About T&S

Tech & Sensibility is my ongoing engagement with technology in the business, academic, and literary spaces. It is, quite obviously, a play on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, that notion of striking a balance between logic (sense) and emotion (sensibility), a balance that has become increasingly skewed in our contemporary discourse on technology. What I want to do here is strike a balance between our fevered focus on whiz-bang gadgets and our measured examination of just how these technologies affect our lives.

I began thinking about this while teaching "Technology and Identities," a themed writing course at the University of Virginia.

At the beginning of the semester, I would give my students a "tech check." They were presented a list of technologies and they would simply "check" the one with with they were familiar, used, or had fluency. Most checked off quite a few items. However, during the course of teaching, I realized that although they had the smartphones and laptops and Facebook profiles (and MySpace, back in the day), they had no concept of how to really engage these tools beyond the basics. Further they had no idea of the consequences of engaging technologies in particular actions nor did they have a language in which to communicate concerns. As a journalist looking to the professional space, I realized that my students were not the only ones unarmed with the knowledge of what a deep engagement with technology implies.

My hope is that we will engage here in conversations that make us informed techno-citizens and not merely cyber-consumers.