You wake before your alarm feeling refreshed. Stretching your arms in a dramatic semicircle, you climb from bed and perform several pirouettes on your way to pick up your phone, which is placed hygienically out of reach. 

You confidently flip open your fitness tracker app. As it loads, your shoulders slump. Your sleep score is frightfully low.

You start to doubt your perception of reality; you begin to feel tired. Over breakfast, you fantasize about slinking back to bed. 

Before sleep trackers, our only means of measuring sleep quality was how we felt in the morning. Now we have two sources: one experiential, and one quantitative. If we’re predisposed to trust numbers over our own experience, we may doubt our perception, even if the instrument collecting them is prone to a bit of error. Technology influences how we perceive and define the truth.

When technology insinuates itself into our lives, it breeds a medium. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, media theorist Neil Postman writes, “A technology . . . is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.” Before sleep trackers, if you politely inquired how someone slept, they answered “well” or “not well.” Now there’s a risk they may start rattling off data. 

Postman carried forward his mentor Marshall McLuhan’s assertion, “The medium is the message,” as “The medium is the metaphor”—in other words, each medium has its own epistemology, or how it defines truth. In Postman’s words, it’s “what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.”

A telegraph is a machine, but a telegram is a medium. A sequencer is a machine, but a DNA sequence is a medium. A microscope is a machine, but a micrograph is a medium. Each medium lends itself to certain uses of the mind. What is considered evidence in journalism or biology may differ from that in physics or history because the conventions of each field differ. 

These conventions change as technology changes. I grew up looking to photographs as a source of truth in a way that my children may not.

If technology dictates not just our means of communication but how we define the truth, then to open ourselves up to the most expansive view of the truth, we must become aware of, question, and push back on the ways in which technology limits how we think and communicate. 

If we overcommit to one single epistemology, we risk coming up short when we’re asked to think broadly. It takes a different skill set to invent a new material than it does to consider that material’s social or ethical implications.

It’s worth reflecting, which uses of our minds do we favor when we engage with a particular technology? How does this impact how we think about—and where we expect to find—certainty? 

This limitation comes into play when we try to communicate outside our communities. As Postman notes, “The ‘truth’ is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.” 

How does your audience define truth? What does it take for your audience to feel that they know something? What happens if we accept science and technology as part of culture, rather than existing outside of it?

For 2026, I will reflect on how I can think more expansively about the truth and how I can help others do the same. I invite you to join me, in the hope that doing so will help us all sleep a little easier.