the first show to have been created in and for a world in which the careful construction of a tweet is as much a part of an encounter with an ex-boyfriend as the actual meeting itself.

Girls gets a lot of things wrong: but it does get this right, almost exactly, painfully right. The biggest anxiety of all, it seems to suggest, is not the one about how to be, but how to appear to be. How to enact that appearance. How to look like the person you want to be, even if you’re not that person, even if you never can be, because, remember, underneath, like the duck gliding serenely across the pond but paddling furiously underwater, we’re all faking it anyway. Girls is bigger than itself; it is also its critical context, a product of its own hype. You could watch it, I guess, without having read a thing about it, but I think you’d be missing something. I think it was created deliberately for an audience who watch with the noise turned on, who contribute to that noise – I think that’s its natural environment. I think you can read about it without watching it, and still be watching it, but it would be harder to watch it without reading about it and still be watching it.

p.s. I haven’t seen any of the second series yet

❧

This is not a tirade against the internet. And when I say ‘break’ I don’t mean that I’ve shut off the wifi, hidden the laptop, thrown the mobile phone into the sea, and started knitting by candlelight in the evenings and building a sailboat in my spare time. Let’s call it a break from engagement: I’ve still been there, I’ve been lurking, hovering, half-heartedly clicking links and saving them to read later and then not reading them, adding items to my eBay watch list and failing to feel regret when I realise I’ve missed the opportunity to bid, scrolling mindlessly through my Twitter feed, smiling automatically at tweets I know are meant to be funny, pausing over ones I know are meant to be thought-provoking. My body knows what it’s meant to do, and so, to a certain extent, does my mind; but my heart’s forgotten.

I’ve been working on a chapter for my book that deals with “DIY” and the value of making stuff. And it’s funny to be someone who makes stuff that’s largely intangible. I spend hours working every day and I have nothing to show for it except text on a screen – text, moreover, that lives in some nebulous place I sometimes see referred to as The Cloud, a non-place really, an imaginary world, a thing I can’t quite wrap my head around. All those drafts and notes and abandoned ideas, which exist but seem not to: invisible output.

Last summer, my first as a freelancer, I remember feeling particularly odd; I floated down the same old streets, to and from the swimming pool, in a state of mild but constant panic. I was powerfully unused to the lack of structure that now characterized my days; I had always been at school or at the office, and now, although in a sense I felt I was always both learning and working, I was not really accountable to anyone but myself. It was almost too much to bear: the intensity of freedom, the terror of uncertainty. What I found online, what found me online, was often the only comfort.

This summer, more accustomed to the aimlessness of my days, I developed an irreverent attitude towards what I had once held sacred. I went to California for a few weeks and forgot to respond to emails for days at a time, sometimes. I stopped reading my newsfeed altogether – every once in awhile I would log into Google Reader, click “mark all as read,” and feel unjustifiably satisfied. I sent an actual postcard to a friend back in England, an act I found disproportionately pleasing. I wondered if I might have been wrong all along, if a more disconnected life would actually suit me far better than the one that I had made for myself.

So yes: I’m tempted to suggest that we should just chuck everything out and start over: build a fire, roast a squirrel killed with a handmade bow and a handmade arrow, sing songs around the campfire. I mean metaphorically, of course. I mean I’m tempted to say, well, I’m going to go back to just reading books now. I had my fun – and oh what fun it was! But I’m going to stick my head in the sand now, because it’s all getting a bit difficult. I’m going to go back to just reading books and maybe I’ll get a job as a waitress or a bike messenger, because I quite like a bit of physical work sometimes, especially when it’s rewarded with cash. And I’ll go to the pub more often, because I’ll have the money to do so, and I’ll talk to people; I’ll read the newspaper, get ink on my fingertips, ideas in my head. I’ll sort the garden out, once and for all – I really mean it this time, this time I really mean it. I’ll be a brighter, fuller, more present human being, whatever any of that means.

