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The Best Technology Writing 2009
Edited by Steven Johnson. Yale University Press, 224 pages, $17.95. Johnson joins Julian Dibbell, danah boyd, and Jack Balkin in a panel discussion, “Writers on Technology and Everyday Life,” Wed., Sept. 30, 4 p.m., free, Linsly-Chittenden Hall Auditorium, 63 High St., New Haven.

The nerds won. Revenge is moot.

But that’s not news.

Just to function in America these days requires technological literacy that scarcely existed 25 years ago. The notion of nerds as social misfits, as depicted in 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds, seems now, in light of Twitter, cloud computing, Kindle and “crowdsourcing,” as quaint as a Rolodex.

It’s a sign of the times then that one of the selections in this year’s Best Technology Writing, a joint effort by presses at Yale and the University of Michigan, a hilarious story from The Onion about an “eccentric” named Philip Meyer from Greenwood, Ind. He managed to read the entirety of To Kill a Mockingbird.

“Even more bizarre,” the anonymous reporter writes, “Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time — time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.”

The article turns to psychologist Elizabeth Schultz to explain this “deviant behavior.” Healthy males, she says, spend countless hours watching videos on YouTube. Meyers, however, seems content to find gratification in slow reading: “At least, that’s what it seems like from what little I’ve skimmed on the topic,” Schultz adds.

The Onion’s satire returns nerdorioty to its rightful place among humanity’s pariahs, freaks and weirdos. But it also manages to reflect the character of writing about technology over the course of the past year — instead of writing that seeks to look into the future, it’s become entrenched in the here and now.

“The approach taken in these essays is phenomenology not prophecy,” writes editor Steven Johnson in his introduction. “They look at the effects of new technology as a real-time, immersive experience, not as a preview of coming attractions. They return to the question of what it feels like to live in a digital world.”

As they should. Often technology reporting brims with jingoism, murketing, and a gee-whiz attitude that fosters ignorance more than understanding. Yet our brains evolved to adapt to the earth’s environment for more than 5 million years. Only in the past 20 has that environment included the Internet. If technology isn’t a subject of sustained skepticism, nothing is. And perhaps it’s an anxiety over technology’s effect on our brains that explains why Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” the most psychological of the bunch, is also the scariest.

Carr’s basic tenet is simple: We know what we read. If we can’t read well, then we don’t know much. And we can’t think much either. Google is an impediment to both. Hence, Google is making us stupid (recall that The Onion’s behavioral psychologist wasn’t sure Meyer’s reading was considered deviant, because she’d only skimmed that part of her reading). Though Carr’s case is somewhat sensational, he has a point.

“It is harder to sit down and focus on a linear argument or narrative for an hour at a time,” Johnson writes. Yet people still read books, he says, lots of them. That it’s harder to read doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Which highlights another tendency among technology writers: that high-tech is going to make life worse, not better.

Not so, says Andrew Sullivan in “Why I Blog.” He notes that before the internet, writers worked behind a firewall. They rarely interacted with readers. With blogs, that relationship turned intimate. That turn was electrifying, brutal and practical for Sullivan. Debate sharpened his arguments. This newfound quid pro quo, however messy, refined his writing for the better.

To recap: The nerds have won.

But there’s nothing to fear.

Not yet anyway.