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Here’s a followup to an earlier post:…

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Part 1 (Kevin Kelly’s interview in Christianity Today) Part 2 (my reply, posted here) Part 3 (drawn from the comment thread to my post): Kevin Kelly: Nick, Thanks for the careful read and thoughtful response. Curious lingo??? I think there is no doubt that God speaks just like Kevin Kelly. But to the crux of our disagreement: You end with: “The best you can argue, therefore, is that technological progress will, on balance, have a tendency to open more choices for more people.” This is precisely my argument. I am not arguing that technology increases the options for everyone equally. Of course new technologies remove some options. Lots of excellent horse buggy and whip makers lost their opportunities. I talk about a very tiny net gain in options when you tally up all the options lost compared to the ones added. That very tiny micro net gain accumulated over time is progress. You say: “Look at any baby born today, and try to say whether that child would have a greater possibility of fulfilling its human potential if during its lifetime (a) technological progress reversed, (b) technological progress stalled, (c) technological progress advanced slowly, or (d) technological progress accelerated quickly….

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In the course of preparing my statements for the Economist journalism debate, I reviewed a bunch of recent, useful studies and surveys. It took a while to dig these up, so I thought I’d provide a list here (in no particular order) in case anybody needs it in the future. Federal Communications Commission, The Information Needs of Communities (2011) Congressional Research Service, The U.S. Newspaper Industry in Transition (2010) Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, Informing Communities (2010) and Re-imagining Journalism (2011) Media Standards Trust, Shrinking World: The decline of international reporting in the British press (2010) American Journalism Review, Statehouse Exodus (2009) and Abandoned Agencies (2010) and Retreating from the World (2011) Columbia Journalism Review, The Reconstruction of American Journalism (2009) The Guardian, Stop Press (UK regional journalism survey) (2009) Global Journalist, Is the Foreign News Bureau Part of the Past? (2010) Human Rights Watch, Whose News? (2011) Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism offers many studies, including its annual State of the News Media reports and News Leaders and the Future (2010)…

I’ve been looking for good counterpoints to John Gray’s mind-altering book Straw Dogs since reading it a couple of years ago. Raymond Tallis provides one in his formidable critique of “neuroscientism” in The New Atlantis. Here’s a drop from the bucket: A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with, as in [Daniel] Dennetts words, the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain everything else in the material universe. Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but…

Listen to Wayne Hurlbert on Blog Talk Radio

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And lest we forget, amid all the clamor surrounding the McLuhan centennial, this week also marks the 45th anniversary of the death of Bobby Fuller at the age of 23, asphyxiated by gasoline fumes. The official cause of death was either suicide or accident – the coroner couldn’t decide – though many believe it was murder. I’m convinced that, like Robert Johnson before him, Fuller pawned his soul to the Devil, and the Devil collected on the loan. The gun-toting dancers are beyond great:…