But what a cowardly idea that is – and a vain one. Do I really think that my disconcertion has anything to do with anybody but myself? – that somehow building things, or ignoring things, or whatever you want to call it, is going to change the fact that I feel a little out of sorts and I’m not able necessarily to concentrate all the time on what it is I’m trying to accomplish? Do I flatter myself so much that I believe that the pure I, free at last from all the distractions imposed on me by the Internet-beast, is so unfettered and unstoppable?

In the end this kind of yearning for a more rustic existence – what Nathan Jurgenson has dubbed “the IRL fetish” – strikes me as a childish impulse, like closing your eyes and thinking, if I can’t see you, you can’t see me. If I ignore the world, it will shrink, become manageable again.

“Our immense self-satisfaction in disconnection is new,” writes Jurgenson. “How proud of ourselves we are for fighting against the long reach of mobile and social technologies! One of our new hobbies is patting ourselves on the back by demonstrating how much we don’t go on Facebook. People boast about not having a profile. We have started to congratulate ourselves for keeping our phones in our pockets and fetishizing the offline as something more real to be nostalgic for.”

Meanwhile, a recent Telegraph article describes the plight of “a growing group of novelists who struggle with internet-addiction”, including Zadie Smith, who thanks the internet-blocking applications Freedom and SelfControl (“for creating the time”) in the acknowledgments for her latest novel. “If someone with as highly creative, original and robust a brain as Zadie Smith needs these tools, what hope is there for a 15 year-old?” concludes the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield.

What is it about this article that bothers me? It’s not all bad, after all; author Carl Wilkinson also quotes Greenfield being somewhat more insightful:

“The worst thing for human beings,” says Greenfield, “is not getting attention. Studies have shown that the worst thing about low-paid jobs – beyond the low pay – is the lack of attention. We all like being acknowledged. Emails and messages reinforce that you’re worth contacting.”

But I think what gets me is the lack of culpability (and, perhaps, imagination: if writing fiction is, as Will Self indicates, “about expressing certain kinds of verities that are only found through observation and introspection”, why is “the internet […] of no relevance at all to the business of writing fiction directly”? Why is observation and introspection online automatically assumed to be impossible?). Why does everyone act so helpless when faced with, basically, their own selves? (I think of a 1999 piece in the Guardian that I recently encountered, in which David Bowie extols the virtues of the internet and its potential as a powerful marketplace for artists. “Interaction on the Web is a little like a mirror, like communicating with a manifestation of yourself. Because it is so chaotic, so decentralised, I find that using the Web becomes like communicating with a hardware version of me. It’s not exactly a doppelgänger, but an alternative version of myself,” he says.)

Why can’t we at least acknowledge that, with or without the internet, we still have to work hard, fight distraction, fight depression, and succumb, every once in awhile, to paralysing self-doubt? So it was nice, while I was on holiday, not to have any mobile phone reception. It’s also nice to be able to video chat with my 86-year-old grandmother in California. Disconnected, connected, whatever: I’m still fallible.

❧

“What if Kickstarter is more about the experience of kickstarting than it is about the finished products?” asks Ian Bogost in a recent piece for Fast Company.

Well, that’s precisely what Kickstarter (and any other crowdfunding site, for that matter) is about. As Felix Salmon writes in a response to Bogost’s piece:

I funded Tomorrow magazine, for instance, to the tune of $15. […] If some as-yet nonexistent magazine had sent me a piece of direct mail, asking $15 for its launch issue, I would never have paid that. Even if an existing magazine looked really good on the newsstand, and had a cover price of $15, I would similarly never pay that. But somehow the idea that by paying the $15 up front I was helping to create that magazine – that was enough to get me to pay. That, and the fact that the founders of Tomorrow magazine are in my social graph – I’m helping out friends as much as I’m buying a product.

Bogost, meanwhile, describes his relationship to “the Pen Type-A, a slick stainless-steel enclosure for Japanese gel ink pens that I first saw on Kickstarter but pre-ordered shortly after their campaign raised more than 100 times its goal in August of last year.” He’s now received the pen, and, “It’s nice, I guess, but I’m still using a $2 roller-ball to sketch notes in my Moleskine. Yet the Pen Type-A is more than a $100 metal pen that never gets used, it’s a memento of the excitement I felt after first seeing the product.”

