We continue to see constant progress in reducing human labor to a mechanical routine, like the script followed by workers in chain restaurants or the swiping motion that’s pretty much the only skill left in staffing the Walmart check-out line. If you think about it, the compliant behavior required by the scripted service worker is, [...]
Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” is becoming better and better known among ordinary Catholics, many of whom have found in it a way of connecting the central mysteries of the Christian faith—Trinity, Incarnation, and Eucharist—with their marriages, their bearing and rearing of children, and their sexuality. To such Catholics, the theology of [...]
As Germany uncovers even more American spies in its midst, its intelligence experts consider protecting themselves from digital snooping by reverting to manual typewriters. Is this a triumph of the old over the new? Will this bung a wrench into the optimism of our pimple-faced teenage technophiles? Will they stop swooning over every semi-useless electronic [...]
Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century by O. B. Hardison Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman The polarities of boundlessness and limits have helped to define the human experience. Although men and women have always lived with infinite longings, at one time they could not avoid [...]
What Steve Jobs “sold” with his Apple devices was the myth of control, of importance, and of connection through technology. In truth, the vast bulk of what these personal devices offer constitutes a massive waste of time—and, worse, a diversion from genuine interaction with actual people, or nature, or our own minds. Redesigning the World [...]
We use our screens to write and read so much that we have turned the noun “text” into a verb. However, while we read and write with and for the screen, is not the screen better used for verbal and visual communication? Text is a secondary form of language. The spoken word was first. Because [...]
The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades—physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists—protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the [...]
Libertarian futurists such as Tyler Cowen and Brink Lindsey sometimes write as if the point of all our remarkable techno-progress—the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of “human capital”—is some combination of the emancipatory hippie spirit of the 1960s with the liberty in the service of individual productivity of Reagan’s 1980s. [...]
Tiny hand held screens are soon to be replaced with screens built into glasses, screens on wrist watches like that gadget Dick Tracy used to have, and even screens built into contact lenses. Micro screens are challenged by macros screens with jumbotrons in stadia, billboards which have morphed into macro screens and advertising screens built [...]
Her is quite the meticulous and creepily seductive criticism of our techno-orientation toward transhumanism. It is the dystopian film of our time, a haunting glimpse at the near future. The transhumanist theory is that, when you strip away the illusions, we’re all basically operating systems. We’re, as Descartes first explained, conscious machines. A problem, though, is that our bodies [...]
The average person checks their (sic) phone every six-and-a-half minutes a day. One in four of us admits to spending longer online each day than we do asleep, while 73 percent say that we would struggle to go the whole day without our phones or computers… By the age of seven, the average British child [...]
There is a growing consensus among human beings that the effects of our developing technology are not conducive to human development. Popular technology, despite its claim to interact and connect, breeds isolation. It causes people, especially young people, to stray into an introverted withdrawal from others and the world. As such, these results are antithetical to [...]
Tinkering in your cellar to build a time machine, as many of our readers claim to do, you’ll eventually require an operator’s manual. Much frustration can be avoided by reading a clever short story that is in many ways opposite to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, often as fun and infinitely [...]
The imagination of the child is very powerful, and sometimes we can still recall the mystery with which it invested the pages of the comic books we devoured when young. There is an atmosphere, a richness, a whole universe associated with those now dulled and faded inks on cheap paper, as the fragrance of our [...]