Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

The headline on the news release blared the good news: “Broadband Access Soars Nearly 150 Percent At Home, According to Nielsen//NetRatings.” Pretty remarkable. The statistic seemed to scream that broadband use of the Internet was taking over digital communications. But the real screaming should be over the reality that was masked by the focus on […]

Walk into the unassuming brick house in Bostons Back Bay and you would think youve walked into the midst of a household ready to pack up and move away at a moments notice. Books, records, coffee cups, bric-a-brac and memorabilia cover every square inch of space. Not walls and shelves, mind you. The floor. Theres […]

Our reliance on keyboards, keypads and button-bearing devices of all kinds is creating a dependency that is not altogether healthy. This became clear to me one night early this month in an unfamiliar hotel. My bad luck had turned to good luck — or so I thought. Because my room at one hotel had been […]

Things you dont think about involve thinking. Take, for example, sleep. It may be akin to “garbage collection,” Marvin Minsky says. I cant remember having done an interview where I get to address love, consciousness and sleep at the same time. Well, I dont know anything about sleep. Well, you made a comment in one […]

God may be eternal, but timing is everything. The Vatican is just about to name a patron saint for the Internet. This is no great surprise to close watchers of the Holy See. There have been signals that a cybersaint was in the works for the last two years. Of course, you probably did not […]

Theres little doubt that e-mail newsletters procreate. The evidence is right on my hard drive. A week or so ago, the cleanup effort began. About 20 minutes of creating filters to transfer readily identifiable newsletters to a separate in-box for the constantly arriving missives accomplished little. That only got me through newsletters that started with […]

Once upon a time, you or I could be shocked with the encroachment of advertisements into more and more nooks and crannies of our lives. For me, the last time that occurred was in 1979 when I was talking to a Time circulation manager who was crowing about her experiment in putting blow cards into […]

Maybe the hermits in Wyoming cabins are right. Technology is antisocial. The advent of the television changed the nature of neighborhood interaction. Families spent more time indoors, glued to the set. Sitting on porches and talking became passé. The personal computer came along and further separated us. Theres a reason it didnt get called the […]

In this day of high-speed, two-way, digital communications, the radio has to be considered a pre-Cambrian device. OK, so its music has long ago gone digital, thanks to the compact disc. And most playlists are now contained on and played off of digital hard drives. But the distribution mechanism is still the analog sound wave. […]

It was the wee hours of the morning when Mitch Maddox made his first appearance in public since 1999. He showed up at a party at the Studio Movie Grill in Plano, Texas, to celebrate his release. He didnt just get out of prison, unless you consider his vocation of the past year to be […]

Just when you think the bear market in tech stocks has hit the floor, you find theres a trap door. Surely the first year of the new millennium cant be as bad as the final year of the last for shares of Net, chip, communications and computing companies. Nope. It can be worse. So the […]