Cirrus@Austlit

'I like to look in mirrors, a predilection I suspect I share with many others – all of us too afraid to be caught out in our hidden vanities to admit it. It feels innate, the biology of my eye’s neurons firing in synchrony with my body’s movements, triggering something deep and unavoidably alluring. But as I stop and appraise myself, something else catches. I am pleased: Narcissus, staring into the pool.' (Introduction) 

'There's something enduringly disconcerting about flying into Silicon Valley from Australia, where you arrive before you leave. If Silicon Valley can do time travel as easily as that, what can’t it do?'  (Introduction)

'When preparing the publicity plan for Made by Humans (MUP, 2018), my book about data, artificial intelligence and ethics, I made one request of my publisher: no ‘women in technology’ panels.' (Introduction)

'I'd like to believe that I wasn’t jumping on the bandwagon. But don’t we all tell ourselves little white lies to keep our self-worth intact?' (Introduction)

'I was with friends, high up on a range looking west and down through a long and beautiful valley just south of Alice Springs, mountains in the far distance gauzy in the late light. A few cars came and went, windows lit up in scattered houses. It was warm but we made a small fire for company. We'd brought food and wine, music and reading. The best of times, yet as the sun sank, I felt a deep melancholy. It can come at that hour, quietly, but that evening, in that place, it rushed in like a wave. I wondered why, and as I did my mind's eye lifted like a bird over the range, across a narrow valley and into the next, to the military base known as Pine Gap. You can see its white domes against the red earth, like a cluster of giant golf balls or spider eggs, when you fly into Alice Springs. From elsewhere, it is out of sight - and out of mind for most of us most of the time, here in Alice as in the rest of the country. But it has moved to the forefront for me, ever since I followed the 2017 Supreme Court trials of six peace activists who dared to trespass into this prohibited domain.' (Publication abstract)

'It's funny to think that a broken gearbox could lead to a physics student folding T-shirts in my lounge room, but that’s the internet for you.'  (Introduction)

‘It has the capacity to change everything – the way we work, the way we learn and play, even, maybe, the way we sleep or have sex,’ wrote British entrepreneur and author Matt Symonds of his prediction for the internet in The Economist in 1999. ‘Within a few years, the internet will turn business upside down. Be prepared – or die.’  (Introduction)

'My interest in Indigenous people's use of social media began while I was completing a PhD on the politics of identity. My participants would talk about how they expressed their Indigenous identities on social media. After I graduated, I was fortunate enough to receive an Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous grant to conduct a national research project exploring Indigenous people's engagements on social media. The aim of the project was to provide a better understanding of how Indigenous people make use of online social network sites. In Australia, Indigenous people are enthusiastic users of mobile technologies and while rigorous data remains scant, research suggests that Indigenous people use social media at rates higher than non-Indigenous Australians. Drawing on data collected as part of a study conducted on Indigenous media habits by the McNair Ingenuity Research Institute, NITV journalist Tara Callinan revealed that, 'Facebook usage among First Nations people is 20 per cent higher than the national average'. Even in the most geographically 'remote' areas of Australia, mobile technologies are becoming increasingly commonplace and Indigenous people in these locations are, like non-Indigenous people, very much entrenched in the use of social media.'  (Publication abstract)

'The first time I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2008, I had an appointment with Google. Its stand in Hall Eight was a shiny white pod with no retractable banners or cheap shelving in sight. The pod made a perfect background for the primary colours of Google's then-serif logo set out on its outer shell. Hall Eight was the English-language hall, though perhaps there were replica Google pods in all the other halls; they felt, even then, omnipresent. At our meeting inside the pod I remember talking about the Google Preview function, of which NewSouth Publishing, my employer then and now, was an early adopter. Analogue babes in the digital woods, my colleague Nella Soeterboek and I also discussed the Google Books Library Project, about which we were far more ambivalent. That Google wanted to digitise every book ever published didn't seem like a utopian vision to us. It was more of a statement of intent, the intent being to take over the world.'  (Publication abstract)

'For most of us who care to think about such things, the teenager was invented by JD Salinger in 1951. Of course, before he was described in literature, the teenager was a naturally occurring phenomenon in postwar America. As that country became the world's richest, a whole generation of young white people emerged who did not need to go immediately to work, whose parents' relative wealth and resulting access to astounding inventions like the washing machine and the motor car had created a new leisure. What Holden Caulfield has that young people did not have before him is time to think. Like a 1940s Hamlet he wanders the streets of New York, out of the jurisdiction of parents and teachers, free to ponder the 'phonies' he has known, free to feel miserable, free to feel trapped by the future his parents imagine for him.' (Publication abstract)

'In the dark before dawn on 5 March 1899, half way up the eastern edge of Cape York Peninsula, five men camping on a sand ridge about forty feet above sea level and half a mile behind the beach found themselves waist deep in the ocean. Since midnight, the four Aboriginal troopers and a white officer of the Native Police had been huddled under a blanket as Australia's deadliest cyclone, and one of the world's fiercest, blew away their tents and killed or scattered their horses. Just after 5 am, as the eye passed north over Cape Melville and wrecked the pearling fleet anchored there, the ocean swept inland over the ridge, spoiling the officer's watch.' (Introduction)

'As a committed reader whose idea of leisure time involves a book, a comfortable seated position and a glass of wine, I rarely take notice of tech developments, especially in entertainment and gaming. Anything requiring a headset, in particular, elicits only disinterest and a sense of Gen-X incompetence. In short, I’m an unlikely candidate to write about virtual reality (VR), but my interest in the technology was piqued when I came across an article in Scientific Reports in February 2018 relating the findings of a team of researchers from the University of Barcelona who used VR to put perpetrators of domestic violence in the shoes of their victims.' (Introduction)