Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Alan Jacobs, and for a while (i.e., as long as Alexis, Megan, and Rebecca will tolerate it) I'm going to be writing for the Technology Channel. I'm a professor of English whose professional work largely concerns 20th-century British literature -- especially the poetry of W. H. Auden -- and the relations between religion and literature; but my avocations tend to be technological. Over the years I have developed an increasingly strong interest in the ways that digital technologies are changing my professional world: the world of reading, research, teaching, and writing. Those changes will be among my chief topics here at the Atlantic.

If you want to know more about how my mind -- such as it is -- works -- if you can call it "work" -- you might check out my most recent book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, or this essay on Christianity and the book, or this brief reader's memoir -- or you could just look at my online commonplace book, which probably says more about me than I'm comfortable with. Though it's not really a "commonplace book," as I'll explain in my next post.

I am very grateful to Alexis and the crew for welcoming me to this very cool venue. I'm hoping to make a non-trivial contribution.

Editors' note: We'd also heartily recommend Alan's Twitter feed, which you can find at @ayjay. We think he's going to provide depth and nuance to our coverage of digital words in our times.