? Is technology or culture the problem?

The return of the visual culture at the expense of the written revives the old medieval subordination of the text to the pictorial. Although people today are not predominantly illiterate, in as much as mass schooling separates us from the Middle Ages, many utilise reading and writing for the most mundane utilitarian tasks and have turned away from

Technologies shape culture, politics, and economics as much as the other way around. For instance, most of our own social and governmental institutions today—prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, welfare systems, even schools—were shaped both literally and figuratively by that great embodiment of the Industrial Revolution: the factory.

The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it. When Kevin Dunbar analyzed the data from his in vivo studies of microbiology labs, one of his most remarkable findings was just how many experiments produced results that were genuinely unexpected. More than half of the data collected by the researchers deviated significantly

Of course, things have not quite worked out this way. As the late nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim perceived, the flipside of free-floating autonomy is anomie — a society without any authoritative norms. Pried from closed communities, many people suffer from pathologies of isolation and purposelessness. Family breakdown, drug ad

Recently, scientists have proposed that our brain divides the world into two separate regions: near and far. Everything that’s close to us – the things we can touch, see, and feel at any given moment – falls into the “near” category. Anything that’s out of our immediate reach – figuratively or literally – falls into the “far” category.

Dopamine gets

The term “cynical romantic” might seem odd, since cynicism and romanticism are typically regarded as opposites. Whereas romantics are devoted to pursuing aesthetic beauty, sentimentality and the sublime, cynics deride everything and everyone as motivated purely by self-interest; they reject all contrary evidence as fatal stupidity or risible hypocr