Social media tend to magnify the expansive self, encouraging participants to stake out a virtual identity within the ethereal territory of the world wide web: “This is who I am, like it or not!” “My political beliefs are part of my identity; to call them into question is to call my very identity into question.” Continue Reading »
We are living in an age of outreach. The rise of Trump is evidence enough. But Trump and his followers are the symptom of a much deeper problem: a diseased culture facing the death of reasoned discourse and civil disagreement. Continue Reading »
There’s been much talk lately about the moral purposes of history, especially from those celebrating the recent Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage. History, we hear, is on the side of ever-expanding personal freedom, and those who counter this expansion are history’s losers. This . . . . Continue Reading »
Dear brothers and hipsters, I, @SaulofTarsus, mimetically writing to you from my iPhone, do exhort you to excuse any exegetical errors. This week, suffering from #FOMO, all things became oppressive and dark—not in a Lo-Fi or Brennan kind of way, but in a terribly Normal kind of way. Aiming my . . . . Continue Reading »
Last week a study appeared in Computers and Human Behavior under the title “The brain in your pocket: Evidence that Smartphones are used to supplant thinking.” A summary of the findings in ScienceDaily bore the header “Reliance on smartphones linked to lazy thinking.” Researchers tested 660 subjects and found a clear correlation between high smartphone use and lower cognitive skills, especially “the willingness to think in an analytical way.” Continue Reading »
Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the Internet by antonio spadaro fordham, 160 pages, $24 The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by eric schmidt and jared cohen random house, 368 pages, $15.95 To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological . . . . Continue Reading »
In a Doonesbury cartoon of recent vintage, Zipper, nephew to the 1960s slacker Zonker Harris, sits in a college class, his laptop open before him, giving every impression of industrious note-taking: Tap tap tappity tap tap. “Dude,” a classmate instant-messages him. “The professor’s calling . . . . Continue Reading »
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