Podcast appearances and mentions of Neil Postman

Mi entrevistado en este episodio es Carlos A. Scolari, Catedrático del Departamento de Comunicación de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Barcelona. Ha sido Investigador Principal de diversos proyectos de investigación internacionales y estatales, desde el proyecto H2020 TRANSLITERACY (entre 2015 y 2018) hasta el proyecto LITERAC_IA, que comenzó en 2024 y dirige junto a María del Mar Guerrero. Sus últimos libros son Cultura Snack (2020), La guerra de las plataformas (2022) y Sobre la evolución de los medios (2024). Ahora está trabajando en un libro sobre los fósiles mediáticos.Notas del Episodio* Historia de ecologia de los medios* Historia de Carlos* Diferencias entre el anglosfero y el hispanosfero* La coevolucion entre tecnologia y humanos* La democratizacion de los medios* Evolucion de los medios* Alienacion y addiccion* Como usar los medios conscientementeTareaCarlos A. Scolari - Pagina Personal - Facebook - Instagram - Twitter - Escolar GoogleSobre la evolución de los mediosHipermediaciones (Libros)Transcrito en espanol (English Below)Chris: [00:00:00] Bienvenido al podcast el fin de turismo Carlos. Gracias por poder hablar conmigo hoy. Es un gran gusto tener tu presencia aquí conmigo hoy. Carlos: No gracias a ti, Chris, por la invitación. Es un enorme placer honor charlar contigo, gran viajero y bueno, yo nunca investigué directamente el tema del turismo.Pero bueno, entiendo que vamos a hablar de ecología de los medios y temas colaterales que nos pueden servir para entender mejor, darle un sentido a todo esto que está pasando en el mundo del turismo. Bueno, yo trabajo en Barcelona. No vivo exactamente en la ciudad, pero trabajo, en la universidad en Barcelona, en la zona céntrica.Y bueno, cada vez que voy a la ciudad cada día se incrementa la cantidad de turistas y se incrementa el debate sobre el turismo, en todas sus dimensiones. Así que es un tema que está la orden del día, no? Chris: Sí, pues me imagino que aunque si no te gusta pensar o si no quieres pensar en el turismo allá, es inevitable tener como una enseñanza [00:01:00] personal de esa industria.Carlos: Sí, hasta que se está convirtiendo casi en un criterio taxonómico, no? ...de clasificación o ciudades con mucho turista ciudades o lugares sin turistas que son los más buscados hasta que se llenan de turistas. Entonces estamos en un círculo vicioso prácticamente. Chris: Ya pues, que en algún memento se que se cambia, se rompe el ciclo, al menos para dar cuenta de lo que estamos haciendo con el comportamiento.Y, yo entiendo que eso también tiene mucho que ver con la ecología de los medios, la falta de capacidad de entender nuestros comportamientos, actitudes, pensamientos, sentimientos, etcétera. Entonces, antes de seguir por tu trabajo y obras, este me gustaría preguntarte de tu camino y de tu vida.Primero me pregunto si podrías definir para nuestros oyentes qué es la ecología de los medios y cómo te [00:02:00] interesó en este campo? Cómo llegaste a dedicar a tu vida a este estudio?Carlos: Sí. A ver un poco. Hay una, esta la historia oficial. Diríamos de la ecología de los medios o en inglés "media ecology," es una campo de investigación, digamos, eh, que nace en los años 60. Hay que tener en cuenta sobre todos los trabajos de Marshall McLuhan, investigador canadiense muy famoso a nivel mundial. Era quizá el filósofo investigador de los medios más famosos en los años 60 y 70.Y un colega de el, Neil Postman, que estaba en la universidad de New York en New York University un poco, digamos entre la gente que rodeaba estos dos referentes, no, en los años 60, de ahí se fue cocinando, diríamos, lo que después se llamó la media ecology. Se dice que el primero que habló de media ecology que aplicó esta metáfora a los medios, fue el mismo Marshall McLuhan en algunas, conversaciones privadas, [00:03:00] cartas que se enviaban finales dos años 50, a principios de los 60, se enviaban los investigadores investigadora de estos temas?Digamos la primera aparición pública del concepto de media ecology fue una conferencia en el año 1968 de Neil Postman. Era una intervención pública que la hablaba de un poco como los medios nos transforman y transforman los medios formar un entorno de nosotros crecemos, nos desarrollamos, no. Y nosotros no somos muy conscientes a veces de ese medio que nos rodea y nos modela.El utilizó por primera vez el concepto de media ecology en una conferencia pública. Y ya, si vamos a principio de los años 70, el mismo Postman crea en NYU, en New York University crea el primer programa en media ecology. O sea que ya en el 73, 74 y 75, empieza a salir lo que yo llamo la segunda generación, de gente [00:04:00] formada algunos en estos cursos de New York.Por ejemplo Christine Nystrom fue la primera tesis doctoral sobre mi ecology; gente como, Paul Levinson que en el año 1979 defiende una tesis doctoral dirigida por Postman sobre evolución de los medios, no? Y lo mismo pasaba en Toronto en los años 70. El Marshall McLuhan falleció en el diciembre del 80.Digamos que los años 70 fueron su última década de producción intelectual. Y hay una serie de colaboradores en ese memento, gente muy joven como Robert Logan, Derrick De Kerchove, que después un poco siguieron trabajando un poco todo esta línea, este enfoque. Y ahí hablamos del frente canadiense, eh?Toda esta segunda generación fue desarrollando, fue ampliando aplicando. No nos olvidemos de Eric McLuhan, el hijo de Marshall, que también fue parte de toda esta movida. [00:05:00] Y si no recuerdo mal en el año 2000, se crea la asociación la Media Ecology Association, que es la Asociación de Ecología de los Medios, que es una organización académica, científica, que nuclea a la gente que se ocupa de media ecology. Si pensamos a nivel más científico epistemológico, podemos pensar esta metáfora de la ecología de los medios desde dos o tres perspectivas. Por un lado, esta idea de que los medios crean ambientes. Esta es una idea muy fuerte de Marsha McLuhan, de Postman y de todo este grupo, no? Los medios - "medio" entendido en sentido muy amplio, no, cualquier tecnología podría ser un medio para ellos.Para Marsha McLuhan, la rueda es un medio. Un un telescopio es un medio. Una radio es un medio y la televisión es un medio, no? O sea, cualquier tecnología puede considerarse un medio. Digamos que estos medios, estas tecnologías, generan un [00:06:00] ambiente que a nosotros nos transforma. Transforma nuestra forma, a veces de pensar nuestra forma de percibir el mundo, nuestra concepción del tiempo del espacio.Y nosotros no somos conscientes de ese cambio. Pensemos que, no sé, antes de 1800, si alguien tenía que hacer un viaje de mil kilómetros (y acá nos acercamos al turismo) kilómetros era un viaje que había que programarlo muchos meses antes. Con la llegada del tren, ya estamos en 1800, esos kilómetros se acortaron. Digamos no? Ahí vemos como si a nosotros hoy nos dicen 1000 kilómetros.Bueno, si, tomamos un avión. Es una hora, una hora y cuarto de viaje. Hoy 1000 kilómetro es mucho menos que hace 200 años y incluso a nivel temporal, se a checo el tiempo. No? Todo eso es consecuencia, digamos este cambio, nuestra percepción es consecuencia de una serie de medios y tecnologías.El ferrocarril. Obviamente, hoy tenemos los aviones. Las mismas redes digitales que, un poco nos han llevado esta idea de "tiempo [00:07:00] real," esta ansiedad de querer todo rápido, no? También esa es consecuencia de estos cambios ambientales generados por los medios y las tecnologías, eh? Esto es un idea muy fuerte, cuando McLuhan y Postman hablaban de esto en los años 60, eran fuertes intuiciones que ellos tenían a partir de una observación muy inteligente de la realidad. Hoy, las ciencias cognitivas, mejor las neurociencia han confirmado estas hipótesis. O sea, hoy existen una serie de eh metodología para estudiar el cerebro y ya se ve como las tecnologías.Los medios afectan incluso la estructura física del cerebro. No? Otro tema que esto es histórico, que los medios afectan nuestra memoria. Esto viene de Platón de hace 2500 años, que él decía que la escritura iba a matar la memoria de los hombres. Bueno, podemos pensar nosotros mismos, no, eh?O por lo menos esta generación, que [00:08:00] vivimos el mundo antes y después de las aplicaciones móviles. Yo hace 30 años, 25 años, tenía mi memoria 30-40 números telefónicos. Hoy no tengo ninguno. Y en esa pensemos también el GPS, no? En una época, los taxistas de Londres, que es una ciudad latica se conocían a memoria la ciudad. Y hoy eso, ya no hace falta porque tienen GPS.Y cuando han ido a estudiar el cerebro de los taxistas de Londres, han visto que ciertas áreas del cerebro se han reducido, digamos, así, que son las áreas que gestionaban la parte espacial. Esto ya McLuhan, lo hablaba en los años 60. Decía como que los cambios narcotizan ciertas áreas de la mente decía él.Pero bueno, vemos que mucha investigación empírica, bien de vanguardia científica de neurociencia está confirmando todas estos pensamientos, todas estas cosas que se decían a los años 60 en adelante, por la media ecology. Otra posibilidad es entender [00:09:00] esto como un ecosistema de medios, Marshall McLuhan siempre decía no le podemos dar significado,no podemos entender un medio aislado de los otros medios. Como que los medios adquieren sentido sólo en relación con otros medios. También Neil Postman y mucha otra gente de la escuela de la media ecology, defiende esta posición, de que, bueno, los medios no podemos entender la historia del cine si no la vinculamos a los videojuegos, si no lo vinculamos a la aparición de la televisión.Y así con todos los medios, no? Eh? Hay trabajos muy interesantes. Por ejemplo, de como en el siglo 19, diferentes medios, podríamos decir, que coevolucionaron entre sí. La prensa, el telégrafo. El tren, que transportaba los diarios también, aparecen las agencias de noticias. O sea, vemos cómo es muy difícil entender el desarrollo de la prensa en el siglo XIX y no lo vinculamos al teléfono, si no lo vinculamos a la fotografía, si no lo vinculamos a la radio fotografía, [00:10:00] también más adelante.O sea, esta idea es muy fuerte. No también es otro de los principios para mí fundamentales de esta visión, que sería que los medios no están solos, forman parte de un ecosistema y si nosotros queremos entender lo que está pasando y cómo funciona todo esto, no podemos, eh, analizar los medios aislados del resto.Hay una tercera interpretación. Ya no sé si es muy metafórica. No? Sobre todo, gente en Italia como el investigador Fausto Colombo de Milán o Michele Cometa, es un investigador de Sicilia, Michele Cometa que él habla de l giro, el giro ecomedial. Estos investigadores están moviéndose en toda una concepción según la cual, estamos en único ecosistema mediático que está contaminado.Está contaminado de "fake news" está contaminado de noticias falsas, está contaminado de discursos de odio, etcétera, etc. Entonces ellos, digamos, retoman esta metáfora ecológica para decir [00:11:00] precisamente tenemos que limpiar este ecosistema así como el ecosistema natural está contaminado, necesita una intervención de limpieza, digamos así de purificación, eh? También el ecosistema mediático corre el mismo peligro, no? Y esta gente también llama la atención, y yo estoy muy cerca de esta línea de trabajo sobre la dimensión material de la comunicación. Y esto también tiene que ver con el turismo, queriendo, no? El impacto ambiental que tiene la comunicación hoy.Entrenar una inteligencia artificial implica un consumo eléctrico brutal; mantener funcionando las redes sociales, eh, tiktok, youtube, lo que sea, implica millones de servidores funcionando que chupan energía eléctrica y hay que enfriarlos además, consumiendo aún más energía eléctrica. Y eso tiene un impacto climático no indiferente.Así que, bueno, digamos, vemos que está metáfora de lo ecológico, aplicado los medios da para dos o tres interpretaciones. Chris: Mmm. [00:12:00] Wow. Siento que cuando yo empecé tomando ese curso de de Andrew McLuhan, el nieto de Marshall, como te mencioné, cambio mi perspectiva totalmente - en el mundo, en la manera como entiendo y como no entiendo también las nuestras tecnologías, mis movimientos, etcétera, pero ya, por una persona que tiene décadas de estudiando eso, me gustaría saber de de como empezaste. O sea, Andrew, por ejemplo tiene la excusa de su linaje, no de su papá y su abuelo.Pero entonces, como un argentino joven empezó aprendiendo de ecología de medios. Carlos: Bueno, yo te comento. Yo estudié comunicación en argentina en Rosario. Terminé la facultad. El último examen el 24 de junio del 86, que fue el día que nacía el Lionel Messi en Rosario, en Argentina el mismo día. Y [00:13:00] yo trabajaba, colaboraba en una asignatura en una materia que era teorías de la comunicación.E incluso llegué a enseñar hasta el año 90, fueron tres años, porque ya después me fui vivir Italia. En esa época, nosotros leíamos a Marshall McLuhan, pero era una lectura muy sesgada ideológicamente. En América latina, tú lo habrás visto en México. Hay toda una historia, una tradición de críticas de los medios, sobre todo, a todo lo que viene de estados unidos y Canadá está muy cerca de Estados Unidos. Entonces, digamos que en los años 70 y 80 y y hasta hoy te diría muchas veces a Marshall McLuhan se lo criticó mucho porque no criticaba los medios. O sea el te tenía una visión. Él decía, Neil Postman, si tenía una visión muy crítica. Pero en ese caso, este era una de las grandes diferencias entre Postman y McLuhan, que Marshall McLuhan, al menos en [00:14:00] público, él no criticaba los medios. Decía bueno, yo soy un investigador, yo envío sondas. Estoy explorando lo que pasa. Y él nunca se sumó... Y yo creo que eso fue muy inteligente por parte de él... nunca se sumó a este coro mundial de crítica a los medios de comunicación. En esa época, la televisión para mucha gente era un monstruo.Los niños no tenían que ver televisión. Un poco lo que pasa hoy con los móviles y lo que pasa hoy con tiktok. En esa época en la televisión, el monstruo. Entonces, había mucha investigación en Estados Unidos, que ya partía de la base que la televisión y los medios son malos para la gente. Vemos que es una historia que se repite. Yo creo que en ese sentido, Marshall McLuhan, de manera muy inteligente, no se sumó ese coro crítico y él se dedico realmente a pensar los medios desde una perspectiva mucho más libre, no anclada por esta visión yo creo demasiado ideologizada, que en América Latina es muy fuerte. Es muy fuerte. Esto no implica [00:15:00] bajar la guardia, no ser crítico. Al contrario.Pero yo creo que el el verdadero pensamiento crítico parte de no decir tanto ideológica, decimos "esto ya es malo. Vamos a ver esto." Habrá cosas buenas. Habrá cosas mala. Habrá cosa, lo que es innegable, que los medios mas ya que digamos son buenos son va, nos transforman. Y yo creo que eso fue lo importante de la idea McLuhaniana. Entonces mi primer acercamiento a McLuhan fue una perspectiva de los autores críticos que, bueno, sí, viene de Estados Unidos, no critica los medios. Vamos a criticarlo a nosotros a él, no? Y ese fue mi primer acercamiento a Marshall McLuhan. Yo me fui a Italia en la decada de 90. Estuve casi ocho años fuera de la universidad, trabajando en medios digitales, desarrollo de páginas, webs, productos multimédia y pretexto. Y a finales de los 90, dije quiero volver a la universidad. Quiero ser un doctorado. Y dije, "quiero hacer un doctorado. Bueno. Estando en Italia, el doctorado iba a ser de semiótica." Entonces hizo un [00:16:00] doctorado. Mi tesis fue sobre semiótica de las interfaces.Ahi tuve una visión de las interfaces digitales que consideran que, por ejemplo, los instrumentos como el mouse o joystick son extensiones de nuestro cuerpo, no? El mouse prolonga la mano y la mete dentro de la pantalla, no? O el joystick o cualquier otro elemento de la interfaz digital? Claro. Si hablamos de que el mouse es una extensión de la mano, eso es una idea McLuhaniana.Los medios como extensiones del ser humano de sujeto. Entonces, claro ahi yo releo McLuhan en italiano a finales de los años 90, y me reconcilio con McLuhan porque encuentro muchas cosas interesantes para entender precisamente la interacción con las máquinas digitales. En el a 2002, me mudo con mi familia a España. Me reintegro la vida universitaria. [00:17:00] Y ahí me pongo a estudiar la relación entre los viejos y los nuevos medios. Entonces recupero la idea de ecosistema. Recupero toda la nueva, la idea de ecología de mi ecology. Y me pongo a investigar y releer a McLuhan por tercera vez. Y a leerlo en profundidad a él y a toda la escuela de mi ecology para poder entender las dinámicas del actual ecosistema mediático y entender la emergencia de lo nuevo y cómo lo viejo lucha por adaptarse. En el 2009, estuve tres meses trabajando con Bob Logan en the University of Toronto. El año pasado, estuve en el congreso ahí y tuvimos dos pre conferencias con gente con Paolo Granata y todo el grupo de Toronto.O sea que, tengo una relación muy fuerte con todo lo que se producía y se produce en Toronto. Y bueno, yo creo que, a mí hoy, la media ecology, me sirve muchísimo junto a otras disciplina como la semiótica para poder entender el ecosistema [00:18:00] mediático actual y el gran tema de investigación mío hoy, que es la evolución del la ecosistema mediático.Mm, digamos que dentro de la media ecology, empezando de esa tesis doctoral del 79 de Paul Levinson, hay toda una serie de contribuciones, que un poco son los que han ido derivando en mi último libro que salió el año pasado en inglés en Routledge, que se llama The Evolution of Media y acaba de salir en castellano.Qué se llama Sobre La Evolución De los Medios. En la teoría evolutiva de los medios, hay mucha ecología de los medios metidos. Chris: Claro, claro. Pues felicidad es Carlos. Y vamos a volver en un ratito de ese tema de la evolución de medios, porque yo creo que es muy importante y obviamente es muy importante a ti. Ha sido como algo muy importante en tu trabajo. Pero antes de de salir de esa esquina de pensamiento, hubo una pregunta que me mandó Andrew McLuhan para ti, que ya ella contestaste un poco, pero este tiene que ver entre las diferencias en los [00:19:00] mundos de ecología de medios anglofonos y hispánicos. Y ya mencionaste un poco de eso, pero desde los tiempos en los 80 y noventas, entonces me gustaría saber si esas diferencias siguen entre los mundos intelectuales, en el mundo anglofono o hispánico.Y pues, para extender su pregunta un poco, qué piensas sería como un punto o tema o aspecto más importante de lo que uno de esos mundos tiene que aprender el otro en el significa de lo que falta, quizás. Carlos: Si nos focalizamos en el trabajo de Marshall McLuhan, no es que se lo criticó sólo de América Latina.En Europa no caía simpático Marshall McLuhan en los 60, 70. Justamente por lo mismo, porque no criticaba el sistema capitalista de medios. La tradición europea, la tradición de la Escuela de Frankfurt, la escuela de una visión anti [00:20:00] capitalista que denuncia la ideología dominante en los medio de comunicación.Eso es lo que entra en América Latina y ahí rebota con mucha fuerza. Quizá la figura principal que habla desde América Latina, que habló mucho tiempo de América latina es Armand Mattelart. Matterlart es un teórico en la comunicación, investigador de Bélgica. Y él lo encontramos ya a mediados de los años 60 finales de los 60 en Chile en un memento muy particular de la historia de Chile donde había mucha politización y mucha investigación crítica, obviamente con el con con con con el capitalismo y con el imperialismo estadounidense. Quizá la la obra clásica de ese memento es el famoso libro de Mattelart y Dorfman, eh, eh? Para Leer El Pato Donald, que donde ellos desmontan toda la estructura ideológica capitalista, imperialista, que había en los cics en las historietas del pato Donald.Ellos dicen esto se publicó a [00:21:00] principio los 70. Es quizá el libro más vendido de la comic latinoamericana hasta el día de hoy, eh? Ellos dicen hay ideología en la literatura infantil. Con el pato Donald, le están llenando la cabeza a nuestros niños de toda una visión del mundo muy particular.Si uno le el pato Donald de esa época, por lo menos, la mayor parte de las historia del pato Donald, que era, había que a buscar un tesoro y adónde. Eran lugares africana, peruviana, incaica o sea, eran países del tercer mundo. Y ahí el pato Donald, con sus sobrinos, eran lo suficientemente inteligentes para volverse con el oro a Patolandia.Claro. Ideológicamente. Eso no se sostiene. Entonces, la investigación hegemónica en esa época en Europa, en Francia, la semiología pero sobre todo, en América latina, era ésa. Hay que estudiar el mensaje. Hay que estudiar el contenido, porque ahí está la ideología [00:22:00] dominante del capitalismo y del imperialismo.En ese contexto, entra McLuhan. Se traduce McLuhan y que dice McLuhan: el medio es el mensaje. No importa lo que uno lee, lo que nos transforma es ver televisión, leer comics, escuchar la radio. Claro, iba contramano del mainstream de la investigación en comunicación. O sea, digamos que en América latina, la gente que sigue en esa línea que todavía existe y es fuerte, no es una visión muy crítica de todo esto, todavía hoy, a Marshal McLuhan le cae mal, pero lo mismo pasa en Europa y otros países donde la gente que busca una lectura crítica anti-capitalista y anti-sistémica de la comunicación, no la va a encontrar nunca en Marshall McLuhan, por más que sea de América latina, de de de Europa o de Asia. Entonces yo no radicaría todo esto en un ámbito anglosajón y el latinoamericano. Después, bueno, la hora de McLuhan es bastante [00:23:00] polisemica. Admite como cualquier autor así, que tiene un estilo incluso de escritura tan creativo en forma de mosaico.No era un escritor Cartesiano ordenadito y formal. No, no. McLuhan era una explosión de ideas muy bien diseñada a propósito, pero era una explosión de ideas. Por eso siempre refrescan tener a McLuhan. Entonces normal que surjan interpretaciones diferentes, no? En estados unidos en Canadá, en Inglaterra, en Europa continental o en Latinoamérica o en Japón, obviamente, no? Siendo un autor que tiene estas características. Por eso yo no en no anclaría esto en cuestiones territoriales. Cuando uno busca un enfoque que no tenga esta carga ideológica para poder entender los medios, que no se limite sólo a denunciar el contenido.McLuhan y la escuela de la ecología de los medios es fundamental y es un aporte muy, muy importante en ese sentido, no? Entonces, bueno, yo creo que McLuhan tuvo [00:24:00] detractores en Europa, tuvo detractores en América latina y cada tanto aparece alguno, pero yo creo que esto se ido suavizando. Yo quiero que, como que cada vez más se lo reivindica McLuhan.La gente que estudia, por ejemplo, en Europa y en América latina, que quizá en su época criticaron a McLuhan, todas las teorías de la mediatización, por ejemplo, terminan coincidiendo en buena parte de los planteos de la media ecology. Hoy que se habla mucho de la materialidad de la comunicación, los nuevos materialismos, yo incluyo a Marshall McLuhan en uno de los pioneros des esta visión también de los nuevos materialismos. Al descentrar el análisis del contenido, al medio, a la cosa material, podemos considerar a macl también junto a Bruno Latour y otra gente como pionero, un poco de esta visión de no quedarse atrapados en el giro lingüístico, no, en el contenido, en el giro semiótico e incorporar también la dimensión material de la comunicación y el medio en sí.[00:25:00] Chris: Muy bien. Muy bien, ya. Wow, es tanto, pero lo aprecio mucho. Gracias, Carlos. Y me gustaría seguir preguntándote un poco ahora de tu propio trabajo. Tienes un capítulo en tu libro. Las Leyes de la Interfaz titulado "Las Interfaces Co-evolucionan Con Sus Usuarios" donde escribes "estas leyes de la interfaz no desprecian a los artefactos, sus inventores ó las fuerzas sociales. Solo se limitan á insertarlos á una red socio técnica de relaciones, intercambios y transformaciones para poder analizarlos desde una perspectiva eco-evolutiva."Ahora, hay un montón ahí en este paragrafito. Pero entonces, me gustaría preguntarte, cómo vea los humanos [00:26:00] co-evolucionando con sus tecnologías? Por ejemplo, nuestra forma de performatividad en la pantalla se convierte en un hábito más allá de la pantalla.Carlos: Ya desde antes del homo sapiens, los homínidos más avanzados, digamos en su momento, creaban instrumentos de piedra. Hemos descubierto todos los neandertales tenían una cultura muy sofisticada, incluso prácticas casi y religiosas, más allá de la cuestión material de la construcción de artefactos. O sea que nuestra especie es impensable sin la tecnología, ya sea un hacha de piedra o ya sea tiktok o un smartphone. Entonces, esto tenemos que tenerlo en cuenta cuando analizamos cualquier tipo de de interacción cotidiana, estamos rodeados de tecnología y acá, obviamente, la idea McLuhaniana es fundamental. Nosotros creamos estos medios. Nosotros creamos estas tecnologías.Estas tecnologías también nos reformatean. [00:27:00] McLuhan, no me suena que haya usado el concepto de coevolución, pero está ahí. Está hablando de eso. Ahora bien. Hay una coevolución si se quiere a larguísimo plazo, que, por ejemplo, sabemos que el desarrollo de instrumentos de piedra, el desarrollo del fuego, hizo que el homo sapiens no necesitara una mandíbula tan grande para poder masticar los alimentos. Y eso produce todo un cambio, que achicó la mandíbula le dejó más espacio en el cerebro, etcétera, etcétera. Eso es una coevolución en término genético, digamos a larguísimo plazo, okey. También la posición eréctil, etcétera, etcétera. Pero, digamos que ya ahí había tecnologías humanas coevolucionando con estos cambios genéticos muy, muy lentos.Pero ahora tenemos también podemos decir esta co evolución ya a nivel de la estructura neuronal, entonces lo ha verificado la neurociencia, como dije antes. Hay cambio físico en la estructura del cerebro a lo largo de la vida de una persona debido a la interacción con ciertas tecnologías. Y por qué pasa eso?Porque [00:28:00] la producción, creación de nuevos medios, nuevas tecnologías se ido acelerando cada vez más. Ahi podemos hacer una curva exponencial hacia arriba, para algunos esto empezó hace 10,000 años. Para algunos esto se aceleró con la revolución industrial. Algunos hablan de la época el descubrimiento de América.Bueno, para alguno esto es un fenómeno de siglo xx. El hecho es que en términos casi geológicos, esto que hablamos del antropoceno es real y está vinculado al impacto del ser humano sobre nuestro ambiente y lo tecnológico es parte de ese proceso exponencial de co evolución. Nosotros hoy sentimos un agobio frente a esta aceleración de la tecnología y nuestra necesidad. Quizá de adaptarnos y coevolucionar con ella. Como esto de que todo va muy rápido. Cada semana hay un problema nuevo, una aplicación nueva. Ahora tenemos la inteligencia artificial, etc, etcétera. Pero esta sensación [00:29:00] no es nueva. Es una sensación de la modernidad. Si uno lee cosas escritas en 1,800 cuando llega el tren también la gente se quejaba que el mundo iba muy rápido. Dónde iremos a parar con este caballo de hierro que larga humo no? O sea que esta sensación de velocidad de cambio rápido ya generaciones anteriores la vivían. Pero evidentemente, el cambio hoy es mucho más rápido y denso que hace dos siglos. Y eso es real también. Así que, bueno, nuestra fe se va coevolucionando y nos vamos adaptando como podemos, yo esta pregunta se la hice hace 10 años a Kevin Kelly, el primer director de la revista Wire que lo trajimos a Barcelona y el que siempre es muy optimista. Kevin Kelly es determinista tecnológico y optimista al mismo tiempo. Él decía que "que bueno que el homo sapiens lo va llevando bastante bien. Esto de co evolucionar con la tecnología." Otra gente tiene una [00:30:00] visión radicalmente opuesta, que esto es el fin del mundo, que el homo sapiens estamos condenados a desaparecer por esta co evolución acelerada, que las nuevas generaciones son cada vez más estúpidas.Yo no creo eso. Creo, como McLuhan, que los medios nos reforman, nos cambian algunas cosas quizás para vivir otras quizá no tanto, pero no, no tengo una visión apocalíptica de esto para nada. Chris: Bien, bien. Entonces cuando mencionaste lo de la televisión, yo me acuerdo mucho de de mi niñez y no sé por qué. Quizás fue algo normal en ese tiempo para ver a tele como un monstruo, como dijiste o quizás porque mis mis papás eran migrantes pero fue mucho de su idea de esa tecnología y siempre me dijo como no, no, no quédate ahí tan cerca y eso.Entonces, aunque lo aceptaron, ellos comprendieron que el poder [00:31:00] de la tele que tenía sobre las personas. Entonces ahora todos, parece a mí, que todos tienen su propio canal, no su propio programación, o el derecho o privilegio de tener su propio canal o múltiples canales.Entonces, es una gran pregunta, pero cuáles crees que son las principales consecuencias de darle a cada uno su propio programa en el sentido de como es el efecto de hacer eso, de democratizar quizás la tecnología en ese sentido? Carlos: Cuando dices su propio canal, te refieres a la posibilidad de emitir o construir tu propia dieta mediática.Chris: Bueno primero, pero puede ser ambos, claro, no? O sea, mi capacidad de tener un perfil o cuenta mía personal. Y luego como el fin del turismo, no? Y luego otro. Carlos: Sí, a ver. Yo creo que, bueno, esto fue el gran cambio radical que empezó a darse a partir la década del 2000 o [00:32:00] sea, hace 25 años. Porque la web al principio sí era una red mundial en los años 90. Pero claro la posibilidad de compartir un contenido y que todo el mundo lo pudiera ver, estaba muy limitado a crear una página web, etcétera. Cuando aparecen las redes sociales o las Web 2.0 como se la llamaba en esa época y eso se suma los dispositivos móviles, ahí se empieza a generar esta cultura tan difundida de la creación de contenido. Hasta digamos que hasta ese momento quien generaba contenido era más o menos un profesional en la radio y en la televisión, pero incluso en la web o en la prensa o el cine. Y a partir de ahí se empieza, digamos, a abrir el juego. En su momento, esto fue muy bien saludado fue qué bueno! Esto va nos va a llevar a una sociedad más democrática. 