The Double Slavery of the Internet… and Liberation

By |2022-08-11T19:40:19-05:00August 11th, 2022|Categories: David Deavel, Information Age, Senior Contributors, Social Media, Technology|

External shackles we will always have with us. Internal ones are the more worrisome, for they are the ones we forge ourselves. My all-too-modern soul requires a great deal of fasting from news, memes, and viral videos lest I develop eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, and a mind that merely bobs [...]

Neil Postman’s Vision of Humane Education

By |2021-04-24T08:09:06-05:00April 23rd, 2021|Categories: Education, Information Age, Liberal Learning, Neil Postman, Technology|

Whether it be in the context of public schools, private schools, home-centered education, co-ops, or learning pods, revisiting Neil Postman’s vision will help foster humane education in our Zoom World. It was nearly sixty years ago when famed media theorist Marshall McLuhan penned The Gutenburg Galaxy as “a series of historical observations” regarding the cultural [...]

Ways to Fight Big Tech

By |2021-01-15T10:52:54-06:00January 14th, 2021|Categories: David Deavel, Information Age, Senior Contributors, Technology|

The social-media giants won't stop censoring conservative speech anytime soon. Why would they? The reality is that conservatives must fight back against big tech immediately. Here are several ways to do it. Will you see this essay on Facebook or Twitter? Maybe, maybe not. The two major social media networks have been censoring political speech [...]

We’re All Muckrakers Now

By |2020-10-20T16:37:31-05:00October 20th, 2020|Categories: American Republic, Information Age, Journalism, Modernity, Politics, Technology, Teddy Roosevelt, Truth|

Today, Theodore Roosevelt prompts us to ask the same question he raised over a century ago in his speech “The Man with the Muck-Rake”: How do we devote our attention to society’s problems without allowing them to devour us? Our survival in the Information Age hinges upon on our ability to address this problem. In [...]

Finding Refreshment in a World of Endless Work

By |2019-09-02T10:09:17-05:00October 3rd, 2018|Categories: Happiness, Information Age, Josef Pieper, Labor/Work|

It only took a moment. The smartphone was somewhere in the grass, forgotten. Our hands and jeans were covered in smears of purple and green sidewalk chalk. My two-year-old daughter and I were busy drawing roads and buildings on a square of pavement—here a library, there a post office, with our house around the corner. [...]

Children Under Siege in the Digital Age

By |2020-05-11T11:01:32-05:00May 28th, 2018|Categories: Culture, Education, Information Age, Science, Technology|

Millions of children today are raised, by default, to be slaves to group-think, addicted to endorphins released from a digital device, burdened with neural pathways so obliterated that nary a logical thought might pass from brain to lips... In The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald casts both an unlikely hero and an unlikely weapon [...]

My New Year’s Resolution: Keep Sundays Internet-Free

By |2021-12-30T11:23:13-06:00December 28th, 2017|Categories: Christianity, Faith, Information Age, John Horvat, New Year's Day, Science, Technology|

An Internet-free Sunday honors the Sabbath and allows us to leave our daily rat-race for at least one day, to ponder and prepare for the week ahead. It is a perfect occasion to visit and converse with others. Last year, I made a New Year’s resolution that I would make my Sundays Internet-free. It was [...]

What Has Facebook Done to Political Discourse?

By |2021-02-03T17:04:54-06:00September 26th, 2017|Categories: Culture, Featured, Information Age, Politics, Technology|

When Facebook came on the scene, I immediately saw this new online forum as a platform from which to express my opinion about current events like I did as a newspaper editorialist. It was all just so easy and convenient. Except for one thing. For about a decade before joining Facebook, I wrote weekly opinion [...]

From Myths to Fact and Back Again

By |2019-03-28T11:44:20-05:00August 13th, 2017|Categories: Civilization, Featured, Ideology, Information Age, Myth, Politics, Social Order, Technology|

A democratic society requires an informed base of voters making political judgments on the basis of commonly accepted information. When reliable authorities no longer hold sway, unscrupulous authoritarians can step in to fill the void… “We have a risk of getting to a place where we don’t have shared public facts. A republic will not [...]

Three Reasons To Do an Internet Detox

By |2019-11-21T12:34:35-06:00April 25th, 2017|Categories: Christianity, Faith, Information Age, John Horvat, Technology|

The important thing is to control technology since it becomes abusive when it starts controlling us. Thus, if email overload is causing concern, it is time to implement some version of detox. There is life beyond the Internet…. On January 1, 2017, I made a New Year’s resolution to make my Sundays Internet free. This [...]

Must Digital Technology Make Enemies of Us All?

By |2019-04-23T16:06:12-05:00March 7th, 2017|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Featured, Film, Information Age, Technology, William F. Buckley Jr.|

Given the choice, people would rather watch flat-out conflict and crosstalk rather than a more plodding format of elevated discourse and sober deliberation… The documentary film Best of Enemies (2015) is not just a compelling chronicle and contextualization of the famous 1968 television debates between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal. As the sequence [...]

The Balkanization of a Boutique World

By |2017-03-14T10:07:05-05:00December 30th, 2016|Categories: Culture, Featured, Information Age, Technology, Television|

As we retreat into our respective corners to enjoy the things we enjoy, we enjoy less and less in common with one another. The bonds that hold us together are loosening… Few things have changed day-to-day American life as much as the free flow of digital entertainment and information from producers to consumers over the [...]

Our Age of Anxiety: Surviving Political Realignment

By |2016-12-28T07:45:18-06:00October 17th, 2016|Categories: Democracy, Democracy in America, Featured, Gleaves Whitney, Information Age, Politics, Presidency, Technology|

In 2016 Americans are feeling anxious. It’s not that we are experiencing crises—we are neither in total war nor economic depression. Yet 2016 has forced us to rethink all we thought we knew. A Socialist made a credible run for the Democratic nomination and succeeded in moving the Democratic Party platform farther left than it [...]

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