As I have read and thought about technology and its cultural consequences, I have especially appreciated the work of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and Albert Borgmann. My appreciation stems not only from the quality and originality of their work, but also from a curiosity about the manner in which their religion … Continue reading Kevin Kelly, God, and Technology
Andrew Keen is not an Internet enthusiast, at least not since the emergence of Web 2.0. That much has been clear since his 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and his 2006 essay equating Web 2.0 with Marxism in The Weekly Standard, a publication in which such … Continue reading The (Un)Naturalness of Privacy
In “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness,” Clark Whelton takes aim at what he calls “the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century” — vagueness. Here’s the opening example: I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. … Continue reading “It’s like, you know … the end of print disciplined speech?”
Some more reflections in interaction with Walter Ong’s work, this time an essay originally published in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford, 1986) titled “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” Literacy does its work of transformation by restructuring the cultural and personal economy of memory and installing a self-alienation at the heart of … Continue reading Memory, Writing, Alienation
Driving home yesterday I caught Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” being replayed on NPR. It is, as everyone who has listened to the speech knows, a moving experience. It is also an experience that is mostly lost to our time. It is relic of a different age, a different world. One … Continue reading The Kings’ Speeches
L.M. Sacasas 