Search Results for: tech

The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick

Longreads Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 12, 2014

The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick

Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. And then there’s the culture clash between older (read as: 35+) coders and tech executives who have experience running companies and the younger entrepreneurs who may (or not) be on to the next big thing. In her story, Lu articulates the creeping angst of Silicon Valley: “the vague sense of a frenzied bubble of app-making and an even vaguer dread that what we are making might not be that meaningful.”

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

Yiren Lu | New York Times Magazine | March 16, 2014 | 28 minutes (6,989 words)

‘Every New Technology Creates Almost As Many Problems As It Solves’

Longreads Pick

An in-depth interview (via The Browser) with Wired co-founder and technology “protopian” Kevin Kelly about the future of sharing and tracking on the Internet:

The question that I’m asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we’re going to stop sharing, and how far are we’re going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there’s no end to how much we can track each other—how far we’re going to self-track, how much we’re going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there’s going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.

Source: edge.org
Published: Feb 3, 2014
Length: 36 minutes (9,124 words)

What Happened to Tech Jobs in Silicon Valley

“Google is visually impressive, but this frenzy of energy and hipness hasn’t generated large numbers of jobs, much less what we think of as middle-class jobs, the kinds of unglamorous but solid employment that generates annual household incomes between $44,000 and $155,000. The state of California (according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California) could boast in 1980 that some 60 percent of its families were middle-income as measured in today’s dollars, but by 2010 only 48 percent of California families fell into that category, and the income gap between the state’s highest and lowest earners had doubled. In Silicon Valley there has actually been a net job loss in tech-related industries over the past decade. According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000 fewer jobs than existed in 2001.”

Charlotte Allen, in the Weekly Standard, on income inequality in the Bay Area, and signs of what’s happening to the middle class in the United States. Read more on tech in the Longreads Archive.

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Early Technologies That Were Supposed to Disrupt Education

“The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in the 1920s led such institutions as New York University and Harvard to launch so-called Colleges of the Air, which, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, prompted a 1924 journalist to contemplate a world in which the new medium would be ‘the chief arm of education’ and suggest that ‘the child of the future [would be] stuffed with facts as he sits at home or even as he walks about the streets with his portable receiving-set in his pocket.’ Udacity wasn’t even the first attempt to deliver an elite education via the Internet: In 2001, MIT launched the OpenCourseWare project to digitize notes, homework assignments, and, in some cases, full video lectures for all of the university’s courses.”

Max Chafkin, in Fast Company, on the difficulties of online education and the struggles of Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun. Read more from Chafkin in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: 29908091@N00, Flickr

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How We Filed: The Early Technology of Paperwork

Longreads Pick

Shannon Mattern was obsessed with office supplies when she was young—here she explores the many ways we once used to file and store paperwork, which once “constituted approximately ninety percent of the activity” in an office:

Filing tools—the spindle file, the pigeonhole file, the bellows file, the flat file, the Shannon file, the vertical file—have been around for centuries. But the First World War gave rise to a new era of business that generated an explosion of paperwork, and that paperwork needed to be filed away. “With the growth of businesses, the departmentalizing of activities, and the necessity of depending upon the written word rather than upon memory,” Johnson and Kallaus write, “[t]he person who is responsible for the orderly arrangement of those papers has one of the most responsible positions in any business office.” Those individuals who held the new and noble position of “Records Manager” had to know “where each piece of paper originates and why, how many copies of it are necessary, how these flow through the different offices and departments, where they are stored temporarily and how, and what their end may be,” whether immediate destruction, destruction after being archived, or temporary or long-term retention.

Published: Oct 29, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,296 words)

Reading List: Examining Technology

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

The following four pieces resist cliches about social media and its impact. These authors do not shame nor condone; they do not preach. They take a deeper look at the tendency and luxury to share our lives with each other.

1. “O.K., Glass.” (Gary Shteyngart, The New Yorker, August 2013)

Shteyngart presents a colorful report on his experience wearing Google’s latest brainchild and his predictions for the near future of technology. (Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, included technology eerily reminiscent of Glass.)

2. “A Tweetable Feast.” (Jared Keller, Aeon Magazine, May 2013)

The author posits that social media expands the dinner table and delves into the relationship among food, internet, and community.

3. “Tweeting Death.” (Meghan O’Rourke, The New Yorker, July 2013)

When his mother entered an ICU, NPR host Scott Simon live-tweeted the experience. What could’ve been garish was instead tender. O’Rourke posits that social media may be a safe, public space to mourn.

4. “Pics and It Didn’t Happen.” (Nathan Jurgenson, The New Inquiry, February 2013)

The New Inquiry turns its blend of astute observation, philosophical investigation and literary criticism to Snapchat.

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Reading List: Examining Technology

Longreads Pick

New reading list from Emily Perper featuring picks from The New Yorker, Aeon Magazine, and the New Inquiry.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 25, 2013

How Much Tech Can One City Take?

Longreads Pick

The takeover of San Francisco by tech companies prompts some soul-searching by Talbot, a longtime resident and veteran of the first dotcom boom as founder of Salon.com:

“One recent Friday evening, a single mother named Fufkin Vollmayer found herself at a Shabbat service started by two young Jews who work in the tech sector. The service, known as the Mission Minyan, is held each week at the Women’s Building, in the heart of San Francisco’s hottest neighborhood. The fortysomething Vollmayer, who was raised in the Haight-Ashbury by an activist mother, is the kind of vibrant, idiosyncratic personality that defines San Francisco (she took her first name from the band manager in Spinal Tap, for reasons that made sense at the time).

“The night she attended the Mission Minyan service, most of her fellow worshippers were successful digital wizards, and all were products of elite schools and seemed single-mindedly focused on the business of tech. As the startup chatter droned on, Vollmayer finally blurted out, ‘What about giving something back?’ A deep silence fell over the room. No one responded. After the embarrassment faded, the conversation returned to business as usual.

“‘Maybe it’s youth—the folly of youth,’ Vollmayer mused to me later. ‘The group that night was clearly about 15 years younger than me. If you’re young and rich, do you really think much about the implications of the work you do and the money you make?'”

Published: Sep 20, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,504 words)

Future TechStars, Step Forward

Longreads Pick

What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City:

“The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a questionnaire and recorded two short videos for the chance to compete for just 14 spots. That works out to an acceptance rate of less than 1 percent. ‘Look to your right; look to your left,’ Tisch said at a recruiting event in early January, modifying the Harvard Law School warning to first-year students. ‘Probably none of you will get in here.'”

Source: Inc.
Published: Apr 2, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,010 words)