As we enter the holiday season and the twilight of 2014, we’re thinking about what it means to be home, to come home, to make a home, and to feel at home. And so, we’re again opening the doors of our home here at the Tech Channel and calling for your story ideas around the theme of Home.
Homes are, in one sense, physical. The modern home is full of inventions—technologies you interact with every day, machines you rarely use, and unseen systems you'd feel lost without.
A home is also where traditions happen, where daily rituals are performed, where people wake up, where they unwind, where family lives, or where we wish they did. Not enough people have homes, and many people have more than one—including multiple emotional homes, unlikely places where they feel at home, spots they return to again and again. There's a reason we call it the home screen, the homepage, the home button.
And digital homes, like physical ones, can be upended by strife and conflict—tensions magnified when they happen in places so often tied to a person's identity.
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We want to hear your stories about homes, about the physical and digital spaces where you live, about what draws you to them, and the defining rituals that happen within their walls.
As a refresher: We're looking for Adventures with Technology—stories about the ways people tangle with tech that make us look at ourselves differently. These are the kinds of tales you tell your friends, and they reveal something about a specific cultural moment. You don’t have to be the main character in these stories, but some human or humans should be. And you should be able to deliver your story in a matter of days.
Remember: Technology doesn't just mean the Internet and gadgets—we want your adventures in architecture and systems and ways of thinking. Somebody had to invent apartment buildings and chocolate chip cookies and the idea of generations. We’re especially interested in the invisible bits of technology that exist all around us, the structures we forget about, the networks we take for granted.
We hope you'll do a little searching before you pitch to see if the concept you’re looking into has been done before—not just by us, but by anybody. We want to hear your wild ideas, your crazy encounters, and your strange stories. We want to be surprised by your originality.
Here are some ways we’ve explored the idea of Home in the past, just to get you thinking:
- What Happens When Digital Cities are Abandoned?
- How the Internet Uses Nostalgia
- What the New Kids on the Block Taught Me About Social Networks
- Old Newspapers, New Value
- How the Remote Control Rewired the Home
- My Internet Hometown
And, finally, the logistics:
1) We will pay you. The amount will depend on the story.
2) We always get a lot of pitches during these calls. We will have to decline more than we would like, but we’ll try to do so quickly.
3) Please send your (short) pitches to Rose Eveleth: reveleth at theatlantic.com
You know that story you’ve always been meaning to write, but couldn’t quite figure out why or where it should go? Welcome home.
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/adventures-with-technology-home/382403/