25 años después, claro, estamos viendo el lado oscuro solamente. Yo creo que el error hace 25 años era pensar solo las posibilidades [00:33:00] buenas, optimistas, de esto. Y hoy me parece que estamos enredados en discursos solamente apocalípticos no?No vemos las cosas buenas, vemos solo las cosas malas. Yo creo que hay de las dos cosas hoy. Claro, hoy cualquier persona puede tener un canal, sí, pero no todo el mundo crea un canal. Los niveles de participación son muy extraños, o sea, la mayor parte de la población de los usuarios y usuarias entre en las redes. Mira. Mete un me gusta. Quizá un comentario. Cada tanto comparte una foto. Digamos que los "heavy users" o "heavy producers" de contenido son siempre una minoría, ya sea profesionales, ya sea influencers, streamers, no? Es siempre, yo no sé si acá estamos en un 20-80 o un 10-90 son estas curvas que siempre fue así? No? Si uno ve la Wikipedia, habrá un 5-10 por ciento de gente que genera contenido mucho menos incluso. Y un 90 por ciento que se [00:34:00] beneficia del trabajo de una minoría. Esto invierte la lógica capitalista? La mayoría vive de la minoría y esto pasaba antes también en otros, en otros sistemas. O sea que en ese sentido, es sólo una minoría de gente la que genera contenido de impacto, llamémoslo así, de alcance mayor.Pero bueno, yo creo que el hecho de que cualquier persona pueda dar ese salto para mí, está bien. Genera otra serie de problemas, no? Porque mientras que genera contenido, es un profesional o un periodista, digamos, todavía queda algo de normas éticas y que deben cumplir no? Yo veo que en el mundo de los streamers, el mundo de los Tik tokers etcétera, etcétera, lo primero que ellos dicen es, nosotros no somos periodistas. Y de esa forma, se inhiben de cualquier, control ético o de respeto a normas éticas profesionales. Por otro lado, las plataformas [00:35:00] Meta, Google, todas. Lo primero que te dicen es nosotros no somos medio de comunicación. Los contenidos los pone la gente.Nosotros no tenemos nada que ver con eso. Claro, ellos también ahí se alejan de toda la reglamentación. Por eso hubo que hacer. Europa y Estados Unidos tuvo que sacar leyes especiales porque ellos decían no, no, las leyes del periodismo a nosotros no nos alcanzan. Nosotros no somos editores de contenidos.Y es una mentira porque las plataformas sí editan contenido a través los algoritmos, porque nos están los algoritmos, nos están diciendo que podemos ver y que no está en primera página. No están filtrando información, o sea que están haciendo edición. Entonces, como que se generan estas equivocaciones.Y eso es uno de los elementos que lleva esta contaminación que mencioné antes en el en los ámbitos de la comunicación. Pero yo, si tuviera que elegir un ecosistema con pocos enunciadores pocos medios controlados por profesionales y este ecosistema [00:36:00] caótico en parte contaminado con muchos actores y muchas voces, yo prefiero el caos de hoy a la pobreza del sistema anterior.Prefiero lidiar, pelearme con y estar buscar de resolver el problema de tener mucha información, al problema de la censura y tener sólo dos, tres puntos donde se genera información. Yo he vivido en Argentina con dictadura militar con control férreo de medios, coroneles de interventores en la radio y la televisión que controlaban todo lo que se decía.Y yo prefiero el caos de hoy, aún con fake news y todo lo que quieras. Prefiero el caos de hoy a esa situación. Chris: Sí, sí, sí, sí. Es muy fuerte de pensar en eso para la gente que no han vivido en algo así, no? Osea algunos familiares extendidos han vivido en mundos comunistas, en el pasado en el este de Europa y no se hablan [00:37:00] exactamente así.Pero, se se hablan, no? Y se se dicen que lo que lo que no tenía ni lo que no tiene por control y por fuerza. Entonces, en ese como mismo sentido de lo que falta de la memoria vivida, me gustaría preguntarte sobre tu nuevo libro. Y sobre la evolución de medios. Entonces me gustaría preguntarte igual por nuestros oyentes que quizás no han estudiado mucho de la ecología de los medios Para ti qué es la evolución de los medios y por qué es importante para nuestro cambiante y comprensión del mundo. O sea, igual al lado y no solo pegado a la ecología de medios, pero la evolución de los medios,Carlos: Sí, te cuento ahí hay una disciplina, ya tradicional que es la historia y también está la historia de la comunicación y historia de los medios. [00:38:00] Hay libros muy interesantes que se titulan Historia de la Comunicación de Gutenberg a Internet o Historia de la Comunicación del Papiro a Tiktok. Entonces, qué pasa? Esos libros te dicen bueno, estaba el papiro, después vino el pergamino, el manuscrito, después en 1450 vino Gutenberg, llegó el libro. Pero eso el libro no te cuentan que pasó con el manuscrito, ni que pasó con el papiro. Y te dicen que llega la radio en 1920 y en 1950 llega la televisión y no te dicen que pasó con la radio, que pasó con el cine.Son historias lineales donde un medio parece que va sustituyendo al otro. Y después tenemos muchos libros muy buenos también. Historia de la radio, historia de la televisión, historia de internet, historia del periodismo. Como dije antes, retomando una idea, de McLuhan no podemos entender los medios aislados.Yo no puedo entender la evolución de la radio si no la vinculo a la prensa, a [00:39:00] la televisión y otro al podcast. Okey, entonces digo, necesitamos un campo de investigación, llamémoslo una disciplina en construcción, que es una teoría y también es metodología para poder entender el cambio mediático, todas estas transformaciones del ecosistema de medios a largo plazo y que no sea una sucesión de medios, sino, ver cómo esa red de medios fue evolucionando. Y eso yo lo llamo una teoría evolutiva o una "media evolution" Y es lo que estoy trabajando ahora. Claro, esta teoría, este enfoque, este campo de investigación toma muchas cosas de la ecología de los medios, empezando por Marshall McLuhan pero también gente de la tradición previa a la media ecology como Harold Innis, el gran historiador, economista de la comunicación y de la sociedad, que fue quizás el intelectual más famoso en Canadá en la primera mitad del siglo XX. Harold Innis que influenció mucho a Marshall McLuhan [00:40:00] Marshall McLuhann en la primera página de Gutenberg Galaxy, dice este libro no es otra cosa que una nota al pie de página de la obra de Harold Innis Entonces, Harold Innis que hizo una historia de los tiempos antiguos poniendo los medios al centro de esa historia. Para mí es fundamental. Incluso te diría a veces más que McLuhan, como referencia, a la hora de hacer una teoría evolutiva del cambio mediático. Y después, obviamente tomo muchas cosas de la historia de los medios.Tomo muchas cosas de la arqueología de los medios (media archeology). Tomo cosas también de la gente que investigó la historia de la tecnología, la construcción social de la tecnología. O sea, la media evolution es un campo intertextual, como cualquier disciplina que toma cosas de todos estos campos para poder construir una teoría, un enfoque, una mirada que sea más a largo plazo, que no sea una sucesión de medios, sino que vea la evolución de todo el ecosistema mediático, prestando mucha atención a las relaciones [00:41:00] entre medios, y con esta visión más compleja sistémica de cómo cambian las cosas.Yo creo que el cambio mediático es muy rápido y necesitamos una teoría para poder darle un sentido a todo este gran cambio, porque si nos quedamos analizando cosas muy micro, muy chiquititas, no vemos los grandes cambios. No nos podemos posicionar... esto un poco como el fútbol. Los mejores jugadores son los que tienen el partido en la cabeza y saben dónde está todo. No están mirando la pelota, pero saben dónde están los otros jugadores? Bueno, yo creo que la media evolution sirve para eso. Más allá de que hoy estemos todos hablando de la IA generativa. No? Tener esta visión de de conjunto de todo el ecosistema mediático y tecnológico, yo creo que es muy útil.Chris: Mm. Wow Increíble, increíble. Sí. Sí. Pienso mucho en como las nuevas generaciones o las generaciones más jóvenes en el día de hoy. O sea, [00:42:00] al menos más joven que yo, que la mayoría, como que tiene 20 años hoy, no tienen una memoria vívida de cómo fuera el mundo, sin redes sociales o sin el internet. Y así como me voy pensando en mi vida y como yo, no tengo una memoria de vida como fuera el mundo sin pantallas de cualquier tipo, o sea de tele de compus. No solo de internet o redes. Carlos: Sí, no, te decia que mi padre vivió, mi padre tiene 90 años y él se recuerda en el año 58, 59, su casa fue la primera en un barrio de Rosario que tuvo televisión y transmitían a partir de la tarde seis, siete de la tarde. Entonces venían todos los vecinos y vecinas a ver televisión a la casa de mi abuela. Entonces cada uno, cada generación tiene sus historias. No? Chris: Ajá. Ajá. Sí. Pues sí. Y también, como dijiste, para [00:43:00] entender los medios como sujetos o objetos individuales, o sea en su propio mundo, no? Este recuerdo un poco de la metáfora de Robin Wall Kimmerer que escribió un libro que se llama Braiding Sweetgrass o Trenzando Pasto Dulce supongo, en español. Y mencionó que para entender el entendimiento indígena, digamos entre comillas de tiempo, no necesitamos pensar en una línea, una flecha desde el pasado hacia el futuro. Pero, un lago, mientras el pasado, presente, y futuro existen, a la vez, en ese lago.Y también pienso como en el lugar, el pasado, presente, y el futuro, como todos esos medios existiendo a la vez, como en un lago y obviamente en una ecología de su evolución de sus cambios. Carlos: Es, muy interesante eso. Después te voy a pedir la referencia del libro porque, claro, [00:44:00] McLuhan siempre decía que el contenido de un medio es otro medio. Entonces, puede pasar que un medio del pasado deja su huella o influye en un medio del futuro. Y entonces ahí se rompe la línea temporal. Y esos son los fenómenos que a mí me interesa estudiar. Chris: Mmm, mmm, pues Carlos para terminar, tengo dos últimas preguntas para ti. Esta vez un poco alineado con el turismo, y aunque no estas enfocado tanto en en el estudio de turismo. Por mis estudios y investigaciones y por este podcast, he amplificado esa definición de turismo para ver cómo existiría más allá de una industria. Y para mí, el turismo incluye también el deseo de ver una persona, un lugar o una cultura como destino, como algo útil, temporal en su valor de uso y por tanto, desechable. Entonces, me gustaría [00:45:00] preguntarte, si para ti parece que nuestros medios populares, aunque esto es un tiempo, digamos con más libertad de otros lugares o tiempos en el pasado, más autoritarianos o totalitarianos? Si te ves la posibilidad o la evidencia de que nuestros medios digamos como mainstream más usados, están creando o promoviendo un , un sentido de alienación en la gente por efectivamente quedarles a distancia al otro o la otra.Carlos: Yo ya te dije no, no tengo una visión apocalíptica de los medios. Nunca, la tuve. Esto no quita de que los medios y como dijimos antes, tienen problemas. Generan también contaminación. Llamémoslo así si seguimos con la metáfora, ? El tema de alienación viene desde hace [00:46:00] muchísimos años. Ya cuando estudiaba en la universidad, nunca sintonicé con las teorías de la alienación.El concepto de alienación viene del siglo XIX. Toda una teoría de la conciencia, el sujeto, el proletario, llamémoslo, así que tenía que tomar conciencia de clase. Bueno, las raíces de esa visión del concepto alienación vienen de ahí. Yo, a mí nunca me convenció, justamente. Y acá si interesante.El aporte de América Latina en teorías de la comunicación siempre fue diferente. Fue reivindicar la resignificación, la resemantización el rol activo del receptor, cuando muchas veces las teorías que venían de Europa o Estados Unidos tenían esta visión del receptor de la comunicación como un ser pasivo. En ese sentido, la media ecology nunca entró en ese discurso porque se manejaba con otros parámetros, pero digamos que lo que era el mainstream de la investigación de estados unidos, pero también de Europa, siempre coincidían en esto en considerar el receptor pasivo, alienado, [00:47:00] estupidizado por los medios. Y yo realmente nunca, me convenció ese planteo, ni antes ni hoy, ni con la televisión de los 70 y 80, ni con el tiktok de hoy.Esto no quita que puede haber gente que tenga alguna adicción, etcétera, etcétera. Pero yo no creo que toda la sociedad sea adicta hoy a la pantallita. Deja de ser adicción. Okey. Esto no implica que haya que no tener una visión crítica. Esto no implica que haya que eventualmente regular los usos de ciertas tecnologías, obviamente.Pero de ahí a pensar que estamos en un escenario apocalíptico, de idiotización total del homo sapiens o de alienación. Yo no lo veo, ni creo que lo los estudios empíricos confirmen eso. Más allá que a veces hay elecciones y no nos gusten los resultados.Pero ahí es interesante, porque cuando tu propio partido político pierde, siempre se le echa la culpa a los medios porque ganó el otro. Pero cuando tu partido político gana, nadie dice nada de los medios. Ganamos porque somos mejores, [00:48:00] porque tenemos mejores ideas, porque somos más democráticos, porque somos más bonitos.Entonces, claro te das cuenta que se usan los medios como chivo expiatorio para no reconocer las propias debilidades políticas a la hora de denunciar una propuesta o de seducir al electorado.Chris: Claro, claro. Ya pues estos temas son vastos y complejos. Y por eso me gusta, y por eso estoy muy agradecido por pasar este tiempo contigo, Carlos.Pero los temas requieren un profundo disciplina para comprender, o al menos según yo, como alguien que está muy nuevo a estos temas. Entonces, a nuestra época, parece que somos, según yo, arrastrados a una velocidad sin precedentes. Nuestras tecnologías están avanzando y quizás socavando simultáneamente nuestra capacidad de comprender lo que está sucediendo en el mundo. Los usamos como protesta a veces como, como mencionaste, [00:49:00] pero sin una comprensión más profunda de cómo nos usan también. Entonces tengo la curiosidad por saber qué papel desempeña la ecología de los medios en la redención o curación de la cultura en nuestro tiempo. Cómo podría la ecología de los medios ser un aliado, quizás, en nuestros caminos? Carlos: Sí, yo creo que esta idea estaba presente, no? En los teóricos de la media ecology, digamos la primera generación.Ahora que lo pienso, estaba también en la semiótica de Umberto Eco, no? Cuando decía la semiótica más allá de analizar cómo se construye significado, también aporta a mejorar la vida significativa, o sea, la vida cultural, la vida comunicacional, nuestro funcionamiento como sujeto, digamos. Y yo creo que en ese sentido, la media ecology también.Digamos, si nosotros entendemos el ecosistema mediático, vamos a poder sacarlo mejor [00:50:00] coevolucionar mejor. Vamos a ser más responsables también a la hora de generar contenidos, a la hora de retwittear de manera a veces automática ciertas cosas. Yo creo que es todo un crecimiento de vivir una vida mediática sana, que yo creo que hoy existe esa posibilidad.Yo estoy en Twitter desde el 2008-2009 y sólo dos veces tuve así un encontronazo y bloqueé a una persona mal educada. Después el resto de mi vida en Twitter, es rica de información de contactos. Aprendo muchísimo me entero de cosas que se están investigando. O sea, también están uno elegir otras cosas.Y por ejemplo, donde veo que yo hay que hay redes que no me aportan nada, no directamente ni entro. También es eso de aprender a sacar lo mejor de este ecosistema mediático. Y lo mismo para el ecosistema natural. Así como estamos aprendiendo a preocuparnos de dónde viene la comida, [00:51:00] cuánto tiempo se va a tardar en disolver este teléfono móvil por los componentes que tiene. Bueno, también es tomar conciencia de eso. Ya sea en el mundo natural, como en el mundo de la comunicación. Y yo creo que todos estos conocimientos, en este caso, la media ecology nos sirve para captar eso, no? Y mejorar nosotros también como sujetos, que ya no somos más el centro del universo, que esta es la otra cuestión. Somos un átomo más perdido entre una complejidad muy grande. Chris: Mm. Mm, pues que estas obras y trabajos y estudios tuyos y de los demás nos da la capacidad de leer y comprender ese complejidad, no?O sea, parece más y más complejo cada vez y nos requiere como más y más discernimiento. Entonces, yo creo que pues igual, hemos metido mucho en tu voluntad y capacidad de [00:52:00] hacer eso y ponerlo en el mundo. Entonces, finalmente Carlos me gustaría a extender mi agradecimiento y la de nuestros oyentes por tu tiempo hoy, tu consideración y tu trabajo.Siento que pues, la alfabetización mediática y la ecología de los medios son extremadamente deficientes en nuestro tiempo y su voluntad de preguntar sobre estas cosas y escribir sobre ellas es una medicina para un mundo quebrantado y para mi turístico. Entonces, así que muchísimas gracias, Carlos, por venir hoy.Carlos: Gracias. Te agradezco por las preguntas. Y bueno, yo creo que el tema del turismo es un tema que está ocupa lugar central hoy. Si tú estuvieras en Barcelona, verías que todos los días se está debatiendo este tema. Así que yo creo que bueno, adelante con esa reflexión y esa investigación sobre el turismo, porque es muy pertinente y necesaria.Chris: Pues sí, gracias. [00:53:00] Igual yo siento que hay una conexión fuerte entre esas definiciones más amplias de turismo y la ecología de medios. O sea, ha abierto una apertura muy grande para mí para entender el turismo más profundamente. Igual antes de terminar Carlos, cómo podrían nuestros oyentes encontrar tus libros y tu trabajo?Sé que hemos hablado de dos libros que escribiste, pero hay mucho más. Muchísimo más. Entonces, cómo se pueden encontrarlos y encontrarte?Carlos: Lo más rápido es en en mi blog, que es hipermediaciones.com Ahí van a encontrar información sobre todos los libros que voy publicando, etcétera, etc. Y después, bueno, yo soy muy activo, como dije en Twitter X. Me encuentran la letra CEscolari y de Carlos es mi Twitter. Y bueno, también ahí trato de difundir información sobre estos [00:54:00] temas.Como dije antes, aprendo mucho de esa red y trato de también devolver lo que me dan poniendo siempre información pertinente. Buenos enlaces. Y no pelearme mucho.Chris: Muy bien, muy bien, pues voy a asegurar que esos enlaces y esas páginas estén ya en la sección de tarea el sitio web de El fin del turismo cuando sale el episodio. Igual otras entrevistas y de tus libros. No hay falta. Entonces, con mucho gusto, los voy compartiendo. Bueno, Carlos, muchísimas gracias y lo aprecio mucho.Carlos: Muchas gracias y nos vemos en México.English TranscriptionChris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast The End of Tourism, Carlos. Thank you for being able to speak with me today. It's a great pleasure to have you here with me today.Carlos: No, thank you, Chris, for the invitation. It is a great pleasure and honor to chat with you, a great traveler and, well, I have never directly investigated the subject of tourism.Well, I understand that we are going to talk about media ecology and collateral issues that can help us better understand, give meaning to all that is happening in the world of tourism. Well, I work in Barcelona. I don't live in the city exactly, but I work at the university in Barcelona, in the central area.Well, every time I go to the city, the number of tourists increases every day and the debate on tourism in all its dimensions increases. So it is a topic that is on the agenda, right?Chris: Yes, well I imagine that even if you don't like to think or if you don't want to think about tourism there, it is inevitable to have a personal lesson [00:01:00] from that industry.Carlos: Yes, to the point that it is almost becoming a taxonomic criterion, right? ...of classification or cities with a lot of tourists, cities or places without tourists that are the most sought after until they are filled with tourists. So we are practically in a vicious circle.Chris: Well, at some point I know that it changes, the cycle breaks, at least to account for what we are doing with the behavior.And I understand that this also has a lot to do with the ecology of the media, the lack of ability to understand our behaviors, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, etc. So, before continuing with your work and deeds, I would like to ask you about your path and your life.First, I wonder if you could define for our listeners what media ecology is and how you [00:02:00] became interested in this field? How did you come to dedicate your life to this study?Carlos: Yes. Let's see a little bit. There is one, this is the official history. We would say media ecology, it is a field of research, let's say, that was born in the 60s. We must take into account above all the work of Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian researcher who is very famous worldwide. He was perhaps the most famous media researcher philosopher in the 60s and 70s.And a colleague of his, Neil Postman, who was at New York University, was a bit, let's say, among the people who surrounded these two references, no, in the 60s, from there it was brewing, let's say, what was later called media ecology. It is said that the first person to talk about media ecology, who applied this metaphor to the media, was Marshall McLuhan himself in some private conversations, [00:03:00] letters that were sent to each other in the late 50s, early 60s, by researchers on these topics?Let's say the first public appearance of the concept of media ecology was a lecture in 1968 by Neil Postman. It was a public speech that talked about how the media transforms us and how the media transforms us, forming an environment in which we grow, develop, and so on. And we are sometimes not very aware of this environment that surrounds us and shapes us.He first used the concept of media ecology in a public lecture. And then, if we go back to the early 70s, Postman himself created the first program in media ecology at NYU, at New York University. So, in 73, 74 and 75, what I call the second generation began to emerge, of people [00:04:00] some of whom were trained in these courses in New York.For example, Christine Nystrom was the first PhD thesis on my ecology; people like Paul Levinson who in 1979 defended a PhD thesis directed by Postman on the evolution of the media, right? And the same thing happened in Toronto in the 70s. Marshall McLuhan died in December 80.Let's say that the 70s were his last decade of intellectual production. And there are a number of collaborators at that time, very young people like Robert Logan, Derrick De Kerchove, who later continued to work a bit along these lines, along these lines. And there we talk about the Canadian front, eh?This whole second generation was developing, expanding and applying. Let's not forget Eric McLuhan, Marshall's son, who was also part of this whole movement. [00:05:00] And if I remember correctly, in 2000, the Media Ecology Association was created, which is the Media Ecology Association, which is an academic, scientific organization that brings together people who deal with media ecology.If we think at a more scientific epistemological level, we can think of this metaphor of media ecology from two or three perspectives. On the one hand, this idea that media create environments. This is a very strong idea of Marsha McLuhan, of Postman and of this whole group, isn't it? The media - "medium" understood in a very broad sense, no, any technology could be a medium for them.For Marsha McLuhan, the wheel is a medium. A telescope is a medium. A radio is a medium and television is a medium, right? I mean, any technology can be considered a medium. Let's say that these media, these technologies, generate a [00:06:00] environment that transforms us. It transforms our way, sometimes our way of thinking, our way of perceiving the world, our conception of time and space.And we are not aware of that change. Let's think that, I don't know, before 1800, if someone had to make a trip of a thousand kilometers (and here we are approaching tourism) kilometers was a trip that had to be planned many months in advance. With the arrival of the train, we are already in 1800, those kilometers were shortened. Let's say no? There we see as if today they tell us 1000 kilometers.Well, yes, we take a plane. It's an hour, an hour and a quarter of a journey. Today, 1000 kilometres is much less than 200 years ago and even in terms of time, time has changed. Right? All of that is a consequence, let's say, of this change, our perception is a consequence of a series of media and technologies.The railroad. Obviously, today we have airplanes. The same digital networks that have somewhat brought us this idea of "time [00:07:00] real," this anxiety of wanting everything fast, right? That is also a consequence of these environmental changes generated by the media and technologies, eh? This is a very strong idea, when McLuhan and Postman talked about this in the 60s, they were strong intuitions that they had from a very intelligent observation of reality. Today, cognitive sciences, or rather neuroscience, have confirmed these hypotheses. In other words, today there are a series of methodologies to study the brain and we can already see how technologies...The media even affects the physical structure of the brain. Right? Another thing that is historical is that the media affects our memory. This comes from Plato 2,500 years ago, who said that writing would kill the memory of men. Well, we can think for ourselves, right?Or at least this generation, who [00:08:00] lived in a world before and after mobile apps. 30 years ago, 25 years ago, I had 30-40 phone numbers in my memory. Today I don't have any. And let's also think about GPS, right? At one time, taxi drivers in London, which is a Latin city, knew the city by heart. And today, that's no longer necessary because they have GPS.And when they went to study the brains of London taxi drivers, they saw that certain areas of the brain had shrunk, so to speak, which are the areas that manage the spatial part. McLuhan already talked about this in the 60s. He said that changes narcotize certain areas of the mind, he said.But well, we see that a lot of empirical research, very cutting-edge neuroscience research is confirming all these thoughts, all these things that were said in the 60s onwards, by media ecology. Another possibility is to understand [00:09:00] this as a media ecosystem, Marshall McLuhan always said we cannot give it meaning,We cannot understand a medium in isolation from other media. It is as if media only acquire meaning in relation to other media. Neil Postman and many other people from the school of media ecology also defend this position, that, well, we cannot understand the history of cinema if we do not link it to video games, if we do not link it to the appearance of television.And so with all the media, right? Eh? There are some very interesting works. For example, about how in the 19th century, different media, we could say, co-evolved with each other. The press, the telegraph. The train, which also transported newspapers, news agencies appeared. I mean, we see how it is very difficult to understand the development of the press in the 19th century and we don't link it to the telephone, if we don't link it to photography, if we don't link it to radio photography, [00:10:00] also later on.I mean, this idea is very strong. It is also one of the principles that I consider fundamental to this vision, which would be that the media are not alone, they are part of an ecosystem and if we want to understand what is happening and how all this works, we cannot, uh, analyze the media in isolation from the rest.There is a third interpretation. I don't know if it's too metaphorical, right? Above all, people in Italy like the researcher Fausto Colombo from Milan or Michele Cometa, he is a researcher from Sicily, Michele Cometa who talks about the turn, the ecomedia turn. These researchers are moving in a whole conception according to which, we are in a unique media ecosystem that is contaminated.It is contaminated by "fake news" it is contaminated by false news, it is contaminated by hate speech, etc., etc. So they, let's say, take up this ecological metaphor to say [00:11:00] We have to clean this ecosystem just as the natural ecosystem is contaminated, it needs a cleaning intervention, let's say a purification, eh?The media ecosystem is also in the same danger, isn't it? And these people are also calling attention, and I am very close to this line of work on the material dimension of communication. And this also has to do with tourism, right? The environmental impact that communication has today.Training an artificial intelligence involves a huge amount of electricity; keeping social networks running, eh, TikTok, YouTube, whatever, involves millions of servers running that suck up electricity and also have to be cooled, consuming even more electricity. And that has a significant impact on the climate.So, well, let's say, we see that this metaphor of the ecological, applied to the media, gives rise to two or three interpretations.Chris: Mmm. [00:12:00] Wow. I feel like when I started taking that course from Andrew McLuhan, Marshall's grandson, as I mentioned, it changed my perspective completely - on the world, on the way I understand and how I don't understand our technologies, my movements, etc. But now, from a person who has been studying this for decades, I would like to know how you started. I mean, Andrew, for example, has the excuse of his lineage, not his father and his grandfather.But then, as a young Argentine, he began learning about media ecology.Carlos: Well, I'll tell you. I studied communication in Argentina, in Rosario. I finished college. The last exam was on June 24, 1986, which was the day that Lionel Messi was born in Rosario, Argentina, on the same day. And [00:13:00] I worked, I collaborated in a class in a subject that was communication theories.And I even taught until 1990, three years, because after that I went to live in Italy. At that time, we read Marshall McLuhan, but it was a very ideologically biased reading. In Latin America, you must have seen it in Mexico. There is a whole history, a tradition of criticism from the media, especially of everything that comes from the United States, and Canada is very close to the United States.So, let's say that in the 70s and 80s and until today I would tell you that Marshall McLuhan was often criticized because he did not criticize the media. I mean, he had a vision. He said, Neil Postman, yes, he had a very critical vision. But in that case, this was one of the big differences between Postman and McLuhan, that Marshall McLuhan, at least in [00:14:00] public, he did not criticize the media. He said, well, I am a researcher, I send out probes. I am exploring what is happening.And he never joined in... And I think that was very clever of him... he never joined in this worldwide chorus of criticism of the media. At that time, television was a monster for many people.Children were not supposed to watch television. A bit like what happens today with cell phones and what happens today with TikTok. At that time, television was the monster. At that time, there was a lot of research in the United States, which was already based on the premise that television and the media are bad for people.We see that it is a story that repeats itself. I think that in that sense, Marshall McLuhan, very intelligently, did not join that critical chorus and he really dedicated himself to thinking about the media from a much freer perspective, not anchored by this vision that I believe is too ideologized, which is very strong in Latin America. It is very strong. This does not imply [00:15:00] letting down one's guard, not being critical. On the contrary.But I think that true critical thinking starts from not saying so much ideology, we say "this is already bad. Let's look at this." There will be good things. There will be bad things. There will be things, which is undeniable, that the media, even if we say they are good, will transform us. And I think that was the important thing about the McLuhanian idea.So my first approach to McLuhan was from the perspective of critical authors who, well, yes, come from the United States, they don't criticize the media. We're going to criticize him, right? And that was my first approach to Marshall McLuhan.I went to Italy in the 90s. I was out of college for almost eight years, working in digital media, web development, multimedia products, and pretext. And in the late 90s, I said, I want to go back to college. I want to be a PhD. And I said, "I want to do a PhD. Well. Being in Italy, the PhD was going to be in semiotics." So I did a [00:16:00] PhD. My thesis was on semiotics of interfaces.There I had a vision of digital interfaces that consider, for example, instruments like the mouse or joystick as extensions of our body, right? The mouse extends the hand and puts it inside the screen, right? Or the joystick or any other element of the digital interface? Of course. If we talk about the mouse being an extension of the hand, that is a McLuhanian idea.The media as extensions of the human being as a subject. So, of course, I reread McLuhan in Italian at the end of the 90s, and I reconciled with McLuhan because I found many interesting things to understand precisely the interaction with digital machines.In 2002, I moved with my family to Spain. I returned to university life. [00:17:00] And there I began to study the relationship between old and new media. Then I recovered the idea of ecosystem. I recovered the whole new idea, the id

