Forward. That's where technology is supposed to take us. It took us to the moon! It connected the world. It brought us... Pinterest.
Tech used to be a discrete thing in our lives — a newfangled video game console or DVD player or bulky video camera hoisted on our dad’s shoulder. A cordless phone. Maybe a single computer in the home office if your family was lucky, a thin bleepy-bloopy-skkkkhhhh line to this neat computer almanac thing called the “Internet.”
But technology is no longer a discrete category, or some thing that occasionally and clumsily intersects with culture. It's reshaping culture. Creating culture. It is culture. It's wonderful. Mostly. We think? It's also consistently absurd and hilarious.
If technology is culture, why don't we start talking about it that way? The way we talk about films and music and art and just straight up pop culture: With the understanding that sometimes it's really funny, sometimes it's deadly serious, and sometimes it's stupid nerdy, but it's always a part of the way we live.
FWD is a way to share things. To pass them on. To nudge the conversation about technology in a different direction--maybe not the next level, exactly, but at least a different one. It's fundamentally social, which is simply the way more and more of the web works now. Social is the web's new reality.
FWD (or Fwd or fwd or maybe FwD, if you’re of a certain demographic, and pronounced for-ward, eff double-yew-dee, or even fwid--doesn't really matter, nobody can hear you right now) exists to answer a few simple questions:
• Why can’t I watch Jurassic Park II on Netflix?
• How did Google know I was going to type that?
• Is Klout... real?
• What is Bing?
• Is it weird to sleep with your phone under your pillow? Or on top of your computer?
• Does Apple hate us?
• Is there a right way to send pictures of naked body parts to other people?
• Fuck/marry/kill: Foursquare, Twitter, Bing
• But what does it mean? Yes, my laptop. What does my laptop mean?
• Will you please follow us on Twitter? And maybe email us? Thanks.
• Hi, how are you?
There are already a lot of publications about technology and gadgets and apps. We’ve written for, or helped run some of them, like Gizmodo, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and American Photo, to name a few. They’re great. We’re just hoping to do something different than what we did in those places. Something a little more personal, and maybe a little more personable. We're also super excited to bring in writers we love from all the over the internet--not just the techy parts. And we’d really love to talk to you about it.
Technology is mostly made by and for humans, ultimately. And that’s BuzzFeed FWD: a site about tech that's made by, and for, humans. Mostly.
- Matt and John, a pair of gingers