I guess the question that’s raised when these two pieces are juxtaposed is: what does “the experience of kickstarting” involve? Bogost’s conclusion is that “we don’t really want the stuff. We’re paying for the sensation of a hypothetical idea, not the experience of a realized product. For the pleasure of desiring it.” Salmon, on the other hand is “not paying for the sensation of a hypothetical idea, so much as paying to support the individuals whom I like and admire.” Moreover, he writes, the product is still important: “while ‘I’m buying a dream’ makes a certain amount of sense for a $1 lottery ticket, it makes much less sense for $100 vaporware. […] If I’m spending $100, I want significantly more than just a dream.”

It’s this invocation of the word ‘dream’ that I find interesting. The title of Salmon’s piece is “Is Kickstarter selling dreams?” I’ve been thinking and writing about this myself lately, for a chapter of my book. I’m looking at it through a particular lens, primarily examining the way that musicians (and, to a certain extent, other artists, including writers) use crowdfunding tools such as Kickstarter. And I think the answer is that yes, absolutely, Kickstarter is selling dreams. Only it’s not selling dreams to consumers. Consumers, as both Bogost and Salmon indicate, are happy to pay more for a product on Kickstarter because they’re buying the privilege of being part of that product’s history. What ‘being part of that product’s history’ actually means will probably differ depending on who the consumer is, what kind of product he’s buying, what relationship (if any) he has to the maker of that product, how much money he’s parting with, and a million other factors. But fundamentally, the consumer is buying some combination of experience + product. The dreams are being sold to the makers, the would-be artists and inventors.

The internet has created an environment in which any artist has the opportunity to connect directly with potential supporters. What this means is that, for instance, a band with no ties to the industry, no external support or other advantages, playing in their basement, can now theoretically harness the power of a community to build whatever it is they need to build: a fund for recording, an even bigger community, a road out of obscurity. The sky is ostensibly the limit, particularly because profit, if there is any, actually reaches the artist.

I think this is a good thing, for the most part. It’s strengthened the connection between creators and consumers, allowed niche projects that might otherwise have gone unnoticed to flourish, and sparked necessary discussions about how we produce, pay for, and distribute creative output in a world where the internet exists.

But if we’re going to talk about selling dreams, let’s consider the possibility that this “do everything yourself” world is selling a dream that’s just as powerful as the traditional “get discovered, sign to a major label, buy a Cribs-worthy mansion” rock ‘n’ roll myth it’s trying to subvert. Now any monkey with a guitar has a chance to make a million bucks, just like Amanda Palmer did. Maybe Kickstarter isn’t selling you a promise of fame and fortune (although there does seem to be some temptation to look at DIY as an alternative pathway to the same old version of commercial success – e.g. the young artist profiled in the Guardian a few months ago who’d dabbled with crowdfunding: “Getting her album made thanks to her fans is the first step, Miss Stylie says, on a path to world domination”). Maybe it’s just selling you the idea that you can make money – some money, any money, ten pounds, say, or a hundred – from your music (or your swanky pen, for that matter). But either way, it’s almost certainly selling you the idea that you can change something, or be part of some change; there’s a sense of infinite individual possibility tinged with worthiness. “People get excited about it, I suppose, because it’s new and it’s an opportunity – it’s like maybe this is how music could come out and it could level the field,” says Ben Folds (who recently announced the launch of a crowdfunded project). “Well, it’s not going to. Let’s say Kanye West decided to go do Kickstarter – he’d blow the Internet up. What good would that do? It wouldn’t mean that the band next door is going to have a better chance.”

