In 2019, the ETC Press published Pamela McCorduck’s book, THIS COULD BE IMPORTANT. Here, I’m releasing clips of our conversation about her life as one of the early science + technology writers.
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A compendium of what I’ve learned in my twenty-five years navigating SXSW Interactive, the greatest show on earth.
As the nation tried to collect itself in the hours, minutes, and days after the terrorist attacks, our president rightfully spent a great deal of time and energy reassuring the public. What I didn’t believe, though, was the insistence that we could adequately monitor digital communications in order to find out if there were looming threats.
Lately I’ve been asking myself a simple question: “What’s next?” I go through these moments of self reflection as I near the end of a large project. In this case, I’m in the final stages of rewriting Dungeons & Dreamers after several years of on-again/off-again work with my friend and co-author John Borland. The book is […]
In 2009, the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive coordinators decided to carve out a corner of the conference where those people interested in start-ups, emerging technology, and entrepreneurship could gather. At the time, this wasn’t necessarily a popular move. For years the conference focused on emerging technologies, media, and creative endeavors. The thought of turning […]
Douglass Engelbart passed away today. You probably don’t know his name but you should. He invented the computer mouse. He helped develop hypertext (those hyperlink thingies, for instance) networked computing, and pushed forward the field of human-computer interaction (that thing that helps make your computers work a little better for you.) He decided when he […]
Ask any college student and they will tell you this: Group work sucks. The reason: In a group of four people, the workload generally breaks down like this: 1 person does nothing, who angers… 1 person who controls everything, who annoys… 2 people just trying to survive the process. Put students into groups, and you […]
My friend Jessie made this, which debuted at SXSW Film this year: She also made Who Killed the Electric Car?: Revenge of the Electric Car: and “Death by Fire” for Frontline:
Every year, South by Southwest Interactive changes for me. When I first started coming in the mid-1990s, I wrote about music and stumbled upon technology. By 1998, I’d largely abandoned the music conference for what we now call Interactive. I was a journalist, then a moderator, then a panelist, and now I’m a mixture of […]
Understanding social technologies can seem mystifying unless you have a framework for evaluation. In this post, I explain the ways I try to understand and predict the use of networks and emerging technologies.
Like so many in my generation, I grew up watching the launch of NASA’s Space Shuttles. For years, we would gather in lunch rooms and classrooms to celebrate the triumph of American science ingenuity as we rocketed into space. I remember watching in awe as those massive shuttles fired into space. I was memerized by […]
I’m just back from South by Southwest, a 10-day interactive, music, and film conference and festival in Austin, Texas. I’ll get into more detail later, but I’m giving several conference recaps to various constituencies. As I work through my round-up, I’ll be adding to my notes and blog here. A brief overview of South by […]