As technology increasingly blurs the distinction between man and machine, new questions emerge about the future of religion, education, work, politics, and family life. Today, Todd and Carl engage in a thought-provoking discussion with Joshua Pauling, co-author of the book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine. Together, they explore the implications of technology on humanity, the concept of being a cyborg, and how modern digital environments shape our understanding of human nature.  The conversation delves into the ethical challenges posed by technological advancements, as well as the opportunities afforded to flourish in the digital age rooted in the sacramental life of the Church and the rich tradition of liberal learning. Technology is posing tremendous opportunities for getting the word out in ways that weren't possible before, but also tremendous challenges. – Todd Pruitt We are pleased to offer three copies of Joshua Pauling and Robin Phillips' book, Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine, to our listeners, thanks to the generosity of Basilian Media & Publishing. Enter here for the opportunity to win.   Show Notes: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death. That means this year is the 40th birthday of this landmark book. And in that 40 years, Postman's troubling prophesies have mostly come true. Screens have reshaped our minds, our relationships, and our culture. Ivan Mesa and Brett McCracken say that “social media and smartphones have brought an appetite for distraction, an epidemic of loneliness, and increased rates of mental health challenges. Their new book, Scrolling Ourselves to Death, is a collection of essays by them and many others who have studied not only Neil Postman's book, but also the culture – examining both through a Christian worldview lens. Both Postman's original book, and this new book celebrating Postman, have much to offer Christians today, and I'm delighted to have both Brett and Ivan on the podcast. Brett McCracken is a senior editor for The Gospel Coalition and the author of many excellent books, including one of my recent favorites, The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World. Ivan Mesa ha a PhD from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the editorial director for The Gospel Coalition. He is the author of Before You Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing Doubt in the Church. The producer for today's program is Jeff McIntosh. I'm your host Warren Smith. Until next time, may God bless you.

