The Technological Return to the Family: How the Internet is Bringing People...
I’m a husband and father who has an outlandish dream: I want to spend the vast majority of my time with my wife and children. Why can’t I do so now? Because I have to work at a job. Commute to and from...
View ArticleThe New Nomads: Eight Characteristics of the Electric Mass Audience
Some years ago W.B. Yeats wrote a poem called Sailing To Byzantium (1928), and one of the verses goes this way: Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from of any natural thing, But such...
View ArticleThe Perils and Promise of Cyber-Church
The internet is volatilizing and reconfiguring political life in late-modern highly-developed societies. If Christian theology gives us any critical purchase on the cultural developments that surround...
View ArticleWhat Big Data Will Never Explain
What is big data? It’s the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create everyday. IBM collects its big data from “sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures...
View ArticleWired Magazine on ‘The First Digital Generation’
They are the Nisei of cyberspace—the first generation born into a world that has never not known digital life and so never had to adjust to it as the rest of us settlers have. Like all Nisei, they...
View ArticleForming our Souls with Facebook
If you make it to the end of this article, you are an impressive and rare breed of human—an intellectual Navy SEAL, an elite mind, trained with an ability most people just don’t have anymore—the...
View Article5 Digital Dangers, from John Piper
Former pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis and evangelical theologian John Piper recently posted a devotional called Five Digital Dangers. For each danger, Piper includes a resolution, or...
View ArticleModern Reformation and Media Ecology
Modern Reformation, the flagship magazine of the White Horse Inn with Michael Horton, devotes most of its current issue (May-June, 2013) to media ecological content. Ryan Glomsrud, executive editor of...
View Article“The internet is where people are”: Paul Miller is back after a year without...
“I was wrong.” Thus begins Paul Miller’s fascinating article for The Verge about his one-year hiatus from the Internet. What was he wrong about? It’s a been a year now since I “surfed the web” or...
View Article‘The Dark Side of the Digital’ Conference
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies hosted a conference last weekend titled ‘The Dark Side of the Digital‘. The conference’s website gave this as part of its...
View ArticleOnline Privacy: How Did We Get Here?
From the description: As technology has evolved over the past two centuries, so have our expectations about privacy. This new digital world allows us to connect with each other with increasing ease,...
View ArticleReview of D. Brent Layham’s “iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements...
Over on the website reformation21, one of Second Nature‘s contributors and editorial board members, T. David Gordon, recently reviewed D. Brent Layham’s new book iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological...
View ArticleLooking Back Upon the Era of YouTube
By this means, they tried to make themselves immortal, the scroll of their days and silly jokes unrolling digitally, the flickering video rolling ever onward tirelessly recording, continuously on as...
View ArticleBuilding a Bridge to 1986
As Michael Sacasas notes in his recent post, “What Motivates the Technology Critic?” there are two common dispositions towards technology: the Arcadian disposition that mourns for what is lost and the...
View ArticleOnline Communion for United Methodists?
Last week, Leroy Huizenga (@LHuizenga) sent us a link to an article on the United Methodist Church’s website titled, “Should churches offer Holy Communion online?” The article notes that this is one of...
View ArticlePresent Shock and Paul
In haste, I broke open my fortune cookie, discarding the cardboard tasting shell, searching for that slip of paper of banal wisdom. But to my surprise, there was nothing inside. Thinking I must have...
View ArticleReading List: Reading and Death, Is WhatsApp Kosher?
If you’ve been wondering what the ultra-orthodox Jewish community thinks about WhatsApp or what advice Google is passing along to Google Glass owners on how not to be creepy, this week’s reading list...
View ArticleWeb 2.0
As the rain fades headlights trace an electronic image of neon lights on the road side slick from the drops which also litter the silky trap where the spider shudders and shimmies another day another...
View ArticleLoneliness vs. Electric Shock. Who wins?
Blaise Pascal famously wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” and now science shows us a deeper truth: that we would rather administer electric...
View ArticleIs Facebook Your Window to the World? It Could Be Soon
As you may know, a few months ago Facebook announced that it was acquiring Oculus Rift, a maker of virtual reality headsets. Compare this news with this piece by artist Pawel Kuczynski:
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