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Here’s a followup to an earlier post:…

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….

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…

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:…

These Economist debates seem to unspool in slo-mo. They’re a sin against realtime. But the third and final round of my debate with Jay Rosen on whether the net is making journalism better is now up. Here’s my closing statement: Like many who celebrate the net’s informational bounties, my opponent in this debate is a member of the online elite. He is a fixture on Twitter, having written, at last count, 16,963 tweets and garnered 61,765 followers. He is a prolific and popular blogger. He broadcasts his thoughts to the world through a FriendFeed account, a Facebook account, a Posterous account, a Tumblr account, a Storify account, a YouTube account and a Google+ account. And he has a weekly podcast. Jay Rosen is very much of the net. I do not intend that as a criticism. Mr Rosen is plying his trade, and he is doing a fine job of it. On the internet, hyperactivity is no sin. But even though he has devoted so much time and energy to the online world, he has not been able to back up his defence of the net’s effects on journalism with facts. Instead, he continues to give us sunny platitudes and…

I suspect it’s accurate to say that Kevin Kelly’s deep Christian faith makes him something of an outlier among the Bay Area tech set. It also adds some interesting layers and twists to his often brilliant thinking about technology, requiring him to wrestle with ambiguities and tensions that most in his cohort are blind to. In a new interview with Christianity Today, Kelly explains the essence of what the magazine refers to as his “geek theology”: We are here to surprise God. God could make everything, but instead he says, “I bestow upon you the gift of free will so that you can participate in making this world. I could make everything, but I am going to give you some spark of my genius. Surprise me with something truly good and beautiful.” So we invent things, and God says, “Oh my gosh, that was so cool! I could have thought of that, but they thought of that instead.” I confess I have a little trouble imagining God saying something like “Oh my gosh, that was so cool!” It makes me think that Kelly’s God must look like Jeff Spicoli: But beyond the curious lingo, Kelly’s attempt to square Christianity with…

This week Thursday, July 21, to be precise marks the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth. Here are some thoughts on the man and his legacy. One of my favorite YouTube videos is a clip from a 1968 Canadian TV show featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan. The two men, both icons of the sixties, could hardly be more different. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is pugnacious, animated, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, seems to be on autopilot. He speaks in canned riddles. The planet is no longer nature, he declares, to Mailers uncomprehending stare; its now the content of an art work. Watching McLuhan, you cant quite decide whether he was a genius or just had a screw loose. Both impressions, it turns out, are valid. As the novelist Douglas Coupland argued in his recent biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, McLuhans mind was probably situated at the mild end of the autism spectrum. He also suffered from a couple of major cerebral traumas. In 1960, he had a stroke so severe that he was given his last rites. In 1967, just a few months before the Mailer debate,…

My debate on the net’s effect on journalism with Jay Rosen has entered the second, rebuttal round over at the Economist’s site. Here’s my rebuttal: Jay Rosen grants that the internet has left us with “a weaker eye on power” while increasing “the supply of rubbish in and around journalism”. As a counterweight, he gives us ten reasons to be cheerful about journalism, most of which revolve around the “democratisation” of media. (I will resist the urge to point out how appropriate it is to provide a defence of the net’s effects on journalism in the form of a Top Ten list.) I join Mr Rosen in applauding the way the net has reduced barriers to media participation. Having written a blog for many years, I can testify to the benefits of cheap digital publishing. But I do not take on faith the idea that democratising media necessarily improves journalism, and, unfortunately, Mr Rosen provides little in the way of facts to support his case. In place of hard evidence, we get dubious generalisations (”journalists are stronger and smarter when they are involved in the struggle for their own sustainability”), gauzy platitudes (”new life flows in through this opening”) and…

“As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.” -Emerson There’s a fascinating – and, to me, disquieting – study on the internet’s effects on memory that’s just come out in Science.* It provides more evidence of how quickly and flexibly our minds adapt to the tools we use to think with, for better or for worse. The study, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” was conducted by three psychologists: Betsy Sparrow, of Columbia University; Jenny Liu, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and Daniel Wegner, of Harvard. They conducted a series of four experiments aimed at answering this question: Does our awareness of our ability to use Google to quickly find any fact or other bit of information influence the way our brains form memories? The answer, they discovered, is yes: “when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.” The findings suggest, the researchers write, “that processes of human memory…