Bienvenidos a un nuevo Spaces en directo. Como si yo fuese el protagonista de Ellos Viven hoy vengo a soltarles una entradilla en forma de arenga. Ponte cómodo y abre tus oídos. ¡Abrelos porque te voy a contar la verdad que no quieren que sepas! Todo este rollo del nihilismo, la gente actuando como niños, obsesionada con memes estúpidos, videos de TikTok y cosas sin importancia vital, no es casualidad. No, no, no. Es un plan orquestado, una red tejida por las élites para mantenernos dormidos, distraídos y sin cuestionar nada. Déjame que te lo explique todo, pieza por pieza, porque esto es más grande de lo que parece. ¡Escucha bien, porque hasta la palabra "nihilista" tiene un trasfondo que te hace pensar quién quiere que pensemos en "nada"! La palabra viene del latín nihil, que significa "nada", puro vacío, la ausencia total de significado. Pero no te engañes, esto no es solo un capricho lingüístico, ¡es una pista de cómo nos han manipulado para abrazar el vacío! El término empezó a tomar forma en el siglo XVIII, pero se puso de moda en el XIX, cuando filósofos, escritores y, sí, ciertas élites comenzaron a jugar con la idea de que nada importa, que no hay verdad, ni Dios, ni propósito. La raíz latina nihil ya se usaba en la Antigua Roma, en textos legales y filosóficos, para hablar de cosas que no existían o carecían de valor. Pero el nihilismo como lo conocemos hoy empezó a gestarse con los pensadores modernos, sobre todo en Europa. Uno de los primeros en darle forma fue Friedrich Nietzsche, el filósofo alemán que en 1880 gritó a los cuatro vientos que "Dios ha muerto" (En Así hablo Zarathustra, 1883). Nietzsche no estaba celebrando, ¡estaba advirtiendo! Decía que sin un sistema de valores (como la religión o la moral tradicional), la humanidad caería en un abismo donde nada tiene sentido, un vacío que llamó nihilismo. Pero aquí viene lo sospechoso: mientras Nietzsche alertaba sobre el peligro, otros parecían encantados con la idea. ¿Quiénes? Los que querían una sociedad sin rumbo, fácil de controlar. El término "nihilista" se popularizó antes de Nietzsche, en Rusia, con los nihilistas rusos de los 1860s, un grupo de intelectuales y revolucionarios que rechazaban toda autoridad: el zar, la iglesia, la familia, todo. El escritor Iván Turguénev los inmortalizó en su novela Padres e hijos (1862), donde describe a un personaje, Bazarov, como un "nihilista" que no cree en nada, solo en la ciencia y la destrucción del viejo orden. Pero, ¿sabes qué? Algunos dicen que estos nihilistas no eran solo rebeldes, sino peones de un juego mayor. Potencias extranjeras y grupos subversivos financiaban ideas radicales para desestabilizar Rusia. ¿Te suena familiar? Es el mismo truco que usan hoy: siembra el caos, haz que la gente crea en "nada", y tendrás un rebaño sin dirección. Y aquí entra la conspiración: la palabra "nihilista" no solo describe a los que no creen en nada, sino que se ha convertido en una herramienta para los que quieren que vivas en el vacío. Fíjate en cómo la cultura moderna, desde Hollywood hasta las redes sociales, glorifica la idea de que "nada importa". ¿Por qué? Porque un nihilista no lucha, no cuestiona, no se organiza. Solo consume, se ríe de memes absurdos y se pierde en la matrix digital. Pero sigamos hablando de la antigua Roma ya que en la actualidad vivimos en un circo moderno, una versión 2.0 del "panem et circenses" de los romanos. En la antigua Roma, los emperadores daban pan y espectáculos para que el pueblo no se revelara. Hoy, las élites globales —los banqueros, los dueños de las Big Tech, los políticos corruptos— hacen lo mismo, pero con esteroides. Nos bombardean con Netflix, tendencias virales, influencers haciendo retos absurdos y realities que no aportan nada. ¿Por qué? Porque mientras estamos pegados al celular viendo un gato bailando o discutiendo sobre el último drama de Twitter, no estamos pensando en los problemas reales: la desigualdad, el control económico, las guerras que financian a escondidas. Esto no es nuevo, ¿sabes? Ya lo decían tipos como Theodor Adorno, un filósofo alemán de la Escuela de Frankfurt, que en los años 40 y 50 escribió sobre la "industria cultural". Este hombre, junto a su colega Max Horkheimer, advirtió que los medios masivos (cine, radio, prensa) no eran solo entretenimiento, sino herramientas para estandarizar el pensamiento y mantener a las masas pasivas. Adorno decía que la cultura pop nos convierte en consumidores obedientes, adictos a lo superficial, mientras las élites manipulan desde las sombras. Y eso fue antes de internet, ¡imagínate ahora con algoritmos que saben exactamente qué mostrarte para mantenerte enganchado! Pero no se queda ahí. Esto va más allá del entretenimiento. Hay una ingeniería social en marcha, un plan deliberado para degradar nuestra cultura y hacernos más tontos, más infantiles. Mira cómo han transformado la educación: menos filosofía, menos historia crítica, menos lógica, y más énfasis en cosas vagas como "habilidades socioemocionales" o en fomentar la cultura del grupo, o lo que es lo mismo, del rebaño. ¿Quién está detrás? Algunos señalan a fundaciones globalistas como la Rockefeller o la Open Society de George Soros, que supuestamente financian cambios curriculares para suavizar las mentes. Y no olvidemos a Hollywood y la música pop: letras vacías, películas que glorifican el hedonismo, la violencia o el individualismo extremo. Todo esto nos empuja a un nihilismo puro: si nada importa, si no hay valores profundos, ¿para qué luchar? Mejor nos quedamos viendo videos de 15 segundos en TikTok, riéndonos de cosas absurdas mientras el mundo se desmorona. Adorno lo vio venir y lo puso en practica con la puesta en marcha de grupos como Los Beatles: él decía que la cultura de masas nos aliena, nos hace olvidar quiénes somos y nos convierte en engranajes de una máquina capitalista que solo beneficia a los de arriba. Y hablando de tecnología, ¡aquí viene lo gordo! Las redes sociales no son un accidente, son armas psicológicas. Los algoritmos de plataformas como Instagram, TikTok o YouTube están diseñados para hackear tu cerebro. ¿Sabías que empresas como Meta contratan a neurocientíficos para perfeccionar sus sistemas? Es verdad, hay estudios, como los de Tristan Harris, exdiseñador de Google, que revelan cómo estas plataformas manipulan la dopamina, el químico del placer, para mantenerte enganchado. Cada "like", cada notificación, cada video absurdo que no puedes parar de ver es parte de un diseño para que no pienses, no reflexiones, no crezcas. Esto crea una sociedad infantil, incapaz de concentrarse más de 10 segundos, obsesionada con lo instantáneo. ¿Y quién controla estas empresas? Los mismos multimillonarios que financian agendas globales, como los de Silicon Valley o el Foro Económico Mundial. ¿Coincidencia? No lo creo. Ahora, conecta los puntos: este nihilismo, esta despreocupación, no es solo cultural, es un declive inducido. Hay teorías que dicen que todo esto forma parte de un plan mayor, algo como el "Nuevo Orden Mundial" o “El Gran Reset". El Foro Económico Mundial, liderado por tipos como Klaus Schwab, habla abiertamente de un "gran reseteo" para cambiar la economía y la sociedad. ¿Y qué mejor manera de controlar a la gente que debilitándola? Destruyen los valores tradicionales —familia, comunidad, religión— y los reemplazan con un individualismo vacío, un "sé tú mismo" que en realidad significa "consume y no pienses". Sin un propósito mayor, la gente cae en el nihilismo, se vuelve cínica, se ríe de todo, y se refugia en cosas absurdas como coleccionar Funko Pops o pelear en redes por tonterías. Esto no es espontáneo, ¡es un diseño! Mi teoría es que hay fuerzas más oscuras, no solo las mal llamadas élites, sino algo espiritual, como una guerra contra el alma humana. Esas elites psicopatas que Pedro Bustamente denomino elites psicopatocraticas. Mira lo que pasó con el arte: antes inspiraba, ahora tenemos "arte contemporáneo" que parece un chiste, como un plátano pegado a una pared vendido por millones. Eso no es arte, es una burla para mantenernos confundidos. En el informe Iron Mountain de 1966 que pidió el presiente Kennedy antes de ser asesinado se explicaba perfectamente como la degradación del arte fue planifica por la CIA, allí se decia: “También resulta instructivo observar que el carácter de la cultura de una sociedad mantiene una estrecha relación con su potencial para hacer la guerra dentro del contexto de su época. No es ningún accidente que la actual "explosión cultural" en los Estados Unidos tenga lugar en una época marcada por un desarrollo inusualmente rápido de la tecnología bélica. Esta relación se reconoce más generalmente de lo que dejaría entrever la literatura especializada en este tema. Por ejemplo, muchos artistas y autores están comenzando a expresar su preocupación acerca de las opciones de creatividad limitadas que prevén en un mundo sin guerras, quellos creen o esperan estará pronto entre nosotros. Actualmente, se están preparando para esta posibilidad realizando experimentaciones sin precedentes con formas carentes de sentido; sus intereses en años recientes se han focalizado crecientemente en diseños abstractos, emociones gratuitas, ocurrencias fortuitas y secuencias sin relación.” Y por si fuera poco, la sobrecarga de información nos ha fracturado. La posverdad, la polarización, las fake news: todo eso es parte del plan. En 2016, Oxford nombró "posverdad" como la palabra del año, describiéndola como un mundo donde los hechos objetivos importan menos que las emociones y las narrativas. ¿Y quién gana con esto? Los que controlan los medios y las plataformas. Si no confías en nada, si todo es un meme, entonces no hay verdad, no hay lucha, solo nihilismo. La gente se cansa, se rinde, y se entretiene con cosas absurdas porque es más fácil que enfrentar un mundo roto. Es como dijo Neil Postman en su libro Divirtiéndonos hasta la muerte (1985): “no nos están esclavizando con cadenas, sino con entretenimiento. Nos están matando con risas.” Entonces, ¿qué tenemos? Un plan maestro: usan los medios para distraernos, la tecnología para adormecernos, la educación para debilitarnos y la cultura para infantilizarnos. Todo para que no levantemos la cabeza y veamos quién mueve los hilos. La educación como decía Bertrand Rusell «estará bien confinada a la clase gobernante y al populacho no se le permitirá saber como estas convicciones fueron generadas«. ¿Los nombres? Algunos señalan a los Rockefeller, los Rothschild, el Foro Económico Mundial, las Big Tech. Yo sostengo que es más grande, que hay poderes que ni conocemos. Pero la prueba está a la vista: una sociedad nihilista, obsesionada con lo absurdo, que no sabe ni quién es Theodor Adorno ni por qué su advertencia sobre la cultura de masas es más relevante que nunca. Despierta, ¡esto no es un juego! Si quieres pruebas, mira las redes, busca los documentos filtrados de fundaciones globalistas publicados por Maria Desiluminate, Nuevo Desorden Mundial, o Desmontando a Babylon, o lee a Adorno, a Orwell, a Bertrand Ruseel o a Postman. Todo está ahí, pero tienes que querer verlo. ¡Despertad, porque nos tienen distraídos como marionetas en su circo! Las élites, desde los días de Adorno y su Escuela de Frankfurt hasta los titanes de Silicon Valley, han tejido un plan maestro: usar la industria cultural, los algoritmos dopamínicos y la posverdad para sumirnos en un nihilismo vacío. Nos inundan con entretenimientos absurdos —memes, TikToks, dramas de redes— para mantenernos infantiles, despreocupados y ciegos ante su control. La palabra "nihilista", nacida del latín nihil y moldeada por los rebeldes rusos y Nietzsche, es su arma secreta: nos convierten en creyentes de la "nada", mientras ellos mueven los hilos del poder desde las sombras. ………………………………………………………………………………………. ¡Agarraos porque os voy a contar una verdad oculta que los poderosos no quieren que sepais! Los sabateanos y el frankismo son la clave para entender cómo el mundo se sumió en el caos nihilista que vivimos hoy. Los sabateanos o sabateos son los discípulos del autoproclamado mesías judío Shabtai Tzvi, nacido en el imperio otomano, el cual se convirtió al Islam en 1666…¿bonita fecha, no creéis? Son partidarios de la Cábala y del Zohar y afirman la existencia de una ley oculta y secreta, los sabateos interpretaron la conversión de su líder como un mandamiento para practicar una religión oculta y secreta. Un tipo que en el siglo XVII se autoproclamó Mesías y dijo que la redención llegaba rompiendo todas las reglas. ¿Cumplir la Torá? ¡Pff, para qué! Él y sus seguidores sabateanos creían que el pecado era el camino a la salvación, una movida que ya olía a rebelión contra todo lo sagrado. Cuando Tzvi se convirtió al islam bajo presión otomana, sus seguidores más fieles, los Dönmeh, se volvieron criptojudíos, viviendo una doble vida mientras planeaban en las sombras. Esto no es teoría, ¡es historia pura que podéis rastrear! Luego aparece Jacob Frank, el verdadero cerebro maquiavélico. Este tipo, en el siglo XVIII, llevó el sabateanismo a otro nivel, diciendo que era el sucesor de Tzvi. Frank no solo quería romper las reglas, quería destruirlas por completo. Su lema era que el mundo debía caer en una "saturación de pecado" para forzar la llegada del Mesías. ¿Rituales raros? Claro, como esa movida en Lanškroun en 1756, donde sus seguidores bailaban alrededor de una mujer semidesnuda, diciendo que era la Shekhinah. Este es un término hebreo que viene de la raíz shajan ("habitar") y, en el judaísmo, se refiere a la presencia divina de Dios en el mundo, o a que una persona esta habitada por un espíritu, vamos que esta poseída. ¡Pura locura! Frank y sus frankistas se convirtieron al cristianismo en masa, pero no te engañes, era una fachada. En secreto, seguían con sus creencias locas, infiltrándose en la sociedad europea como una red oculta. Si cruzamos el charco hasta España y tenemos un siglo antes a los alumbrados, una secta mística del siglo XVI que también olía a subversión. Estos tipos, que surgieron alrededor de 1511 en Castilla, creían en un contacto directo con Dios a través de éxtasis y visiones, despreciando los sacramentos y la autoridad de la Iglesia. Decían que, al estar "iluminados" por Dios, no podían pecar, sin importar lo que hicieran. ¿Os suena familiar? Su idea de "dejamiento" (entregarse pasivamente a Dios) se parece mucho a la transgresión deliberada de Tzvi. La Inquisición los persiguió a muerte, encarcelando a líderes como Isabel de la Cruz y Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz en 1524, porque veían en ellos un peligro herético con tintes protestantes. Pero, ¿y si los alumbrados eran un eco temprano de la misma mentalidad antinomiana que Tzvi predicaría después? ¡Es como si alguien estuviera sembrando la semilla de la rebelión espiritual en distintos frentes! Y aquí entra el jesuitismo, la gran pieza que conecta todo en esta conspiración. La Compañía de Jesús, fundada en 1540 por Ignacio de Loyola, se creó para ser la vanguardia de la Contrarreforma, combatiendo herejías como el protestantismo y, sí, los alumbrados. Pero esperad, ¡aquí hay algo turbio! Los jesuitas eran famosos por su disciplina, su infiltración en las élites y su "obediencia ciega", algo que algunos conspiranoicos dicen que se parece sospechosamente a las tácticas de los Dönmeh sabateanos, que se colaban en otras religiones mientras mantenían sus creencias secretas. Es famoso el tema de la monista secreta, un texto que habla de las técnicas de infiltración que usaban y usan los jesuitas. Donde esta permitido hacer cualquier maldad con tal de salirse con la suya. Curiosamente, Ignacio de Loyola fue investigado por la Inquisición en 1527 por posible simpatía con los alumbrados, aunque salió libre. ¿Coincidencia? ¡Yo digo que no! Quizás los jesuitas, mientras combatían herejías, aprendieron un par de trucos de los alumbrados sobre manipulación y control espiritual, usándolos para su propia agenda de poder. Ahora, aquí viene lo gordo: esta idea de "redención a través del pecado" es el germen del nihilismo que hoy nos tiene atrapados. Frank no solo quería romper las leyes judías, sino TODAS las leyes morales. ¿Os suena familiar? ¡Es el eco de Nietzsche gritando que "Dios ha muerto"! La filosofía de Nietzsche, con su rechazo a los valores tradicionales y su idea de que no hay verdad absoluta, no salió de la nada. Bebió directo de esa fuente envenenada del frankismo, que decía que destruir el orden moral era el camino a la libertad. Los frankistas, con su desprecio por el Talmud y las normas, fueron los primeros en decir que nada importa, que todo vale si sirve al "gran plan". ¡Eso es nihilismo puro, amigos! Y no creais que esto se quedó en el siglo XVIII. Los frankistas, con sus conversiones falsas al cristianismo, se metieron en las élites de Europa. Hay quienes dicen que familias poderosas, incluso en América, tienen raíces frankistas. ¿Nombres como Brandeis o Frankfurter te dicen algo? No es casualidad. Estos tipos sembraron las semillas de una ideología que destruye cualquier sentido de propósito, dejando un vacío que hoy llamamos nihilismo moderno. Desde el marxismo cultural hasta los movimientos que promueven el caos moral, todo tiene el ADN de esa "involución" que Frank predicaba. No era una regresión biológica, ¡era un plan para sumir al mundo en la anarquía espiritual! Lo más loco es cómo lo hicieron: los frankistas no solo querían pecar, querían que el mundo entero se hundiera en el pecado. Frank decía que el caos moral forzaría la redención, pero, ¿y si la redención nunca llega? Lo que queda es un mundo donde nadie cree en nada, donde los valores se derrumban. Eso es exactamente lo que Nietzsche teorizó después, y lo que hoy vemos en la cultura: un vacío donde todo es relativo, donde no hay bien ni mal. El solipsismo satanista que impera por todas partes. Los frankistas, con sus rituales y su infiltración, fueron los arquitectos de esta mentalidad. No lo digo yo, ¡lo dicen los hechos históricos! No es ninguna sorpresa que el frankismo tuviera hasta 50,000 seguidores en su momento, muchos en Polonia, donde se mezclaron con la nobleza católica. Desde ahí, su influencia se extendió como un virus. Si queréis pruebas, leed los primeros trabajos de Gershom Scholem, que destripó el sabateanismo y mostró cómo sus ideas eran una bomba de relojería. La evolución del estudio de Scholem sobre el sabbateanismo sirve como prueba de la creciente reticencia de Scholem y otros muchos a criticar el proyecto sionista tras el Holocausto y la Segunda Guerra Mundial y de su giro gradual desde la marginalidad hacia convicciones políticas más dominantes. En resumen, los sabateanos y Frank armaron el escenario para el nihilismo actual. Su plan de "redención a través del pecado" no era misticismo inocente, era una declaración de guerra contra los valores. Nietzsche solo tomó el testigo y lo gritó más alto. Hoy, cuando ves una sociedad que no cree en nada, que celebra la transgresión por la transgresión, estás viendo el legado de Frank y sus locos. ¡Despierta, que el nihilismo no es casualidad, es un plan que lleva siglos en marcha! ………………………………………………………………………………………. ¡Y hasta aquí el podcast de hoy, amigos! Hemos desentrañado cómo las distracciones modernas y la infantilización de la sociedad nos mantienen en una danza perpetua de entretenimiento vacío, lejos de la verdad incómoda. Como decía Orwell, “el pueblo que elige corruptos, impostores, ladrones y traidores no es víctima, sino cómplice”. Y en la misma línea, Russell nos advertía que “la mayoría de las personas preferirían morir antes que pensar; de hecho, muchas lo hacen”. Así que, mientras el mundo nos lanza notificaciones y pantallas para anestesiarnos, recordad: despertad, cuestionad, pensad. Pero, claro, si todo esto os parece demasiado... ¡hoy no, mañana! ………………………………………………………………………………………. Conductor del programa UTP Ramón Valero @tecn_preocupado Canal en Telegram @UnTecnicoPreocupado Un técnico Preocupado un FP2 IVOOX UTP http://cutt.ly/dzhhGrf BLOG http://cutt.ly/dzhh2LX Ayúdame desde mi Crowfunding aquí https://cutt.ly/W0DsPVq Invitados ………………………………………………………………………………………. Enlaces citados en el podcast: AYUDA A TRAVÉS DE LA COMPRA DE MIS LIBROS https://tecnicopreocupado.com/2024/11/16/ayuda-a-traves-de-la-compra-de-mis-libros/ MIRANDO HACIA ATRÁS VI: ANTICIPÁNDONOS A HG WELLS CUARTA PARTE https://tecnicopreocupado.com/2020/01/31/mirando-hacia-atras-vi-anticipandonos-a-hg-wells-cuarta-parte/ LA PEDAGOGÍA WALDORF CREADA POR STEINER, LA NEW AGE Y EL LUCIFERANISMO https://tecnicopreocupado.com/2018/04/02/la-pedagogia-waldorf-creada-por-steiner-la-new-age-y-el-luciferanismo/ APRENDER DEL PASADO PARA VALERNOS EN EL FUTURO https://tecnicopreocupado.com/2014/05/17/aprender-del-pasado-para-valernos-en-el-futuro/ DESTRUCCIÓN DE LA FAMILIA Y LOS VALORES https://tecnicopreocupado.com/2018/07/10/destruccion-de-la-familia-y-los-valores/ DESTRUCCIÓN DE LA FAMILIA Y LOS VALORES. 2ª PARTE https://tecnicopreocupado.com/2019/01/14/destruccion-de-la-familia-y-los-valores-2a-parte/ ………………………………………………………………………………………. Música utilizada en este podcast: Tema inicial Heros Epílogo Mañana - Los Iberos https://youtu.be/uVa-Yi07ZYk?feature=shared

