arts and culture on Messages

One of the most critically acclaimed fantasy films in recent years was a piece of science fiction called Arrival . It is the story of beings from outer space who arrive on earth, igniting a wildfire ...

We are surrounded by hundreds, thousands of messages every day that link our deepest emotions to products that objectify people and trivialize our most heartfelt moments and relationships. Every emoti...

In this excerpt from Jay Y. Kim’s book, Analog Church , the author shares about an experience at a local restaurant after being convicted of his own smartphone use at home, keeping him from being p...

Looking into his life and out to the wider world, Kenneth Gergen writes about The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, arguing that “social saturation brings with it a general lo...

Loving and grace-filled God, we confess that it is difficult to keep you first in our lives. There are so many urgent demands on us that we find it hard to focus ourselves on you. The culture around u...

In The Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness , Tim Chester has come up with twelve diagnostic questions to determine if and how much we’ve become sick with “hurry sickness.” “Do you regularly work ...

Have you noticed the ever-increasing arm of advertising in our lives? According to a New York Times article, supermarket eggs have begun to be stamped by CBS television shows, turnstiles in subways ar...

Everyone knows that during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis we were perilously close to WWIII and nuclear Armageddon. Most people don’t know HOW close we were. Or how much we owe to Vasili Arkhipov. Ark...

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World , Mike Cosper explains the value in persevering through the difficult realities of practicing solitude. ...

In recent decades, many Christians have tried to make sense of the tension between our bodies and spirits by swinging to the opposite pole. Instead of saying, “The body doesn’t matter,” they have said...

Don’t all these little tweets, these little sips of online connection, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.

My guess—and I think this will be debated for a long time—is that humans are very communicative, and so the fact that you’re talking to more people with shorter bursts of communication is probably net...

The living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk together, speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it. Speech conne...

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World , Mike Cosper shares a short vignette about the comedian Louis C.K.* Louis CK tells fans he meets in pu...

Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...

Digital connections . . . may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.

Studies of conversation both in laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on the table between them or in the periphery of their vision cha...

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

Two monologues do not make a dialogue.

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.

For thousands of years human beings have communicated with one another first in the language of dress. Long before I am near enough to talk to you on the street, in a meeting, or at a party, you annou...

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.

There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.

People began to learn, first from the telegraph, then from radio, newsreels, television, and the Internet, that what was happening now, all over the globe, mattered more than what was happening here.

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

With my friends, it’s either no conversation or conversation about what’s going on, on your phone.

Below is the description of this short video, posted on youtube, click the link below the description to watch: Imagine a day when a young woman’s daily routine unfolds normally, with one exception: ...

A man went in for his annual checkup and received a phone call from his physician a couple of days later. The doctor said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” “What’s the news?” the man asked...