How Cell Phones, Computers, Gaming and Social Media Are Changing Our Brains

I once got into testy e-mail exchange with a media ecologist over my use of the word addiction in regard to media behavior. He adamantly preferred the word habit for behavior, whether acceptable or problematic, leaving addiction to recovery problems of physiological substance abuse, alcohol, heroin, etc. I had deliberately left out the defining limit […]

Under The Spreading Chestnut Tree

A poem by Mark Nenadov.

God is Not Spectacular

Communication technologies are not neutral channels. Just as the riverbed shapes the path of the river as much as the river does, so too, society’s media shape their organization as much as they do. To take an example, smartphones may ostensibly “connect” us, but everyone knows that what they have actually done is atomize us […]

Orionids

A poem by David Oestreich.

Being Disabled in the New World of Genetic Testing

  by Brian Brock PhD and Stephanie Brock RN Introduction This paper speaks biographically in order to introduce a real time snapshot of the forces genetic technologies bring to bear on the disabled and their families. We do so as an academic theologian and a neo-natal nurse experiencing the joys and frustrations of first-time parenthood. […]

Donald Trump: Hot Persona for a Cool Medium

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, perhaps one of the most respected scholars on political rhetoric in the electronic age, must be scratching her head right now. Back in the 1980s she explained the popularity of Ronald Reagan by saying he had mastered the “cool” medium of television with his winsome persona. So how does one explain Trump’s […]

The 12 Golden Rules of Email Courtesy

An obscure twentieth-century physicist named Albert Einstein said:  “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”  Our technologies now develop faster than our ability to think about their humane or courteous use.  Before we can assess the impact of the iPod, the iPhone appears; and before we can assess the iPhone, […]

Just Another Day in America: On Location with the Latest Spectacle in the Global Village

On December 3, 2015, Matt Lauer opened the Today Show in California, when only several hours earlier he had been sitting comfortably in his New York studio. While we were all sleeping NBC flew him and a camera crew across the country so we could watch events of the latest mass killings unfold on location. […]

My Customer Feedback Form After Purchasing a New Apple Product

Tell us about your experience at the Apple Store. It was a very busy Saturday.  Think of the sound of trickling water.  The customers outnumbered the employees by 20:1.  The cleaning lady from Eastern Europe dusted the shelves silently but efficiently.  The middle-aged moms waited for their apps to download.  The conversations were chatty, clipped, […]

POMO + FOMO + YOLO = GOPRO

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