This episode, Neil Almond, creator of the amazing Teacher Prompts newsletter, returns to the show. We begin by reflecting on some recent developments in the world of AI and then turn our attention to Neil's AI spin on Neil Postman's Technology Principles, where Neil expresses caution about the impact AI could have on our students' education and the role of teachers. You can access the shownotes here: mrbartonmaths.com/blog/ai-in-education-3

It's been 40 years since Neil Postman wrote his prophetic book, Amusing Ourselves To Death. From the Gospel Coalition, Brett McCracken and Dr. Ivan Mesa will show how the rapid advance of digital technology is reshaping our world and warping our minds. Are we scrolling ourselves to death? Don't miss a timely conversation on Chris Fabry Live. Featured resource:Scrolling Ourselves to Death For more information about the work of Care Net, click here. Chris Fabry Live is listener-supported. To support the program, click here.Become a Back Fence Partner: https://moodyradio.org/donateto/chrisfabrylive/partnersSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary: In this compelling conversation, Michael Easley and Brett McCracken examine the far-reaching impact of digital technology on spiritual life, mental health, and Christian community. They delve into the addictive nature of social media and gaming, drawing on the insights of Neil Postman and George Orwell to frame today's digital challenges. The discussion contrasts passive digital consumption with the richness of active, embodied living, emphasizing how an abundance of dopamine-driven experiences can dull the soul and contribute to a growing mental health crisis. They call Christians to navigate technology with wisdom—using it to serve their mission, not sabotage it—and to prioritize real human connection, spiritual growth through discomfort, and intentional community engagement in an increasingly digital world. Takeaways: Dystopian futures may stem from pleasure, not pain. Dopamine hits from technology can desensitize us. Digital gaming can be a form of mental gambling. The unpredictability of social media is addictive. Pain and discomfort can lead to growth. The stakes of digital engagement are high for Christians. LINKS MENTIONED: Scrolling Ourselves to Death by Brett McCracken The Wisdom Pyramid by Brett McCracken Uncomfortable by Brett McCracken Watch the highlights and full version of this interview on our Youtube channel. For more inContext interviews, click here.

To celebrate our 2500th show, long time KEEN ON friend David Masciotra interviewed me about the current perilous situation in America. We discuss why I've renamed the show KEEN ON AMERICA and my thoughts on the U.S's increasingly pivotal role in 21st century history. We discuss America's changing "operating system" as it struggles to reinvent its 20th century industrial identity. We explore America's age old relationship between technology, entertainment, and politics, particularly in how Trump represents a kind of apotheosis of Neil Postman's warning about the convergence of politics and entertainment. I express ever so cautious optimism about America in 2025, highlighting the country's historic capacity for reinvention, self-creation and, above all, defiant resistance to the stupidity and evil of you-know-who. 5 TAKEAWAYS* I've renamed the show to "Keen on America" because I see America at the "cockpit of world history" in the 2020s, and I wants to focus on exploring American themes and the country's changing identity.* I see America as reinventing its "operating system" - moving beyond its 20th century identity while maintaining its uniquely American characteristics rather than becoming more like Europe.* As an immigrant, I value America as a place for continual reinvention and second chances, reversing Fitzgerald's infamous remark that "there are no second acts in American lives."* I have evolved from my earlier tech pessimism to cautious optimism about America's future, noting that historical periods of transition produce both "monsters" and "angels."* We discuss how Trump represents the complete convergence of politics and entertainment, where entertainment isn't just replacing serious discourse but becoming "the ontological reality" itself.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation, Benjamin Quinn and Ivan Mesa delve into the implications of technology on the Christian life, particularly focusing on the phenomenon of doom scrolling. They explore Neil Postman's critiques of media consumption, the cultural shifts that have occurred since his time, and how these changes affect Christian discipleship. - Website: cfc.sebts.edu - Contact us: cfc.sebts.edu/about/contact-us/ - Support the work of the Center: cfc.sebts.edu/about/give/ All opinions and views expressed by guest speakers are solely their own. They do not speak for nor represent SEBTS. Read our expressed views and confessions: www.sebts.edu/about/what_we_believe.aspx

Theodore McCarrick has died, but the stains of his scandal live on. We talk with Matthew Bunson, and Nathaniel Peters dicusses how Neil Postman predicted America “amusing itself to death.”

Theodore McCarrick has died, but the stains of his scandal live on. We talk with Matthew Bunson, and Nathaniel Peters dicusses how Neil Postman predicted America “amusing itself to death.”

On today's episode, Phil Christman joins Josiah to discuss Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. They explore Postman's intellectual trajectory and legacy, as well as the broader media ecology movement. Did Postman predict Donald Trump? Is Postman a conservative? Would Postman have liked podcasts? All this and more on today's episode.Phil Christman's previous appearance on Fruitless: https://share.transistor.fm/s/e49b23bcPre-order Why Christians Should Be Leftists here: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802884053/why-christians-should-be-leftists/Check out Phil Christman's Substack The Tourist: https://philipchristman.substack.com/Follow Phil on Bluesky @philipchristman.bsky.socialBecome a Fruitless Patron here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11922141Check out Fruitless on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIZWDsDrQ0XvDQFWzE6s2ggFind more of Josiah's work: https://linktr.ee/josiahwsuttonFollow Josiah on Twitter @josiahwsuttonReferencesAmusing Ourselves to Death by Neil PostmanTechnopoly by Neil PostmanThe Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan"The Media Ecologists," Phil Christman on Substack, https://philipchristman.substack.com/p/the-media-ecologists"You Don't Need a Postman To Know It's Mostly Junk Mail," Phil Christman on Substack, https://philipchristman.substack.com/p/you-dont-need-a-postman-to-know-itsTeaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil PostmanTeaching as a Conserving Activity by Neil PostmanThe Disappearance of Childhood by Neil PostmanThe Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibbenWNUF Halloween Special (2013, dir. Chris LaMartina)Ghostwatch (1992, dir, Lesley Manning)71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994, dir. Michael Haneke)Benny's Video (1992, dir. Michael Haneke)Music & audio creditsSunflower (Prod. Lukrembo)Yesterday – bloom."Russia Invades Ukraine Sponsored By Applebee's - CNN Clip (February 24, 2022)," YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6QUsx68DCAIn My Dreams – bloom. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

On this episode of BMU, the guys discuss Marvin Sapp closing the doors of the church to raise a significant offering. The conversation considers the consequences of broadcasting church to the masses, how nuance can be lost in increasingly larger contexts, and what we mean by "authority" in the Christian context.Today's episode references an excellent book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman.

On this episode of BMU, the guys discuss Marvin Sapp closing the doors of the church to raise a significant offering. The conversation considers the consequences of broadcasting church to the masses, how nuance can be lost in increasingly larger contexts, and what we mean by "authority" in the Christian context.Today's episode references an excellent book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman.

Are we being controlled by fear or by pleasure? The boys drink and review an imperial pilsner, then discuss the contrasting visions of the future by Orwell and Huxley. P&C explore the strange relevance of 1984 and Brave New World -- from constant surveillance, censorship, and thought control, to mindless entertainment, dopamine addiction, and emotional infantilization. Both dystopian visions offer chilling insights into modern society. We break down the contrasting methods of control: Orwell's world of pain and suppression vs. Huxley's world of pleasure and distraction. Drawing from key quotes, real-world parallels, and cultural trends.

Episode Notes What could a book written about television forty years ago possibly have to teach us about living well and wisely in our world of smartphones, social media, and high-speed connectivity? According to the editors of Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age, a lot! In this episode, Brett McCracken and Dr. Ivan Mesa join Dr. Keith Plummer to discuss why Neil Postman's classic volume Amusing Ourselves to Death is still amazingly relevant and how they hope their project will help the body of Christ.

