Jenna Wortham

The Internet is especially adept at compressing humanity and making it easy to forget there are people behind tweets, posts, and memes.

Established technology companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have expanded their reach and influence throughout the world. And while many countries have pushed back against that spread, our government has essentially left them alone.

Obama was the first American president to see technology as an engine to improve lives and accelerate society more quickly than any government body could.

In many ways, Obama is America's first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity.

Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead, it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don't agree with.

The video-sharing app Vine was the first place I got a glimpse of cultures beyond my own, including those of the Middle East. I was able to see how some women there wanted us to see them: prospering, aware.

Social media is my portal into the rest of the world - my periscope into the communities next to my community, into how the rest of the world thinks and feels.

I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, two of the most liberal places in the country.

Artists have long urged cultural introspection by creating work that forces awareness of our current political and economic landscape.

Artists' obsessions with technology are not new, but in the late aughts, the work tended to focus on the possibility of the medium, treating technology like a new tool rather than a sociopolitical framework.

Thinking about Amazon's restraints - the company has never tried to introduce a social network or an email service, for example - you can understand something about the future Amazon seems to envision: A time when no screen is needed at all, just your voice.

We are being conditioned, as a population, to never wait, to never delay our gratification, to accept thoughtless, constant consumption as the new norm. But how we think about consumption and willpower carry enormous implications for the environment and the culture of society as a whole.

The fact that I live in New York, a city that thrives on accessibility, might explain why I was slow to grasp the appeal of Alexa. Here we have bodegas on every corner, most open 24 hours, in case you need to pick up a roll of toilet paper or a bottle of hot sauce in the middle of the night.

Obama routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy, including his successful effort to keep broadband suppliers from giving preferential treatment to bigger web companies over individuals.

Producing zines can offer an unexpected respite from the scrutiny on the Internet, which can be as oppressive as it is liberating.

In theory, the maturation of the Internet should have killed off the desire for zines entirely.

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

We live in a time of astounding technological advancements. There are deep-sea drones and live-streaming virtual reality.

The web's earliest architects and pioneers fought for their vision of freedom on the Internet at a time when it was still small forums for conversation and text-based gaming. They thought the web could be adequately governed by its users without their needing to empower anyone to police it.

As we now know, cyberspace did not liberate human society from pre-existing socioeconomic hierarchies and power structures.

Online, there is an irresistible social currency to being a user who has thousands of followers, who starts memes, who comes up with an idea that is turned into a movie. But I wonder how comfortable we should be with this arrangement.

The Internet has become the go-to place to toss out ideas in the hope that they could lead to a job, but it has also become the place where people go to find the best ideas, creating a lopsided dynamic that tends to benefit people in power.

The types of ideas protected by intellectual-property law typically don't include a clever catchphrase on a Vine or a film idea in a tweet.

A governing ethos of the Internet has been that whatever flows through it - information, ideas - is up for grabs.

I'm partial to a Muji recycled-paper sketch book and a Sharpie ultrafine marker.

The speed with which modern society has adapted to accommodate the world's vast spectrum of gender and sexual identities may be the most important cultural metamorphosis of our time.

Our phones don't just keep us in touch with the world; they're also diaries, confessional booths, repositories for our deepest secrets.

For many of us, our smartphones have become extensions of our brains - we outsource essential cognitive functions, like memory, to them, which means they soak up much more information than we realize.

For all the advances in tech that let us try on various guises to play around with who we are, it seems that we just want new ways to be ourselves.

Most efforts to approximate normal human behavior in software tend to be creepy or annoying.

Getting a tattoo is arguably one of the most insane decisions a sensible human can make.

Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians.

The Internet is pushing us - in good ways and in bad - to realize that the official version of events shouldn't always be trusted or accepted without question.

Many of the short videos on Vine feel as though they belong to an ever-evolving, completely new genre of modern folk art.

Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web - communal, crowdsourced, and shared online in real time. Some of the most interesting and vital work I come across exists only in pixels.

The future will bring new possibilities and ideas - and new terms for them.

Someday, maybe we'll recognize that queer is actually the norm, and the notion of static sexual identities will be seen as austere and reductive.

The radical power of 'queer' always came from its inclusivity. But that inclusivity offers a false promise of equality that does not translate to the lived reality of most queer people.

Luckily, my only responsibility for 'Still Processing' is to show up and talk.

Perhaps all of us have come to rely too deeply on machinery and software to be our allies without wondering about the cost: the way technology doesn't fix problems without creating new ones.

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress.

Technology can be part of a solution, but it takes far more than software to usher in reform.

The rise of the social web promised a new era of personalization for globe-trotting. But like many things born online, as popularity of the new tools increased, efficiency and usefulness began to decrease.

When people talk about how the Internet has changed the way we travel, they typically lament the way our compulsion to document removes us, somehow, from the actual experience.

Traditional guidebooks have never quite done it for me. Too often, they seem to be aimed at a certain type of comfortable, middle-class traveler.

When I was a kid, 'Quantum Leap' was one of my favorite TV shows.

It's becoming much more common to see yoga studios offer classes aimed exclusively at people of color who are searching for ways to cope with racism and fears around police brutality.

Making space to deal with the psychological toll of racism is absolutely necessary.

For all teenagers, the Internet offers a periscope to the outside world, but it's particularly important for students who are unable to find themselves represented and understood in their immediate surroundings.

High school is already an academic and social pressure cooker, and the forces that make it stressful are amplified for queer students.