It seems like only a few years ago that we began making wry jokes about the doofus minority of people who walked down the street while texting or otherwise manipulating their phone, bumping into lamp-posts and so forth. Now that has become the predominant mode of locomotion in the city, to the frustration of those of us who like to get anywhere fast and in a straight line. Pedestrian accidents are on the rise, and some urban authorities are even thinking of installing smart kerbside sensors that alert the phone-obsessed who are about to step into oncoming traffic. New technologies, as Adam Greenfield's tremendously intelligent and stylish book repeatedly emphasises, can change social habits in unforeseen and often counterproductive ways. The technological fixes to such technology-induced problems rarely succeed as predicted either.

Let's pause for a moment, and take linguistic stock. Technology has many societal impacts, but perhaps one of its most visibly evident is how the tools we use change how we communicate with each other -- so, literally, how technology rewrites language itself. We see this in the willing stockpiling of techie jargon into individual vocabularies (the Androids, the iPhones, the lesser-seen Surface Books); the new word coinages (blockchain), the new and expanding uses for existing words (a'message' is a noun; 'message me' an imperative verb asking someone to send you an IM); the creative portmanteaus (glasshole is a particularly good one), the tech-obsessed idioms (I don't have bandwidth for that right now), and so on and on. We also get to glimpse the places where technology might be in the process of placing stress on social structures or societal norms. Again, glasshole is a great example of that -- a word that effectively contains the full story of Google Glass' abject consumer failure wrapped up in those two mocking syllables.

Let's pause for a moment, and take linguistic stock. Technology has many societal impacts, but perhaps one of its most visibly evident is how the tools we use change how we communicate with each other -- so, literally, how technology rewrites language itself. We see this in the willing stockpiling of techie jargon into individual vocabularies (the Androids, the iPhones, the lesser-seen Surface Books); the new word coinages (blockchain), the new and expanding uses for existing words (a'message' is a noun; 'message me' an imperative verb asking someone to send you an IM); the creative portmanteaus (glasshole is a particularly good one), the tech-obsessed idioms (I don't have bandwidth for that right now), and so on and on. We also get to glimpse the places where technology might be in the process of placing stress on social structures or societal norms. Again, glasshole is a great example of that -- a word that effectively contains the full story of Google Glass' abject consumer failure wrapped up in those two mocking syllables.