The first time my father looked at me was on a screen, using technology developed to detect flaws in the hulls of ships. These inventions were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it. The problem with accepting – with preferring – diminished substitutes is that, over time, we too become diminished substitutes. Isn’t it possible that technology, in the forms in which it has entered our everyday lives, has diminished us? • Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer is published by Hamish Hamilton.

Source: The Guardian December 03, 2016 06:56 UTC