Technology Has Hijacked Family Dinner Time

Technology has hijacked family dinnertime. So to help bring families together for dinner, Dolmio created the Pepper Hacker. It cracks pepper, shuts down TVs, wipes out WiFi and disables mobile devices. Watch their experiment reclaim family dinnertime.

The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World

Our technological advancements have one trajectory: up. Up the corporate ladder, up in social status, up and away from our surroundings, our physical demands, from the bore of the everyday. We are headed up, yet the happiest people in the world are the Danes sitting down to have dinner. Editor’s note: The following is an […]

On Smart Phones and the Death of Conversation: A Photo Essay

“I started to photograph people in company on their phones as there was a certain symmetry to them and it appealed on a visual level, but as I continued I noticed an inherent sadness to the proceedings,” writes Babycakes Romero, in his short introduction to his photo essay titled “The Death of Conversation.” He compares […]

Pope Francis’ Message for the 48th World Communications Day

In commemoration of the feast day for the patron saint of journalists, St. Francis de Sales, on January 24th, Pope Francis released his message for the 48th World Communications Day. Like Pope Benedict XVI before him, Pope Francis focuses on the digital media environment, asking “What is it, then, that helps us, in the digital […]

The Innovation of Loneliness

  Shimi Cohen’s video, The Innovation of Loneliness, is a beautiful visual reflection on the invention of loneliness. Starting with monkeys, detouring through sociology and ending up at online social networks, Cohen’s video is a quick trip through the history of the experience of loneliness–which he claims is the most common ailment of the modern […]

Building a Bridge to 1986

As Michael Sacasas notes in his recent post, “What Motivates the Technology Critic?” there are two common dispositions towards technology: the Arcadian disposition that mourns for what is lost and the Utopian disposition that celebrates what is gained. When I come across someone with a strong Arcadian disposition towards technology, my favorite experiment is to […]

Digital Exile: Media Ecology in a New Key

  The newly released album, Subtlety, is your perfect new soundscape for long stretches of media ecology reading. The band, Digital Exile, puts media ecology into a smooth progressive rock setting with titles like “Senses,” “Abstracted,” “Council of Heretics,” featuring a great blend of thoughtful lyrics, heavy riffs, rocking guitar solos, and biblical references to satisfy […]

Hearing Bly Read

His words bubbled from the speakers as he bantered with the host, his voice coffee-warm with a Norwegian froth; he began reading in a tone one might use when granting deepest confidence— interrupting himself, making mid-poem commentary, repeating favorite stanzas—   and I knew again that I was fatherless, and I felt like a blind […]

Forming our Souls with Facebook

If you make it to the end of this article, you are an impressive and rare breed of human—an intellectual Navy SEAL, an elite mind, trained with an ability most people just don’t have anymore—the ability to sustain mental concentration over long periods of time on a single subject.  This capacity, to endure a cerebral […]

Plato’s New Media Cave

A new take on Plato’s Cave from artist Joan Steacy:

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