Listen free for 30 days
-
100 Things We've Lost to the Internet
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 5 hrs and 34 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $17.48
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
The acclaimed editor of The New York Times Book Review takes listeners on a nostalgic tour of the pre-internet age, offering powerful insights into both the profound and the seemingly trivial things we've lost.
Remember all those ingrained habits, cherished ideas, beloved objects, and stubborn preferences from the pre-internet age? They’re gone.
To some of those things we can say good riddance. But many we miss terribly. Whatever our emotional response to this departed realm, we are faced with the fact that nearly every aspect of modern life now takes place in filtered, isolated corners of cyberspace - a space that has slowly subsumed our physical habitats, replacing or transforming the office, our local library, a favorite bar, the movie theater, and the coffee shop where people met one another’s gaze from across the room. Even as we’ve gained the ability to gather without leaving our house, many of the fundamentally human experiences that have sustained us have disappeared.
In 100 glimpses of that pre-internet world, Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, presents a captivating record of the world before cyberspace - from voicemails to blind dates to punctuation to civility. There are the small losses: postcards, the blessings of an adolescence largely spared of documentation, the Rolodex, and the genuine surprises at high school reunions. But there are larger repercussions, too: weaker memories, the inability to entertain oneself, and the utter demolition of privacy.
100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet is at once an evocative swan song for a disappearing era and, perhaps, a guide to reclaiming just a little bit more of the world IRL.
What the critics say
“[A] rare feat of exploring what technology has done to us without succumbing to doom and panic.... Poignant, thought-provoking.” (The Guardian)
“An accomplished solo act.... Readers who remember the dawning of the internet era will find plenty to commiserate with in this mostly lighthearted lament.” (Publishers Weekly)