By Walt HickeyDouble feature today!Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.I'm a huge fan of Alissa, she's a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to work on the most important American medium — is super fascinating. It's a really wonderful book and if you're a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it's a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless.Alissa can be found at the New York Times, and the book is available wherever books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. All right, Alissa, thank you so much for coming on.Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be back, wherever we are.Yes, you are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It's a really exciting book. It's a really exciting approach, for a Joan Didion biography and placing her in the current of American mainstream culture for a few years. I guess just backing out, what got you interested in Joan Didion to begin with? When did you first get into her work?Joan Didion and I did not become acquainted, metaphorically, until after I got out of college. I studied Tech and IT in college, and thus didn't read any books, because they don't make you read books in school, or they didn't when I was there. I moved to New York right afterward. I was riding the subway. There were all these ads for this book called The Year of Magical Thinking. It was the year 2005, the book had just come out. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's National Book Award-winning memoir about the year after her husband died, suddenly of a heart attack in '03. It's sort of a meditation on grief, but it's not really what that sounds like. If people haven't read it's very Didion. You know, it's not sentimental, it's constantly examining the narratives that she's telling herself about grief.So I just saw these ads on the walls. I was like, what is this book that everybody seems to be reading? I just bought it and read it. And it just so happened that it was right after my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia, and then died shortly thereafter, which was shocking, obviously. The closer I get to that age, it feels even more shocking that he was so young. I didn't have any idea how to process that emotion or experience. The book was unexpectedly helpful. But it also introduced me to a writer who I'd never read before, who felt like she was looking at things from a different angle than everyone else.Of course, she had a couple more books come out after that. But I don't remember this distinctly, but probably what happened is I went to some bookstore, The Strand or something, and bought The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the front table as everyone does because those books have just been there for decades.From that, I learned more, starting to understand how writing could work. I didn't realize how form and content could interact that way. Over the years, I would review a book by her or about her for one publication or another. Then when I was in graduate school, getting my MFA in nonfiction, I wrote a bit about her because I was going through a moment of not being sure if my husband and I were going to stay in New York or we were going to move to California. They sort of obligate you to go through a goodbye to all that phase if you are contemplating that — her famous essay about leaving New York. And then, we did stay in New York City. But ultimately, that's 20 years of history.Then in 2020, I was having a conversation (that was quite-early pandemic) with my agent about possible books I might write. I had outlined a bunch of books to her. Then she was like, “These all sound like great ideas. But I've always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion. So I just wanted to put that bug in your ear.” I was like, “Oh, okay. That seems like something I should probably do.”It took a while to find an angle, which wound up being Didion in Hollywood. This is mostly because I realized that a lot of people don't really know her as a Hollywood figure, even though she's a pretty major Hollywood figure for a period of time. The more of her work I read, the more I realized that her work is fruitfully understood as the work of a woman who was profoundly influenced by (and later thinking in terms of Hollywood metaphors) whether she was writing about California or American politics or even grief.So that's the long-winded way of saying I wasn't, you know, acquainted with her work until adulthood, but then it became something that became a guiding light for me as a writer.That's really fascinating. I love it. Because again I think a lot of attention on Didion has been paid since her passing. But this book is really exciting because you came at it from looking at the work as it relates to Hollywood. What was Didion's experience in Hollywood? What would people have seen from it, but also, what is her place there?The directly Hollywood parts of her life start when she's in her 30s. She and her husband — John Gregory Dunn, also a writer and her screenwriting partner — moved from New York City, where they had met and gotten married, to Los Angeles. John's brother, Nick Dunn later became one of the most important early true crime writers at Vanity Fair, believe it or not. But at the time, he was working as a TV producer. He and his wife were there. So they moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a moment where, you know, it's all well and good to be a journalist and a novelist. If you want to support yourself, Hollywood is where it's at.So they get there at a moment when the business is shifting from these big-budget movies — the Golden Age — to the new Hollywood, where everything is sort of gritty and small and countercultural. That's the moment they arrive. They worked in Hollywood. I mean, they worked literally in Hollywood for many years after that. And then in Hollywood even when they moved back to New York in the '80s as screenwriters still.People sometimes don't realize that they wrote a bunch of produced screenplays. The earliest was The Panic in Needle Park. Obviously, they adapted Didion's novel Play It As It Lays. There are several others, but one that a lot of people don't realize they wrote was the version of A Star is Born that stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. It was their idea to shift the Star is Born template from Hollywood entities to rock stars. That was their idea. Of course, when Bradley Cooper made his version, he iterated on that. So their work was as screenwriters but also as figures in the Hollywood scene because they were literary people at the same time that they were screenwriters. They knew all the actors, and they knew all the producers and the executives.John actually wrote, I think, two of the best books ever written on Hollywood decades apart. One called The Studio, where he just roamed around on the Fox backlot. For a year for reasons he couldn't understand, he got access. That was right when the catastrophe that was Dr. Doolittle was coming out. So you get to hear the inside of the studio. Then later, he wrote a book called Monster, which is about their like eight-year long attempt to get their film Up Close and Personal made, which eventually they did. It's a really good look at what the normal Hollywood experience was at the time: which is like: you come up with an idea, but it will only vaguely resemble the final product once all the studios get done with it.So it's, it's really, that's all very interesting. They're threaded through the history of Hollywood in that period. On top of it for the book (I realized as I was working on it) that a lot of Didion's early life is influenced by especially her obsession with John Wayne and also with the bigger mythology of California and the West, a lot of which she sees as framed through Hollywood Westerns.Then in the '80s, she pivoted to political reporting for a long while. If you read her political writing, it is very, very, very much about Hollywood logic seeping into American political culture. There's an essay called “Inside Baseball” about the Dukakis campaign that appears in Political Fictions, her book that was published on September 11, 2001. In that book, she writes about how these political campaigns are directed and set up like a production for the cameras and how that was becoming not just the campaign, but the presidency itself. Of course, she had no use for Ronald Reagan, and everything she writes about him is very damning. But a lot of it was because she saw him as the embodiment of Hollywood logic entering the political sphere and felt like these are two separate things and they need to not be going together.So all of that appeared to me as I was reading. You know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It just made sense for me to write about it. On top of it, she was still alive when I was writing the proposal and shopping it around. So she actually died two months after we sold the book to my publisher. It meant I was extra grateful for this angle because I knew there'd be a lot more books on her, but I wanted to come at it from an angle that I hadn't seen before. So many people have written about her in Hollywood before, but not quite through this lens.Yeah. What were some things that you discovered in the course of your research? Obviously, she's such an interesting figure, but she's also lived so very publicly that I'm just super interested to find out what are some of the things that you learned? It can be about her, but it can also be the Hollywood system as a whole.Yeah. I mean, I didn't interview her for obvious reasons.Understandable, entirely understandable.Pretty much everyone in her life also is gone with the exception really of Griffin Dunn, who is her nephew, John's nephew, the actor. But other than that, it felt like I needed to look at it through a critical lens. So it meant examining a lot of texts. A lot of Didion's magazine work (which was a huge part of her life) is published in the books that people read like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album and all the other books. What was interesting to me was discovering (I mean, not “discovering” because other people have read it) that there is some work that's not published and it's mostly her criticism.Most of that criticism was published in the late '50s and the early '60s when she was living in New York City, working at Vogue and trying to make it in the literary scene that was New York at that time, which was a very unique place. I mean, she was writing criticism and essays for both, you know, like National Review and The Nation at the same time, which was just hard to conceive of today. It was something you'd do back then. Yeah, wild stuff.A lot of that criticism was never collected into books. The most interesting is that she'd been working at Vogue for a long time in various positions, but she wound up getting added to the film critic column at Vogue in, '62, I want to say, although I might have that date slightly off. She basically alternated weeks with another critic for a few years, writing that until she started writing in movies proper. It's never a great idea to be a critic and a screenwriter at the same time.Her criticism is fascinating. So briefly, for instance, she shared that column with Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael became well known after she wrote about Bonnie and Clyde. This was prior to that. This is several years prior to that. They also hated each other for a long time afterward, which is funny, because, in some ways, their style is very different but their persona is actually very similar. So I wonder about that.But in any case, even when she wasn't sharing the column with Pauline Kael, it was a literal column in a magazine. So it's like one column of text, she can say barely anything. She was always a bit of a contrarian, but she was actively not interested in the things that were occupying New York critics at the time. Things like the Auteur Theory, what was happening in France, the downtown scene and the Shirley Clark's of the world. She had no use for it. At some point, she accuses Billy Wilder of having really no sense of humor, which is very funny.When you read her criticism, you see a person who is very invested in a classical notion of Hollywood as a place that shows us fantasies that we can indulge in for a while. She talks in her very first column about how she doesn't really need movies to be masterpieces, she just wants them to have moments. When she says moments, she means big swelling things that happen in a movie that make her feel things.It's so opposite, I think, to most people's view of Didion. Most people associate her with this snobbish elitism or something, which I don't think is untrue when we're talking about literature. But for her, the movies were like entertainment, and entering that business was a choice to enter that world. She wasn't attempting to elevate the discourse or something.I just think that's fascinating. She also has some great insights there. But as a film critic, I find myself disagreeing with most of her reviews. But I think that doesn't matter. It was more interesting to see how she conceived of the movies. There is a moment later on, in another piece that I don't think has been republished anywhere from the New York Review of Books, where she writes about the movies of Woody Allen. She hates them. It's right at the point where he's making like Manhattan and Annie Hall, like the good stuff. She just has no use for them. It's one of the funniest pieces. I won't spoil the ending because it's hilarious, and it's in the book.That writing was of huge interest to me and hasn't been republished in books. I was very grateful to get access to it, in part because it is in the archives — the electronic archives of the New York Public Library. But at the time, the library was closed. So I had to call the library and have a librarian get on Zoom with me for like an hour and a half to figure out how I could get in the proverbial back door of the library to get access while the library wasn't open.That's magnificent. That's such a cool way to go to the archives because some stuff just hasn't been published. If it wasn't digitized, then it's not digitized. That's incredible.Yeah, it's there, but you can barely print them off because they're in PDFs. They're like scanned images that are super high res, so the printer just dies when you try to print them. It's all very fascinating. I hope it gets republished at some point because I think there's enough interest in her work that it's fascinating to see this other aspect of her taste and her persona.It's really interesting that she seems to have wanted to meet the medium where it is, right? She wasn't trying to literary-up Hollywood. I mean, LA can be a bit of a friction. It's not exactly a literary town in the way that some East Coast metropolises can be. It is interesting that she was enamored by the movies. Do you want to speak about what things were like for her when she moved out?Yeah, it is funny because, at the same time, the first two movies that they wrote and produced are The Panic in Needle Park, which is probably the most new Hollywood movie you can imagine. It's about addicts at Needle Park, which is actually right where the 72nd Street subway stop is on the Upper West Side. If people have been there, it's hard to imagine. But that was apparently where they all sat around, and there were a lot of needles. It's apparently the first movie supposedly where someone shoots up live on camera.So it was the '70s. That's amazing.Yes, and it launched Al Pacino's film career! Yeah, it's wild. You watch it and you're just like, “How is this coming from the woman who's about all this arty farty stuff in the movies.” And Play It As It Lays has a very similar, almost avant-garde vibe to it. It's very, very interesting. You see it later on in the work that they made.A key thing to remember about them (and something I didn't realize before I started researching the book)was that Didion and Dunn were novelists who worked in journalism because everybody did. They wrote movies, according to them (you can only go off of what they said. A lot of it is John writing these jaunty articles. He's a very funny writer) because “we had tuition and a mortgage. This is how you pay for it.”This comes up later on, they needed to keep their WGA insurance because John had heart trouble. The best way to have health insurance was to remain in the Writers Guild. Remaining in the Writers Guild means you had to have a certain amount of work produced through union means. They were big union supporters. For them this was not, this was very strictly not an auteurist undertaking. This was not like, “Oh, I'm gonna go write these amazing screenplays that give my concept of the world to the audience.” It's not like Bonnie and Clyding going on here. It's very like, “We wrote these based on some stories that we thought would be cool.”I like that a lot. Like the idea that A Star is Born was like a pot boiler. That's really delightful.Completely. It was totally taken away from them by Streisand and John Peters at some point. But they were like, “Yeah, I mean, you know, it happens. We still got paid.”Yeah, if it can happen to Superman, it can happen to you.It happens to everybody, you know, don't get too precious about it. The important thing is did your novel come out and was it supported by its publisher?So just tracing some of their arcs in Hollywood. Obviously, Didion's one of the most influential writers of her generation, there's a very rich literary tradition. Where do we see her footprint, her imprint in Hollywood? What are some of the ways that we can see her register in Hollywood, or reverberate outside of it?In the business itself, I don't know that she was influential directly. What we see is on the outside of it. So a lot of people were friends. She was like a famous hostess, famous hostess. The New York Public Library archives are set to open at the end of March, of Didion and Dunn's work, which was like completely incidental to my publication date. I just got lucky. There's a bunch of screenplays in there that they worked on that weren't produced. There's also her cookbooks, and I'm very excited to go through those and see that. So you might meet somebody there.Her account of what the vibe was when the Manson murders occurred, which is published in her essay The White Album, is still the one people talk about, even though there are a lot of different ways to come at it. That's how we think about the Manson murders: through her lens. Later on, when she's not writing directly about Hollywood anymore (and not really writing in Hollywood as much) but instead is writing about the headlines, about news events, about sensationalism in the news, she becomes a great media critic. We start to see her taking the things that she learned (having been around Hollywood people, having been on movie sets, having seen how the sausage is made) and she starts writing about politics. In that age, it is Hollywood's logic that you perform for the TV. We have the debates suddenly becoming televised, the conventions becoming televised, we start to see candidates who seem specifically groomed to win because they look good on TV. They're starting to win and rule the day.She writes about Newt Gingrich. Of course, Gingrich was the first politician to figure out how to harness C-SPAN to his own ends — the fact that there were TV cameras on the congressional floor. So she's writing about all of this stuff at a time when you can see other people writing about it. I mean, Neil Postman famously writes about it. But the way Didion does it is always very pegged to reviewing somebody's book, or she's thinking about a particular event, or she's been on the campaign plane or something like that. Like she's been on the inside, but with an outsider's eye.That also crops up in, for instance, her essays. “Sentimental Journeys” is one of her most famous ones. That one's about the case of the Central Park Five, and the jogger who was murdered. Of course, now, we're many decades out from that, and the convictions were vacated. We know about coerced confessions. Also Donald Trump arrives in the middle of that whole thing.But she's actually not interested in the guilt or innocence question, because a lot of people were writing about that. She's interested in how the city of New York and the nation perform themselves for themselves, seeing themselves through the long lens of a movie and telling themselves stories about themselves. You see this over and over in her writing, no matter what she's writing about. I think once she moved away from writing about the business so much, she became very interested in how Hollywood logic had taken over American public life writ large.That's fascinating. Like, again, she spends time in the industry, then basically she can only see it through that lens. Of course, Michael Dukakis in a tank is trying to be a set piece, of course in front of the Berlin Wall, you're finally doing set decoration rather than doing it outside of a brick wall somewhere. You mentioned the New York thing in Performing New York. I have lived in the city for over a decade now. The dumbest thing is when the mayor gets to wear the silly jacket whenever there's a snowstorm that says “Mr. Mayor.” It's all an act in so many ways. I guess that political choreography had to come from somewhere, and it seems like she was documenting a lot of that initial rise.Yeah, I think she really saw it. The question I would ask her, if I could, is how cognizant she was that she kept doing that. As someone who's written for a long time, you don't always recognize that you have the one thing you write about all the time. Other people then bring it up to you and you're like, “Oh, I guess you're right.” Even when you move into her grief memoir phase, which is how I think about the last few original works that she published, she uses movie logic constantly in those.I mean, The Year of Magical Thinking is a cyclical book, she goes over the same events over and over. But if you actually look at the language she's using, she talks about running the tape back, she talks about the edit, she talks about all these things as if she's running her own life through how a movie would tell a story. Maybe she knew very deliberately. She's not a person who does things just haphazardly, but it has the feeling of being so baked into her psyche at this point that she would never even think of trying to escape it.Fascinating.Yeah, that idea that you don't know what you are potentially doing, I've thought about that. I don't know what mine is. But either way. It's such a cool way to look at it. On a certain level, she pretty much succeeded at that, though, right? I think that when people think about Joan Didion, they think about a life that freshens up a movie, right? Like, it workedVery much, yeah. I'm gonna be really curious to see what happens over the next 10 years or so. I've been thinking about figures like Sylvia Plath or women with larger-than-life iconography and reputation and how there's a constant need to relook at their legacies and reinvent and rethink and reimagine them. There's a lot in the life of Didion that I think remains to be explored. I'm really curious to see where people go with it, especially with the opening of these archives and new personal information making its way into the world.Yeah, even just your ability to break some of those stories that have been locked away in archives out sounds like a really exciting addition to the scholarship. Just backing out a little bit, we live in a moment in which the relationship between pop culture and political life is fairly directly intertwined. Setting aside the steel-plated elephant in the room, you and I are friendly because we bonded over this idea that movies really are consequential. Coming out of this book and coming out of reporting on it, what are some of the relevances for today in particular?Yeah, I mean, a lot more than I thought, I guess, five years ago. I started work on the book at the end of Trump One, and it's coming out at the beginning of Trump Two, and there was this period in the middle of a slightly different vibe. But even then I watch TikTok or whatever. You see people talk about “main character energy” or the “vibe shift” or all of romanticizing your life. I would have loved to read a Didion essay on the way that young people sort of view themselves through the logic of the screens they have lived on and the way that has shaped America for a long time.I should confirm this, I don't think she wrote about Obama, or if she did, it was only a little bit. So her political writing ends in George W. Bush's era. I think there's one piece on Obama, and then she's writing about other things. It's just interesting to think about how her ideas of what has happened to political culture in America have seeped into the present day.I think the Hollywood logic, the cinematic logic has given way to reality TV logic. That's very much the logic of the Trump world, right? Still performing for cameras, but the cameras have shifted. The way that we want things from the cameras has shifted, too. Reality TV is a lot about creating moments of drama where they may or may not actually exist and bombarding you with them. I think that's a lot of what we see and what we feel now. I have to imagine she would think about it that way.There is one interesting essay that I feel has only recently been talked about. It's at the beginning of my book, too. It was in a documentary, and Gia Tolentino wrote about it recently. It's this essay she wrote in 2000 about Martha Stewart and about Martha Stewart's website. It feels like the 2000s was like, “What is this website thing? Why are people so into it?” But really, it's an essay about parasocial relationships that people develop (with women in particular) who they invent stories around and how those stories correspond to greater American archetypes. It's a really interesting essay, not least because I think it's an essay also about people's parasocial relationships with Joan Didion.So the rise of her celebrity in the 21st century, where people know who she is and carry around a tote bag, but don't really know what they're getting themselves into is very interesting to me. I think it is also something she thought about quite a bit, while also consciously courting it.Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. For someone who was so adept at using cinematic language to describe her own life with every living being having a camera directly next to them at all times. It seems like we are very much living in a world that she had at least put a lot of thought into, even if the technology wasn't around for her to specifically address it.Yes, completely.On that note, where can folks find the book? Where can folks find you? What's the elevator pitch for why they ought to check this out? Joan Didion superfan or just rather novice?Exactly! I think this book is not just for the fans, let me put it that way. Certainly, I think anyone who considers themselves a Didion fan will have a lot to enjoy here. The stuff you didn't know, hadn't read or just a new way to think through her cultural impact. But also, this is really a book that's as much for people who are just interested in thinking about the world we live in today a little critically. It's certainly a biography of American political culture as much as it is of Didion. There's a great deal of Hollywood history in there as well. Thinking about that sweep of the American century and change is what the book is doing. It's very, very, very informed by what I do in my day job as a movie critic at The New York Times. Thinking about what movies mean, what do they tell us about ourselves? I think this is what this book does. I have been told it's very fun to read. So I'm happy about that. It's not ponderous at all, which is good. It's also not that long.It comes out March 11th from Live Right, which is a Norton imprint. There will be an audiobook at the end of May that I am reading, which I'm excited about. And I'll be on tour for a large amount of March on the East Coast. Then in California, there's a virtual date, and there's a good chance I'll be popping up elsewhere all year, too. Those updates will be on my social feeds, which are all @alissawilkinson on whatever platform except X, which is fine because I don't really post there anymore.Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you so much.Edited by Crystal Wang.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

