There is a saying that Renaissance humanism laid the egg that the Reformation hatched. In plain sense, this means that when the sixteenth-century humanists turned back to original sources’reflecting carefully on the meaning of words in context, paying attention to details, and demonstrating both agility and humility of mind’they became a major catalyst for the […]
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and former columnist for The Boston Globe. She wrote Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2009) and What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age (Sorin Books, 2002). In your latest book you prophesy the coming of a […]
In the first scene of the first season of HBO's new sitcom Girls, Hannah (played by Lena Dunham) is out to dinner with her parents to be "let down easy" with regard to her postgraduate finances. After the last glass of wine is poured, her mother declares, "You graduated from college two years ago; we've […]
Even though few of us have ever worked with sheep, the line "sheep without a shepherd" resonates for all of us. A scene flashes before our mind's eye of kids on a playground with no adults: it's Lord of the Flies. So it was this imagined scene that frosted Moses' mind when God told him […]
In 2008, Nicholas Carr began a national conversation about technology and contemporary life. His Atlantic article was provocatively titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and it quickly became the talk of the town. In 2012, he expanded his treatment in a landmark book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. […]
In the beginning of The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis describes the near conversion of a solid atheist. As the man is meditating on the ideas of a particular book, a train of thought is, according to the elder demon, "beginning to go the wrong way." Screwtape could have suggested counterarguments to his patient, but […]
Status symbols have changed. Where once a warmly paneled room with wainscoting, high leatherback chairs, and a library replete with vast numbers of books may have been the central feature of a dream home’s architectural plans, now it is sterile geometric spaces sparsely punctuated with technological fixtures: wall-mounted flat screen, multipurpose remote, and an iPad […]
Psychiatrist Keith Ablow joins the chorus of colleagues, as well as sociologists and historians, in a recent online article. The gist: "We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists." He refers to new surveys collected by Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychology professor. Today's college students "are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and […]
"I don't read books," says Joe O'Shea, a former president of the student body at Florida State University and a 2008 recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship. "I go to Google, and I can absorb relevant information quickly." O'Shea, a philosophy major, doesn't see any reason to plow through chapters of text when it takes but […]
Almost thirty years ago, culture critic and media ecologist Neil Postman (1931-2003) wrote a book that became an instant classic: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 1985; rev. 2005). The book began with a provocative and admittedly cryptic thesis: George Orwell was wrong; Aldous Huxley was right. ¶ […]
For a book written about media in 1985, Postman’s book is surprisingly relevant. When my students read it, I expect them to say something about how irrelevant it is to them, but they never say this; instead, they speak enthusiastically about how insightful and helpful it is. This is probably because laptops, iPads, and smartphones […]
Nearly three decades after its publication, you still hear people refer to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Especially among theological conservatives, the book is cited as the definitive critique of today's media- and entertainment-saturated culture. Mind you, not much of the book's content actually gets referenced, just the book's title. The all-too-clever catchphrase has […]
Businesses must go beyond mere entertainment to truly engage participants in memorable and meaningful ways. To achieve this, they need to richly draw from the following four experiential realms: Educational (to learn via active absorption) Escapist (to transport from one sense of reality to another via active immersion) Esthetic (to hang out and "just be" […]
Rule 1: Classify Is the purpose of the article/post to entertain, inform, edify,instruct? Most pieces will fit into one of these categories, so pick one and skim it through that lens. Rule 2: Skim to Scan A good skimmer is a master in the art of scanning. He is one who has learned to pick […]
