Hello, World!

Hello, and welcome. I don't know how you did it, but you made it here. And where are we, exactly? Good question. At the moment at which I'm writing this, it's just an empty room. The walls are bare, the floors clear. The sounds of my footsteps echo off of each surface and bounce their way back to my ears. Hopefully, though, by the time that you're reading this I'll have had a chance to warm the place up a bit. Make my mark, so to speak. 

I find it a little strange that I'm putting this site together at this particular moment. For the past couple of weeks I've been passing my time on the subway to and from work by reading The End of Absence, a book that argues that modern technology, with all it's power to connect us with each other and the boundless information present on the internet, has quietly, without our noticing, taken away something precious. Michael Harris (the author, and yes, the instructor of a class I'm currently taking—no, he didn't make us buy the book) argues that in exchange for our constant connection we are forfeiting absence. Absence is idle day dreaming and quiet contemplation. It's the step back from the action necessary for meaningful thought.  It's refuge from the world that constantly reaches out to you from your devices, blinking, screaming, needing your attention like demanding little robot baby that refuses to be satisfied. 

Harris points out various problems that are starting to crop up in our tech-saturated lives and offers advice for how we might regain the absence that we seem to have lost. Now, with all these themes whirling around in my head, you can understand how strange I feel in launching a website. But although I haven't yet finished the book, I'm pretty sure that the conclusion it'll comes to is not that we should all adopt a Luddite lifestyle and head for the hills, abandoning our smartphones and laptops for quaint and quiet country living. As with most things, living meaningfully with technology requires finding a balance. Tech can obviously have greatly beneficial applications, and although I make no claims to greatness, here I'm at least attempting to lean more in that direction. 

Here you'll find my writing. Half blog, half archive of things by me around the web, consider this my official foray into the "real world" of writing. Thanks for stopping by. 

Sam