After we finished up The Power Broker, a bunch of people were asking us what other books we'd been reading. A group of us got together and presented some of our recent favorites, and the choices were so good and surprising and charming, we're now sharing it widely.Here are the books covered in this episode:Lasha's book: Usha's Pickle Digest by Usha R PrabakaranChris's books: What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer (and The Power Broker by Robert Caro

On Culture Friday, John Stonestreet says Neil Postman was right about public discourse and show business, Arsenio Orteza reviews a handful of new recordings worthy of consideration, and Ask the Editor for the month of March. Plus, the Friday morning newsSupport The World and Everything in It today at wng.org/donateAdditional support comes from Covenant College in Georgia, providing an uncompromising biblical education where students explore calling and career. More at covenant.edu/WORLDAnd from The New Living Translation. Accurate, understandable, and audibly enjoyable. NewLivingTranslation.com

Few thinkers were as prescient about the role technology would play in our society as the late, great Neil Postman. Forty years ago, Postman warned about all the ways modern communication technology was fragmenting our attention, overwhelming us into apathy, and creating a society obsessed with image and entertainment. He warned that “we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” Though he was writing mostly about TV, Postman's insights feel eerily prophetic in our age of smartphones, social media, and AI. In this episode, Tristan explores Postman's thinking with Sean Illing, host of Vox's The Gray Area podcast, and Professor Lance Strate, Postman's former student. They unpack how our media environments fundamentally reshape how we think, relate, and participate in democracy - from the attention-fragmenting effects of social media to the looming transformations promised by AI. This conversation offers essential tools that can help us navigate these challenges while preserving what makes us human.Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_RECOMMENDED MEDIA“Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman (PDF of full book)”Technopoly” by Neil Postman (PDF of full book) A lecture from Postman where he outlines his seven questions for any new technology. Sean's podcast “The Gray Area” from Vox Sean's interview with Chris Hayes on “The Gray Area” Further reading on mirror bacteriaRECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES'A Turning Point in History': Yuval Noah Harari on AI's Cultural Takeover This Moment in AI: How We Got Here and Where We're GoingDecoding Our DNA: How AI Supercharges Medical Breakthroughs and Biological Threats with Kevin Esvelt Future-proofing Democracy In the Age of AI with Audrey TangCORRECTION:  Each debate between Lincoln and Douglas was 3 hours, not 6 and they took place in 1859, not 1862.

Guido Vitiello"Joker scatenato"Il lato oscuro della comicitàGramma Feltrinelliwww.feltrinellieditore.itPer più di mezzo secolo abbiamo considerato il divertimento, la comicità e l'umorismo come strumenti di pacificazione sociale. Nel 1985 un pamphlet del critico americano Neil Postman, Divertirsi da morire, annunciava che grazie alla droga della tv commerciale eravamo ormai entrati in un “mondo nuovo” ilare e rincretinito profetizzato dallo scrittore Aldous Huxley.Poi però è successo qualcosa di imprevisto. La nostra è tuttora una società del divertimento, ma la comicità non è più soltanto un innocuo gas esilarante: è l'arma con cui si combattono duelli politici all'ultimo sangue e guerre culturali ferocissime. Un umorismo cinico e sarcastico si è impadronito del discorso pubblico. Il re e il suo buffone si cambiano continuamente di posto: i leader politici adottano uno stile da stand-up comedy e i comici avviano inopinate carriere politiche. Una frangia della sinistra americana ha scatenato una war on jokes moralizzatrice, e la comicità si va spostando a destra. Dai bassifondi della rete è emersa la troll culture, con il suo sarcasmo nichilistico e sottilmente sociopatico, e ha trovato una consonanza entusiastica con il ritorno trionfale di Donald Trump – battezzato non per caso Troll-in-Chief dalla stampa americana – alla Casa Bianca.Guido Vitiello tenta di decifrare questo carnevale perpetuo rivisitando alcuni passaggi cruciali nella storia sociale dell'umorismo. A fargli da guida in questo inferno sghignazzante è la figura di Joker, l'antieroe della saga di Batman, le cui successive metamorfosi hanno rispecchiato fin dagli anni quaranta le diverse fasi del nostro rapporto con il “lato oscuro della farsa” e con il nesso ineludibile tra comicità e violenza. Nelle sue ultime incarnazioni, dal Cavaliere oscuro di Christopher Nolan al Joker di Todd Phillips, il supervillain ha assunto i tratti sinistramente convergenti del terrorista e dello stand-up comedian. Scappato, dopo decenni, dalla gabbia dorata dell'egemonia televisiva, soporifera ma universalistica, si è mescolato tra le bande identitarie dei social network, che si sbranano a colpi di risate.Guido Vitiello è nato a Napoli ma vive e lavora a Roma. Scrive per “Il Foglio”, curando la rubrica Il Bi e il Ba. Ha collaborato per anni con il “Corriere della Sera” (“La Lettura”) e “Il Sole 24 Ore” (“IL Magazine”). Insegna Teorie del cinema e dell'audiovisivo alla Sapienza di Roma. Ha pubblicato, per Adelphi, Una visita al Bates Motel (2019); per Einaudi, Il lettore sul lettino. Tic, manie e stravaganze di chi ama i libri (2021).IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarewww.ilpostodelleparole.itDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.

In this insightful episode, Chad engages with Bob Hutchins, an expert in marketing communications and organizational psychology. Bob shares his unique journey from running a successful digital marketing agency to pursuing a PhD that intersects generative AI, creativity, and human meaning-making. The conversation delves into the concept of media ecology, as influenced by thinkers like Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan, exploring how new media environments affect human behavior. Discussing the phenomenon of media trauma, Bob highlights the compound impacts of consuming traumatic events through screens. The dialogue then shifts to how AI and technology can both challenge our sense of human identity and offer opportunities for deeper human connection and creativity. Bob emphasizes the importance of AI literacy and proactive human-centered approaches as we navigate the evolving technological landscape.High Notes:00:42 The Intersection of Marketing and Psychology02:45 Generative AI and Human Behavior05:47 Media Ecology and Neil Postman's Influence11:23 Understanding Media Trauma21:39 Balancing Technology and Humanity27:26 Ethical Marketing: Beyond Manipulation28:14 Empathy in AI Education: A Personal Story32:42 Navigating the AI Landscape: Red Box Era33:46 AI and Human Flourishing: Opportunities and Challenges43:40 The Future of Creativity in the Age of AI45:03 Redefining Human Identity and Creativity47:20 The Evolution of Work and Meaning52:34 Concluding Thoughts and ReflectionsMore about Bob: Bob Hutchins, MSc. is a marketing and communication strategist, author, and speaker with a master's degree in behavioral and organizational psychology and ongoing PhD research focused on generative AI and its effects on human creativity and meaning-making. Co-author of Our Digital Soul and Finally Human, he explores how technology shapes human behavior, connection, and well-being. With decades of experience in marketing, machine learning and media, Bob helps individuals and organizations navigate the digital world with intention and authenticity.Subscribe now for practical tips on managing stress and achieving a balanced life.Unlock your mental and emotional wellbeing with Emma. Emma is your emotional and mental wellbeing available to everyone. You'll wonder where she's been all your life. Want to give us some love but don't know how? Leave us a review and subscribe on Apple iTunes or Subscribe on Spotify! Mentioned in this episode:Try Emma for Free Right NowGo to Emma at MyEmmaAi.com and sign up for a free trial.

s technology shaping us more than we realize? Are we losing our ability to rest, reflect, and be present? In this episode of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer sits down with Dr. Felicia Wu Song, sociologist and author of Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (InterVarsity Press). They explore how digital technology influences our sense of self, why constant connectivity isn’t neutral, and how Christians can resist being shaped by algorithms instead of by God.

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 408, and my in-depth interview with Lance Strare about his new book, Not A, Not Be &C. Relevant links: Get a copy of Not A, Not Be &C Come see Lance, Thom Gencarelli, and me talking about Lance's book at The Players in Manhattan on 19 February 2025 at 6pm.  More information about this book launch, including FREE registration, here Frank LoBuono's Facebook page -- where he will be live streaming the dramatic reading from my novel, It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles, taking place at Big Red Books in Nyack, NY, 23 February 2025.

In his third appearance on The Human Voice, media theorist and science fiction author Paul Levinson shares a fascinating conversation about the timeless relevance of media ecology, technology's role in human progress, and the myths surrounding information overload. Paul reflects on his seminal 1996 article On Behalf of Humanity and its argument that the issue isn't too much information but a lack of organizational tools.   Drawing connections between historical innovations and today's AI landscape, Paul explores the concept of “remedial media”—new technologies that solve problems created by previous ones—and how it applies to challenges like algorithmic bias and deep fakes. From his collaborations with media icons Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan to his optimistic vision for technology as a force for good, Paul offers insights that resonate across decades.   The episode wraps up with Paul's thoughts on techno-pessimism, the power of storytelling, and a fun recommendation for mystery fans: A Perfect Couple. He also highlights his recent alternate history book, Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles, imagining a world where John Lennon was never assassinated.   Key Topics Covered: • Information overload vs. information organization • Remedial media as a framework for technological progress • AI, digital watermarks, and the future of human-machine collaboration • Why techno-pessimism often gains more attention • Recommendations for media and books   Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion that spans history, technology, and the enduring human connection to media.

In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin, a book that explores the construction of unreality in American media and culture. Jerry introduces the book as his pick and notes its thematic resonance with previous discussions, particularly those around Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. The hosts agree that Boorstin's work predates many of Postman's arguments and, in some ways, anticipates the cultural shift toward media-driven realities.Stably and Jerry unpack Boorstin's central argument that American culture increasingly operates within “mirrors upon mirrors of unreality,” where pseudo-events—artificial happenings staged for media consumption—dominate public perception. Boorstin, writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, critiques how society becomes incentivized to embrace these fabricated realities, constructing what Jerry calls “castles in the air.” This critique extends across multiple facets of public life, including politics, advertising, and entertainment, all of which blur the line between authenticity and illusion.The discussion touches on Boorstin's seemingly conservative perspective, as he neither explicitly condemns the shift toward pseudo-events nor advocates for a return to a previous era. Instead, he opts to describe the phenomenon with striking clarity, allowing the implications to speak for themselves. This ambiguity prompts Jerry to reflect on Boorstin's ultimate goals or desired outcomes, noting that while the book is critical, it refrains from offering solutions or alternatives.Stably and Jerry also draw connections between Boorstin's work and Marshall McLuhan's theories on media, highlighting the shared observation of media as an environment that reshapes human experience. They discuss how Boorstin's observations remain relevant, despite the book's age, as contemporary media landscapes have only amplified the prevalence and impact of pseudo-events.Throughout the conversation, the hosts emphasize the enduring value of Boorstin's analysis, particularly in an era where digital media and social platforms further complicate notions of authenticity. They reflect on specific examples of pseudo-events in modern society, noting parallels to Boorstin's original case studies and illustrating how the themes of the book continue to manifest today.By the end of the episode, Jerry and Stably underscore the significance of The Image as a foundational critique of media culture. While Boorstin stops short of prescribing change, his work serves as a powerful lens for examining how societies construct and consume manufactured realities. The hosts conclude with a shared appreciation for Boorstin's prescient insights, leaving listeners with a deeper understanding of the book's arguments and their implications for contemporary life.

This election felt like the peak of the TV-ification of politics. There's Trump, of course, who rose to national prominence as a reality-TV character and is a master of visual stagecraft. And while Trump's cabinet picks in his first term were described as out of central casting, this time he wants to staff some positions directly from the worlds of TV and entertainment: Pete Hegseth, his choice to run the Pentagon, was a host on “Fox and Friends Weekend”; his proposed education secretary, Linda McMahon, was the former C.E.O. of W.W.E.; Mehmet Oz, star of the long-running “The Dr. Oz Show,” is his pick to run Medicare and Medicaid; and he's tapped Elon Musk, one of the most powerful figures in American culture, to lead a government efficiency effort. Two years ago, we released an episode that helps explain why politics and entertainment are converging like this. It's with my old Vox colleague Sean Illing, host of “The Gray Area,” looking at the work of two media theorists, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, who uncannily predicted what we're seeing now decades ago.And so I wanted to share this episode again now, because it's really worth stepping back and looking at this moment through the lens of the media that's shaping it. In his book “The Paradox of Democracy,” Illing and his co-author, Zac Gershberg, put it this way: “It's better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture.” So what does our communicative culture — our fragmented mix of cable news, X, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp and podcasts — mean for our democracy? This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“‘Flood the zone with shit': How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy” by Sean Illing“Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences” by Daniel Muise, Homa Hosseinmardi, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius, David Rothschild and Duncan J. WattsBook Recommendations:Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil PostmanPublic Opinion by Walter LippmannMediated by Thomas de ZengotitaThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Our production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Have a question you want answered? Submit it here!What if the digital world was costing us more than we realized? In this episode, we sit down with Chris Martin, an insightful author who has navigated the depths of social media's real costs. Chris shares his journey of writing a thought-provoking book during the pandemic, drawing from his rich experiences in social media roles at Lifeway and Moody Publishers. Together, we explore how his upbringing in a tech-savvy household shaped his perspectives, and what compelled him to question the societal impact of social media so deeply.Our conversation takes a fascinating turn as we ponder how media critic Neil Postman might critique today's digital landscape, especially from a Christian viewpoint. We chart the evolution of the social internet, reminiscing about AOL trial disks and MySpace days, while unpacking how modern platforms have shifted societal norms toward valuing affirmation over truth. The discussion extends to the ethical implications of social media's addictive designs and their effects on mental health, illustrating a nuanced portrayal of our digital lives.As we peer into the future, the concept of the metaverse emerges, raising questions about the balance between virtual and authentic human connections. Chris and I discuss the potential for technology to both enhance and hinder intimacy, while considering society's possible rejection of tools that fail to deliver on meaningful interactions. Through reflections on Bo Burnham's creative critiques and personal anecdotes, we encourage listeners to prioritize offline experiences and nurture real-life relationships. Join us on Twitter as we continue this important dialogue and explore the themes of Chris Martin's book, "Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media."Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and RelationshipsKimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.

Matthew Syed asks what it means to be distracted in a media world vying for our attention.In this first episode, he seeks answers in the work of the media theorist and educator Neil Postman. Forty years ago Postman wrote 'Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business'. Postman feared that the rise of television had created a world where the image became more important than information, and that democracy was in danger to becoming entertainment.Postman cited the author Aldous Huxley as a key influence. Huxley's novel 'Brave New World' depicts a World State where citizens are engineered to focus on pleasure rather than the challenges of life and society. Huxley feared that tyranny may appear not through censorship, but due to "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."Matthew speaks to Andrew Postman, Neil Postman's son, and Aldous Huxley's biographer Uwe Rasch, to ask what the ideas of the two writers might mean for us today, in a world where media and entertainment are at our fingertips 24/7. Has the prophecy of either Postman or Huxley come to pass?Presenter: Matthew Syed Producer: Sam Peach

Matthew Syed asks what it means to be distracted in a media world vying for our attention.In this episode Matthew traces the inexorable rise of shortform video and investigates its success. He asks what the increasing popularity of this type of media might mean for our attention and finds out about the people using for purposes that may have surprised Neil Postman.Apps such as Tik Tok, Youtube and Snapchat are ubiquitous and for many have become the chief way that they consume media. What does watching shorter videos mean for the content, and how do these apps change our habits and possibly, our brains? The popularity of this medium has driven traditional institutions that are concerned with public affairs to embrace shortform video. So what's the result? Matthew finds out.Contributors:Dr Zoetanya Sujon, University of the Arts London Dave Jorgenson, Senior Video Journalist, Washington Post. Communications and Media Society, University of LiverpoolPresenter: Matthew Syed Producer: Sam Peach

In this episode, Dr. Groothius discusses four influential books that shaped his philosophical perspective. "The God Who Is There" by Francis Schaeffer introduced him to the importance of Christian worldview and apologetics. Blaise Pascal's unfinished work, "Pensées," deepened his understanding of human nature and the Christian view of humanity. C.S. Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" emphasized the necessity of objective moral values. Lastly, Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" highlighted the impact of media on culture. Royce emphasizes the integration of these works with the Bible in shaping his worldview. Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D., is Distinguished University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at Cornerstone University and the author of twenty books, including Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (InterVarsity, 2024). Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Join the #McConnellCenter as we host Dr. John Kleber for a conversation regarding the work of Neil Postman. Now one of Kentucky's most respected historians, John Kleber was a member of the third graduating class of Trinity High School in 1959. Four years later he earned a history BA at Bellarmine College, graduating summa cum laude. By 1969, Kleber had earned his Master's degree and PhD from the University of Kentucky. At Morehead State University, he became associate professor of history, director of the Academic Honors Program, and dean of the Caudill College of Humanities. He is the editor of The Kentucky Encyclopedia and The Encyclopedia of Louisville. We all know we need to read more and there are literally millions of books on shelves with new ones printed every day. How do we sort through all the possibilities to find the book that is just right for us now? Well, the McConnell Center is bringing authors and experts to inspire us to read impactful and entertaining books that might be on our shelves or in our e-readers, but which we haven't yet picked up. We hope you learn a lot in the following podcast and we hope you might be inspired to pick up one or more of the books we are highlighting this year at the University of Louisville's McConnell Center. Stay Connected Visit us at McConnellcenter.org Subscribe to our newsletter  Facebook: @mcconnellcenter Instagram: @ulmcenter  Twitter: @ULmCenter This podcast is a production of the McConnell Center

"Children enter school as questions marks," Neil Postman chastised, "and they leave school as periods." What is happening in the scholastic environment to crush intrigue? Developmentalists have shown that children have what is known as epistemic curiosity, a need for understanding. But when they enter a traditional school environment, their question rate drops from one every two minutes to less than one every two hours. Modern education is not inspiring curiosity; it's undermining it, silencing it. Join Dr. Dunne on today's show as we unpack the value of a question, and learn how you can stoke the fires of curiosity by utilizing the Socratic method with your children, grandchildren, college students, and employees. Learn more about CVCU's signature Socratic method at CVCU.us. 

