The Comedian vs. The Smart Phone
https://youtu.be/5HbYScltf1c Kids are by nature mean. Smart phones make them meaner. Why? They can’t see the faces and experience the reactions of those they diss. Their “humor”…
The “Gig Economy” and the Death of Society
Until relatively recently, most people hearing that someone had a “gig” would assume that person was a musician. Whether for a night, a week, or even as…
Reductio ad Machina: Human Identity in the Age of Machines
“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very…
Technological Servitude and Marshall McLuhan’s Proposal for Liberation
Marshall McLuhan identified our time of postmodernity as the “ecological age” in which technological dominance has become planetary. This undeniable truth is a fact that may be…
Re-Programming Ourselves to Be Mindful
“The world exists to end in a book” — Stéphane Mallarmé “Happy is your Grace, That can translate the stubbornness of fortune Into so quiet and…
Being Human in a Digital Age of Light and Darkness
In this digital age of polarized politics, where can we look for guidance on how to turn down the heat? After all, we don’t want to blow…
Stranger Things Have Happened: The Civil War Among Media Forms
“There’s Nothing Like a Best Seller to Set Hollywood a-Tingle” —The New York Times Book Review (Sep 16, 1962) “I’d willingly start my next novel—about a small…
On the Narcosis of Narcissus
He could not go. He wanted neither to eat nor to sleep. Only to lie there — eyes insatiably Gazing into the eyes that were no eyes.…
Learning Wisdom in the Midst of Reversals
The West shall shake the East awake While ye have the night for morn. — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake 企者不立；跨者不行； 自見者不明；自是者不彰； 自伐者無功；自矜者不長。 其在道也，曰：餘食贅行。 物或惡之，故有道者不處。 — Lao Tzu,…
The Social Message of Social Media
In the first chapter of Understanding Media (1964), called “The Medium is the Message,” Marshall McLuhan begins the book by explaining his most famous aphorism. Over time, the…
The Christian Humanism of Marshall McLuhan
Postmodern intellectual culture is perhaps best characterized as adhering to the thesis that all reality is socially constructed. Many have mistaken Marshall McLuhan for being a prophet…
Can the Digital Fix What the Digital Breaks?
In 1995, John Gray wrote “The cultural void that yawns when the secular meliorism of the religion of growth founders is as yet too far away to…
On Technological Utopianism
I propose an inquiry into what Hans Jonas once called the “built-in, automatic utopianism” of our thought and actions. Jonas suggests that this “utopian drift” inheres in…
Hierarchy, Beauty, and Freedom: D. H. Lawrence’s Response To Techno-Industrial Modernity
The discussion which follows is intended to provide more evidence for what a number of scholars have recently been contending about Lawrence’s fundamental ontological vision. It derives…
Has the Digital Age Eclipsed the Television Age?
In order to explain surprising political phenomena like Donald Trump and Brexit, we have to look at the unprecedented impact of new technologies on our total environment.…