I had planned on my next post being an already composed book review on Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants but America's latest horrendous mass murder, this time in Arizona, has pushed that aside. The two topics are not totally unrelated and many are beginning to scrutinize the effects that the Internet and other technological entertainments have on our society. Kelly labelled the unstoppable growth of technology as the technium and although warning about it's negative potential, even saying that it may be near 50% of the overall influence, wrote that it cannot be stopped and therefore we must attempt to tame it.
The book I am reading at this moment is titled The Net Delusion, The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov while Saturday's Wall Street Journal book review was on Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think edited by John Brockman. I will be ordering a book coming out this February titled Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers Of The E-personality by Elias Aboujaoude and add to this the blog I did this past November on Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows, How The Internet Is Changing Our Brains and it is obvious that we are at least looking at how cyberspace may control us rather than us controlling it.
The social networking element of the technium feeds on a society that wants its fifteen minutes of fame, while that society feeds on the product that the enormous financial potential is more than willing to provide. This, the scrutiny of the Internet, only touches on the problems that we face. It is irony in that the very people who are calling for sanity, responsibility and the observance of the law (the Tea Party) are being tarred with that with which they warn about. It is also irony in that those that Dinesh D'Souza wrote this way about in his 2008 book The Enemy At Home, "What traditional societies consider repulsive and immoral, the cultural left considers progressive and liberating." are the ones that cast others as violent. The horror of Saturday's events are the results of a society that has forsaken God.
I'd like to return to my very first blog written on November 27th, 2008, and a couple more written before that year ended. In my first blog (untitled) I tried to encourage readers to support legislative efforts at the time to free subscribers of cable companies to be able to choose only those channels they want to come into their home instead of bundled options now in use. It was my opinion, and continues to be my opinion, that if Americans are given a la carte cable choice, the violence, the occult and the intellectual mayhem on television will wither and dry up and the fringe element of our society will shrink. Another post that I would like to mention was my third in which in attempting to defend then President George W. Bush I began "Is George Bush a murderer and a war criminal as has been said over and over by many people?" It was this very vitriol and the accompanying surreptitious agendas that have led to the movement that is accused of vitriol today.
Three weeks later I wrote about the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Engle vs.Vitale where in a 6 to 1 vote, this prayer, written by the regents of New York's education system was banned from use in the classroom and led to multiple other expulsions of God from our children's lives, "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our teachers and our country." We are a violent society because we no longer wanted God's hand on our decisions. We have a fringe element because chaos has replaced order. This debate has to continue, not only in the public square but in our churches for we have forgotten God who alone established this nation and who alone can stop the carnage.
The book I am reading at this moment is titled The Net Delusion, The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov while Saturday's Wall Street Journal book review was on Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think edited by John Brockman. I will be ordering a book coming out this February titled Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers Of The E-personality by Elias Aboujaoude and add to this the blog I did this past November on Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows, How The Internet Is Changing Our Brains and it is obvious that we are at least looking at how cyberspace may control us rather than us controlling it.
The social networking element of the technium feeds on a society that wants its fifteen minutes of fame, while that society feeds on the product that the enormous financial potential is more than willing to provide. This, the scrutiny of the Internet, only touches on the problems that we face. It is irony in that the very people who are calling for sanity, responsibility and the observance of the law (the Tea Party) are being tarred with that with which they warn about. It is also irony in that those that Dinesh D'Souza wrote this way about in his 2008 book The Enemy At Home, "What traditional societies consider repulsive and immoral, the cultural left considers progressive and liberating." are the ones that cast others as violent. The horror of Saturday's events are the results of a society that has forsaken God.
I'd like to return to my very first blog written on November 27th, 2008, and a couple more written before that year ended. In my first blog (untitled) I tried to encourage readers to support legislative efforts at the time to free subscribers of cable companies to be able to choose only those channels they want to come into their home instead of bundled options now in use. It was my opinion, and continues to be my opinion, that if Americans are given a la carte cable choice, the violence, the occult and the intellectual mayhem on television will wither and dry up and the fringe element of our society will shrink. Another post that I would like to mention was my third in which in attempting to defend then President George W. Bush I began "Is George Bush a murderer and a war criminal as has been said over and over by many people?" It was this very vitriol and the accompanying surreptitious agendas that have led to the movement that is accused of vitriol today.
Three weeks later I wrote about the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Engle vs.Vitale where in a 6 to 1 vote, this prayer, written by the regents of New York's education system was banned from use in the classroom and led to multiple other expulsions of God from our children's lives, "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon thee and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our teachers and our country." We are a violent society because we no longer wanted God's hand on our decisions. We have a fringe element because chaos has replaced order. This debate has to continue, not only in the public square but in our churches for we have forgotten God who alone established this nation and who alone can stop the carnage.
