My Attempt at Living a Life

  The New Tech Experiments We Do We never stop to ask if we should do a thing. As teachers, we experience this every day. New policies and procedures, programs, and mandates. But it is a larger problem than that. It's a human problem. We experiment without a control group. We get a new technology and we just start using it.  We just do it. We just adopt new tech and think it's the best thing ever, and we don't stop to think of the consequences. Marshall McLuhan was writing and speaking about this phenomenon for years. He discussed the tetrad of new media and how it was a blessing and a curse.  New tech always makes life better, it always replaces and obsolesces something, and it calls back to an older tech. But the biggest part of this is what I mentioned in the previous paragraph. It is a curse. Image: Columbia.edu We never stopped to think about cars, factories, suburbs, pesticides, coal, or cellphones.  Let's stop and look at one long-ago example, to illustrate th...