Even at its best, technology is a strange master.  It’s the kind of master that blinds you to your own submission, really.  The level of submission is different for everyone, of course.  Sometimes the people you think would buy in the most barely touch things like social media.  And there are so many options, so there’s always at least one good venue for expression.

Nicholas Carr is one of the tech-thinkers I read in order to process technology issues.  Over spring break I read one of his slightly older books, The Big Switch.  And even though some of the tech-names used were dated, much of what he said was a real help in locating contemporary life on the media map.  He often blogs at roughtype.com.  A recent entry, titled “Identity Overload,” is a nice distillation of one of technology’s effects: the demands it often makes on our sense of self (or selves, as the case may be).  Connecting T. S. Eliot and writer Rob Horning, Carr writes:

Social media turns us all into bad poets . . .

Personality wants to expand to fill all available space. Resisting the self’s inclination to artificially inflate what’s inside, and thereby overwhelm what’s inside, has always been hard, but it becomes much harder when the available space for the self is made both explicit and infinite, as happens with social media and other documentary systems of self-expression.

And is there a good escape from a world of bad poets?  I’m not sure.  But you can read more of Carr’s thoughts here.