Archives for November 2013

Reading List: November 25

  Each week, we put together a reading list of the best articles on technology, new media, and religion from across the web. Here’s what we’re reading this week. Happy Thanksgiving! Redeeming Technologies – The New Atlantis “For the secularization hypothesis, the evidence of history is decidedly mixed. It is, in spite of Nietzsche’s astute observation, […]

Benedict XVI: World Communications Day Messages

You probably saw the pictures of Pope Benedict XVI sending a tweet from his iPad as he became the first Pope to join Twitter in December of 2012. Twitter was rightfully excited, of course, because what social network would pass up the chance for that kind of publicity? Previous popes had sent letters, appeared on TV, talked […]

The E-Book and the Surveillance Society

When I embarked on a reading of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, in the spring of 2013, a commercial e-book version was not yet available. I located a bootleg PDF copy online somewhere. It was an interesting artifact, not well formatted but possibly useful for copying passages to paste into another document. I could have read the […]

Reading List: November 18

Each week, we put together a reading list of the best articles on technology, new media, and religion from across the web. Here’s what we’re reading this week: On the xkcd Philosophy of Technology, Briefly – The Frailest Thing “Similarly, pointing out that human beings have always used technology is perhaps the least interesting observation […]

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 […]

Reading List: November 11

Each week, we put together a reading list of the best articles on technology, new media, and religion from across the web. Here’s what we’re reading this week: The Experience Design of Server Farms – Medium “Standing among the Internet Archive’s pews, Kahle talks about trust. He points out the extreme implicit trust that users […]

McLuhan receives McLuhan Award

We are pleased to announce that editorial board member Eric McLuhan was awarded with the third annual Medium and the Light award on October 23rd. During a celebration at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, over 50 scholars gathered at the old coach house where Eric’s father Marshall McLuhan had his office and […]

Reading List: November 5

  Here’s what we’re reading this week: Are Smartphones Turning us into Bad Samaritans? – Wall Street Journal “In late September, on a crowded commuter train in San Francisco, a man shot and killed 20-year-old student Justin Valdez. As security footage shows, before the gunman fired, he waved around his .45 caliber pistol and at one […]

Living for the Moment in the Age of Memory Abundance

The most famous section in arguably the most famous book about photography, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, dwells on a photograph of Barthes’ recently deceased mother taken in a winter garden when she was a little girl. On this picture, Barthes hung his meditative reflections on death and photography. The image evoked both the “that-has-been” reality […]

The Ghost(s) of Marshall McLuhan

Here at Second Nature we’re celebrating Halloween and All Saints’ Day by channeling the ghost(s) of Marshall McLuhan. How you ask? We’re reading the only e-mail Neil Postman ever sent in which he poses as the ghost of Marshall McLuhan: This is the Ghost of Marshall McLuhan speaking to you. I don’t have to tell you […]

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