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 396, in which I interview Bob Hutchins about AI.  My guess is you'll find this discussion much more optimistic about AI than what you'll usually hear. Discussed or mentioned in this interview: "On Behalf of Humanity: The Technological Edge" my 1996 article The Media Ecology Association New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication my review of Confronting the Presidents    

Paris Marx is joined by Karl Bode to discuss how Mark Zuckerberg's makeover and the PR campaign that's accompanied it shouldn't distract from the ongoing harms of his company.Karl Bode is a freelance tech journalist and consumer rights reporter.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris wrote about the problem with the “Zuckessance” for Disconnect.The New York Times published an article about the political evolution of Mark Zuckerberg.Facebook's Free Basics was widely called out for being a form of digital colonialism.Joel Kaplan was a key figure within Facebook defending right-wing content from effective moderation.Neil Postman wrote the book Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985.Support the show

In the debut episode of RatSec 2.1, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Kevin Frazier, Eugenia Lostri, and Benjamin Wittes to talk over the week's big national security news, including:“I Have Concepts of a Segment Topic.” On Tuesday, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump faced off in what might end up being the only presidential debate between the two candidates in the 2024 election. What did it tell us about how national security is figuring into this election? “Running Political Interference Interference.” The Justice Department has been very busy these past few weeks, bringing an array of indictments and enforcement actions against various Russian actors and their proxies for spreading misinformation, surreptitiously funding political commentary, and otherwise attempting to interfere in the upcoming 2024 elections. What explains this sudden wave of activity so close to the election? And what threats are still hanging out there?“Never Forgot.” Twenty-three years have passed since the unprecedented terrorist attacks of 9/11. In many ways, they redefined the trajectory of U.S. national security policy (and politics) for decades. But today, the United States has shifted focus to a very different set of challenges. What is the legacy of 9/11 more than two decades after the attacks? For object lessons, Kevin readied our listeners for depression before recommending Neil Postman's new book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Ben endorsed the documentary Man on Wire as his favorite movie about 9/11, in part because it has nothing to do with 9/11. Scott urged D.C.-area residents not to sleep on the sublime joys of an outdoor show at Wolf Trap while the weather is still nice. And Eugenia shed her video game label to throw her support behind James Cameron's latest maritime adventure, the (weirdly mutant-free) sea exploration documentary series OceanXplorers.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the debut episode of RatSec 2.1, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Kevin Frazier, Eugenia Lostri, and Benjamin Wittes to talk over the week's big national security news, including:“I Have Concepts of a Segment Topic.” On Tuesday, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump faced off in what might end up being the only presidential debate between the two candidates in the 2024 election. What did it tell us about how national security is figuring into this election? “Running Political Interference Interference.” The Justice Department has been very busy these past few weeks, bringing an array of indictments and enforcement actions against various Russian actors and their proxies for spreading misinformation, surreptitiously funding political commentary, and otherwise attempting to interfere in the upcoming 2024 elections. What explains this sudden wave of activity so close to the election? And what threats are still hanging out there?“Never Forgot.” Twenty-three years have passed since the unprecedented terrorist attacks of 9/11. In many ways, they redefined the trajectory of U.S. national security policy (and politics) for decades. But today, the United States has shifted focus to a very different set of challenges. What is the legacy of 9/11 more than two decades after the attacks? For object lessons, Kevin readied our listeners for depression before recommending Neil Postman's new book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Ben endorsed the documentary Man on Wire as his favorite movie about 9/11, in part because it has nothing to do with 9/11. Scott urged D.C.-area residents not to sleep on the sublime joys of an outdoor show at Wolf Trap while the weather is still nice. And Eugenia shed her video game label to throw her support behind James Cameron's latest maritime adventure, the (weirdly mutant-free) sea exploration documentary series OceanXplorers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first segment Rev. Sam Schuldheisz teaches us more about the redeemed imagination. During the rest of the show Pastor Bramwell goes back to a conversation on technology in order to think through the characteristics of the loving resistance fighter as detailed by Neil Postman in Technopoly. Find this book at Amazon.com. This program originally aired February 22, 2021.

Major Garrett is chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, and as he told me in our conversation, he is an "accidental television journalist" who "never imagined" working in TV and "never wanted it." He was a print reporter for 17 years before entering the world of television. Since then, he's proven to be one of the most formidable, best prepared interviewers in journalism. This dude is rigorous, smart, and fun! And you know what? Damn it, he cares. Major is the host of The Takeout podcast and author of five books, including The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie, and Mr. Trump's Wild Ride: The Thrills, Chills, Screams, and Occasional Blackouts of an Extraordinary Presidency. Major read Amusing Ourselves to Death in the 1990's. He then soon after became a TV reporter for CNN, where he spent two years before moving to the then-nascent Fox News, where he became a Washington fixture as White House correspondent. That's where he was when I met him during my time as a White House correspondent for The Washington Times. I was glad, as I told him, that Major has a textured view of Postman's work. I didn't want a cheerleader. But Major talks about the impact of the work on him, his views of its shortcomings, and its lasting value.

We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?  This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling. Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?  This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling. Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In episode 406 of The Brainy Business podcast, behavioral scientist Patrick Fagan shares insights on the psychology of effective messaging in marketing, drawing from his extensive research and book "Hooked." Fagan's expertise lies in understanding and influencing consumer behavior, utilizing behavioral science to uncover the impact of environmental cues, social media, and psychological segmentation on decision-making processes.  Through his studies on background noises, Facebook psychology, and segmentation for a supplements brand, Fagan demonstrates the practical applications of behavioral science in marketing. His framework for effective messaging, encompassing attention-grabbing, engagement, and behavior nudges, offers actionable strategies for businesses to tailor messages to different audience segments. By listening to this episode, small business owners and marketers can gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, environmental cues, and ethical messaging strategies, empowering them to enhance consumer engagement and influence purchasing decisions effectively. In this episode: Understand the psychology of online shopping to optimize your e-commerce strategy. Boost self-esteem with insights into the impact of social media on mental well-being. Utilize behavioral science to craft compelling marketing campaigns that resonate with consumers. Harness the influence of background noise to enhance consumer decision-making processes. Implement effective message engagement strategies to maximize advertising impact. Show Notes: 00:00:00 - Introduction Melina introduces Patrick Fagan, author of #Hooked, and discusses the intentionality of marketing messaging in the book. 00:02:13 - Patrick's Background in Behavioral Science Patrick shares his background in behavioral science, including his research on music priming for online shopping and the effects of background noises on purchasing behavior. 00:07:15 - Facebook Psychology and Facial Expressions Patrick discusses his research on Facebook psychology, which found that the platform can impact self-esteem and loneliness. He also shares insights on using facial expressions to measure engagement and boredom. 00:10:23 - Current Projects and Interests Patrick shares his current interest in understanding behavior and influence, focusing on psychology and behavior segmentation. He highlights a recent segmentation project for a supplements brand, which identified five different types of people with respect to health and nutrition. 00:14:43 - Conclusion and Future Focus Patrick emphasizes his passion for understanding people's behavior and motivation, highlighting the importance of psychology and behavior segmentation over traditional demographics and attitudes. He expresses excitement for future projects in this area. 00:15:13 - Understanding Different Motivations Patrick discusses the different motivations people have for health and fitness, including diet, appearance, achievement, and reassurance. He highlights the importance of tailoring messages to different groups based on their motivations. 00:21:43 - The Power of Habits Patrick and Melina delve into the influence of habits on behavior, particularly in the context of fitness. They discuss how habits can impact people's reasons for exercising and how triggers can influence their decision to engage in physical activity. 00:24:44 - Traditionalism and Progressivism Patrick shares his research on traditionalism and progressivism, revealing that a significant proportion of people are motivated by a desire to return to the past rather than just conserving or progressing. He discusses the implications of this finding for businesses in terms of messaging and branding. 00:27:53 - Applying Psychology to Marketing Patrick and Melina explore how businesses can utilize psychological insights to tailor their marketing strategies. They discuss the importance of understanding customer mindsets and motivations, and how businesses can use this knowledge to communicate effectively with their target audience. 00:29:45 - The Three Steps of Effective Messaging Patrick outlines the three crucial steps for creating effective messages: grabbing attention, engaging the audience, and nudging behavior. He emphasizes the significance of understanding the brain's response to certain stimuli and leveraging this knowledge in crafting compelling messages. 00:30:14 - Attention-Grabbing Factors Patrick discusses the importance of paying attention to things like kids, faces, emotions, surprise, and personal elements in grabbing attention. 00:31:58 - Engaging Emotionally Engaging people through curiosity, stories, and fluency is discussed. Using puzzles, riddles, and stories can help people engage and remember information more effectively. 00:34:06 - Nudging Behavior Patrick talks about the use of priming, memory, motivation, and relevance to nudge behavior. Emotions and relevance play a significant role in motivating people to act. 00:36:45 - Conclusion What stuck with you while listening to the episode? What are you going to try? Come share it with Melina on social media -- you'll find her as @thebrainybiz everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Android. If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes and share what you liked about the show.  I hope you love everything recommended via The Brainy Business! Everything was independently reviewed and selected by me, Melina Palmer. So you know, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. That means if you decide to shop from the links on this page (via Amazon or others), The Brainy Business may collect a share of sales or other compensation. Let's connect: Melina@TheBrainyBusiness.com The Brainy Business® on Facebook The Brainy Business on Twitter The Brainy Business on Instagram The Brainy Business on LinkedIn Melina on LinkedIn The Brainy Business on Youtube Connect with Patrick: Patrick on LinkedIn  Patrick on X Patrick's Website  Learn and Support The Brainy Business: Check out and get your copies of Melina's Books.  Get the Books Mentioned on (or related to) this Episode: #Hooked, by Patrick Fagan Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland Blindsight, by Matt Johnson and Prince Ghuman The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman and Andrew Postman Top Recommended Next Episode: Rory Sutherland Interview (ep 373) Already Heard That One? Try These:  Wendy Wood Interview (ep 127) Priming (ep 252) Disney (ep 292) Prince Ghuman Interview (ep 344) The Truth About Pricing (ep 356) Other Important Links:  Brainy Bites - Melina's LinkedIn Newsletter Radio, Chatter and Football – The Sounds That Help Us Shop

Are we more strict with our kids in the real world than we are in the digital world? First book talk of the summer, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt where he addresses that question. Citing stats of the decline of mental health among teens beginning with the advent of smartphones and social media, Coach brings not just the problems Haidt addresses but also one of his solutions...a return to the play based childhood. Along the way Coach calls Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death prophetic and offers insight into what he sees in the classroom in light of Haidt insights. The Anxious Generation is a must read for parents and teachers alike. Professor Haidt's endorsed website mentioned in the episode https://letgrow.org . --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ptcpodcast/message

This episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School's Shannon Mattern. We have teamed up with Mediapolis, a journal that places urban studies and media studies into conversation with one another, to interview Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (U of Minnesota Press: 2018). And lucky for us on Phantom Power, a large portion of Mattern's story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves to Roman amphitheaters to telephone wires and radio towers—she shows us how sonic infrastructures allow us to communicate and form communities, cultivating forms of intelligence that are embodied and affective, as well as informatic. Before there was the smart city, there was the sonic city—and the sonic city isn't going anywhere soon. Some topics discussed: Patrick Feaster and First Sounds; Neil Postman; Harold Innis; Marshall McLuhan; John Durham Peters' The Marvelous Clouds; Carolyn Birdsall's Nazi Soundscapes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School's Shannon Mattern. We have teamed up with Mediapolis, a journal that places urban studies and media studies into conversation with one another, to interview Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (U of Minnesota Press: 2018). And lucky for us on Phantom Power, a large portion of Mattern's story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves to Roman amphitheaters to telephone wires and radio towers—she shows us how sonic infrastructures allow us to communicate and form communities, cultivating forms of intelligence that are embodied and affective, as well as informatic. Before there was the smart city, there was the sonic city—and the sonic city isn't going anywhere soon. Some topics discussed: Patrick Feaster and First Sounds; Neil Postman; Harold Innis; Marshall McLuhan; John Durham Peters' The Marvelous Clouds; Carolyn Birdsall's Nazi Soundscapes.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

National Review correspondant Jim Geraghty's interview with Salem host Hugh Hewitt this morning brings up Neil Postman's old arguments of Huxley versus Orwell. Producer David Doll recalls his weekend shenanigans. We're joined by John Dombroski, founder and president of Grand Canyon Planning. Listener call-in appreciation for Waylon Jennings' ties to Phoenix.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the first segment Rev. Sam Schuldheisz teaches us more about the redeemed imagination. During the rest of the show Pastor Bramwell goes back to a conversation on technology in order to think through the characteristics of the loving resistance fighter as detailed by Neil Postman in Technopoly. Find this book at Amazon.com. This program originally aired February 22, 2021. Host Rev. Tyrel Bramwell, pastor of St. Mark Lutheran Church in Ferndale, California, and author of the book Come in, We are Closed, talks about curious topics to excite the imagination, equip the mind, and comfort the soul with God's ordering of the world in the Law and Gospel.

We've become so used to our phones in our lives that we've stopped realizing how arbitrary and unusual the content we're watching really has become. In this episode, Cal looks closer at what we're really spending time doing on our phones, then provides step-by-step instructions for healing this relationship. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here's the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today's episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Confronting Your Phone [4:30]- What does Cal think about Neil Postman's “Amusing Ourselves To Death”? [28:35]- Can you pursue high quality leisure after a day filled with deep work? [33:14]- Can commercial breaks be used for high quality leisure? [37:24]- Will digital minimalism work in an age of augmented reality? [40:34]- How can a full time YouTuber practice digital minimalism? [46:53]-CALL: How to share content online? [52:38]CASE STUDY: Cost-benefit analysis of technology usage [1:00:39] CAL REACTS: J. R. R. Tolkien's Search for Depth [1:06:43]Links:twitter.com/explore/tabs/trendinginstagram.com/explore/tags/popular/?hl=entiktok.com/foryou?lang=ennewcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/the-consolations-of-fantasyUse this link to preorder a signed copy of “Slow Productivity”: peoplesbooktakoma.com/preorder-slow-productivity/ FREE download excerpt and 2 Bonuses for “Slow Productivity”: calnewport.com/slow Thanks to our Sponsors: ladderlife.com/deepmybodytutor.comrhone.com/calmintmobile.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.

Join host Ginny Yurich in a riveting episode of the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast as she engages in a profound conversation with Nicholas Carr, renowned author of "The Shallows." Carr shares insights into the genesis of his book, which began as a personal exploration of the challenges he faced while spending excessive time online. The realization that constant connectivity hindered concentration and fueled distraction led him to delve deeper into the transformative impact of technology on our minds. The discussion unfolds with Carr drawing inspiration from Neil Postman, emphasizing that technology is not merely a tool but an ideology that shapes our environment and influences the way we think and interact. The conversation explores how our communication tools create a new ecology, molding our perceptions and interactions. Carr highlights the inherent distractibility of human beings and how modern technology exacerbates this issue, hijacking our minds and affecting our ability to focus. The episode delves into the ways screens, particularly on computers and phones, alter the reading experience. Carr contrasts the shield of a paper with the distractions surrounding digital words. He discusses the steady stream of information bombarding us, making it challenging to screen out distractions and maintain focus. The impact of technology on attention spans is a central theme, with Carr addressing the addictive nature of smartphones and the constant mental presence of our phones. He shares personal experiences of losing the ability to concentrate and immerse oneself in a book due to excessive online engagement. The conversation expands to societal implications, exploring how technology has changed our perception of time, eroded patience, and altered social dynamics. The influence of screens on reading habits, promoting skimming and scanning, is examined, highlighting the fundamental shift in the way we consume information. Carr also touches upon the societal shift towards instant gratification and the desire for quicker stimuli, evident in the rise of AI companions. The episode concludes with a reflection on the value placed on measurable outcomes, leaving listeners with a deeper understanding of the profound impact of technology on our minds, attention, and societal behaviors. ** Learn more about Nicholas Carr here >> https://www.nicholascarr.com/ Get your copy of The Shallows here >> https://amzn.to/3HmBpAK ** Downloads your free 1000 Hours Outside trackers here >> https://www.1000hoursoutside.com/trackers Find everything you need to kick off your 1000 Hours Outside Journey here >> https://www.1000hoursoutside.com/blog/allthethings Order of copy of Ginny's newest book, Until the Streetlights Come On here >> https://amzn.to/3RXjBlN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SPONSORED BY: The Winged Hussars, the Patrons of the program who support on Patreon. Click here to support as well.   STUFF IN THIS EPISODE Matthew Henry's Bible Commentary Online A Shell In The Pit Book of Kells SR-71 Blackbird Inception Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman   CONNECT WITH NO DUMB QUESTIONS: Discuss this episode here NDQ Subreddit Our podcast YouTube channel Our website is nodumbquestions.fm No Dumb Questions Twitter Matt's Twitter Destin's Twitter SUBSCRIBE LINKS: Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Android OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELS ARE ALSO FUN: Matt's YouTube Channel Destin's YouTube Channel (Smarter Every Day) YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY MATT'S DAILY PODCAST: The Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast