It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strand Champs.

How attached are you to your personal technology?

My laptop crashed and took a lot of my work with it.

Writer Alexander Weinstein.

I found myself crying over my laptop.

And I noticed then just the bizarreness of crying over my laptop. And I noticed then just the bizarreness of crying over electronics.

And this was about eight years ago. A lot of students at that point of my students were getting

iPhones. And they were all talking about, oh, I love my iPhone, right? And they kept using this word love.

And that made me aware that we were starting to forge these emotional connections with our technology.

Actually, when you think about it, this seems kind of normal. I mean, there are days when I look at my phone, more than I look

at my family. It's kind of like my Silicon best friend. Isn't that why we call it personal

technology? Well, this hour, just how deep do those attachments go? We'll talk with filmmaker

Astra Taylor and media theorist Doug Rushkoff,

but first, Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World, a debut collection of short stories about the dangers of our increasing reliance on digital technologies.

Doug Gordon sat down with him to find out more. Things have gotten more and

strange with Snapchat and Tinder and Grindr and all the different requests we have to join this or

that social network. Yeah. So let's talk about the very poignant and very powerful story saying

goodbye to Yang. Can you tell me a bit about this story? Yeah, so here we have a

world that's pretty close to our own. And the only real differences are that people are buying

robotic big brothers and sisters as babysitters for their children. These can be of any

nationality and sort of any background you want.

And there's a little bit of tension between them and the cloning folk, right?

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