This doesn’t mean that crowdfunding is the enemy, any more than it means that crowdfunding is the answer. It just means that the narrative is complicated. I still like the idea that part of the appeal of crowdfunding is to pay not just for product but for process; from the perspective of the artist, I suppose, maybe the healthiest response is to enjoy the process too, just in case there isn’t a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

❧

The other day this tweet from Nathan Jurgenson appeared in my feed:

finished my weekly reading of the NYTimes tech section. it is almost indistinguishable from the business section

It reminded me of some frustrated notes I’d made in the pub a few months ago and then done nothing with. So this is me doing something with them.

I was concerned, at the time, with what I disparagingly (if you can intuit a disparaging tone from the particular slant of hand-written quotation marks, which I believe in this case you can) labelled “tech journalism”. I meant this term to encompass all the things I didn’t like about the way we – by which I mean authors, journalists, bloggers – write about technology. In many ways I think technology is actually a misleading term here, but I’m not sure we have the vocabulary to talk about it in nuanced enough ways yet, and maybe this is at the heart of the problem: we don’t need to just change the way we write about technology, we also need to develop a more precise language with which to write about it.

Anyway, here’s the thing: I don’t think we are really doing “technology” enough justice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rock ‘n’ roll myth lately, the myth that says if you play at the right venue on the right night you’ll get noticed by some bigshot industry dude and get signed and get rich and get famous. This myth, admittedly, has some basis in reality: that did happen to some people, and it will undoubtedly, as unlikely as it sounds, happen again to other people. But it doesn’t happen to most people, and in my view it isn’t necessarily what’s most interesting about music, even if it does happen. Ultimately the music itself is still the most interesting thing, the people playing the music, the people hearing it, the relationship between sound and feeling, what Alex Ross calls “a peculiar American dream, this notion that music can give you a new personality, a new class, even a new race”.

The startup world has its own version of the rock ‘n’ roll myth. People my age are running companies valued at millions of dollars, or billions of dollars. Spend enough time in a dark room coding and you, too, could get rich quick. Journalists in the mainstream media write very compellingly about this very compelling story, and rightly so: it’s big news.

But I worry that what gets lost in the flurry of excitement about technology as a business (money! risk! investment! valuations! rags to riches! riches to rags!) is excitement about the technology itself: the software, the applications, the websites, the whatever. By emphasizing money over meaning, we often ignore the opportunity for an examination of anything more relevant than, “How This Social Networking Site Can Help Brands Engage With Customers!”

The important point here is that business ≠ technology. Business is certainly an aspect of technology, and I don’t dispute the need to write about this aspect. I do fear, however, that we’re on the verge of forgetting that ideas and implications matter as much, in many contexts, as money and marketing. By simply transposing technology and business, there’s a lot we miss writing (and talking) about. Technology can be a mirror, an indicator; it can be challenging, damaging, constructive, life-changing. It can influence our ways of being in the world as much as our ways of being in the world influence what tools we develop or how we behave online.

So I crave a different form of “tech journalism” (though I suspect journalism is not really the right word here): writing on the sociology of technology, perhaps. In my (very unscientific) view, we’re seeing more of this sort of thing now than we did six months ago (or maybe I’m just looking harder now). But it’s often specialist and fairly academic stuff – hugely enjoyable to read and discuss, but not necessarily part of the ongoing mainstream technology narrative. And I still have the sense that a lot of “tech journalism” is just business journalism wearing a slightly hipper hat.

There are obvious exceptions to this; the Atlantic, for instance, springs to mind. And the landscape is certainly undergoing a change – Sarah Lacy left TechCrunch to start (the admittedly business-focused) PandoDaily; Milo Yiannopoulos asked: “Where are the columnists, the brave iconoclasts? The people who can make insightful links between technology and other disciplines, draw distinctions, see revealing connections?” and then launched the delightfully if sometimes uncomfortably bitchy online magazine The Kernel, which aims to publish “high-quality writing about the way technology is rapidly changing our lives”.

My sense is that the tech section and the business section will, eventually, have to diverge. Perhaps they are already diverging; perhaps the sparks and rumbles online, the new ventures, the longer-form essays, are evidence of that. I hope so, anyway; it would be a shame to ignore a whole space ripe for exploration.

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