I’ve had a busier week than usual so sharing just one recommendation.

A Much More Interesting Way to Think About the Digital Body

Anne Helen Petersen | Culture Study | Jan 14, 2026

I think expansively about technology, taking my cue from Ursula Le Guin, who called it "the active human interface with the material world." This includes not just smartphones or satellites but roads, clothing, energy—technology interwoven into the fabric of human existence. Across this interface, so much more than information travels: our beliefs, our relationships, our cultures, our affects. Every technological encounter is a drama of skin, bone, rhythm, and power. Technologies refine, track, translate, and choreograph our behaviors; in so doing, they generate new languages of feeling, moving, and knowing.

The Ear chapter traces the evolution of the ear as a social organ, exploring how listening has shifted from an embodied, collective experience to a computational process—and what that shift means for how we know, love, and recognize one another. This chapter begins with an acapella choir, which I frame as kind of a primeval listening situation. Our ears have historically been enmeshed in sonic community, bathed in human and animal choruses alike. Gathered in a room with others, united by song, breath leaves a body as sound, which enters another as vibration. Listening in this context is fundamentally social; because sound is ephemeral, disappearing at the moment it is made, a speaker and a listener must share the same space and time.