science and technology on Pop Culture

These days, music is everywhere. It’s on television and film, elevators and restaurants, public bathrooms and dentist offices. It’s in our cars and on our phones. With just a few taps to our screens, ...

TV is imago populi—all of society’s trendy appetites incarnated into visible form and broadcasted.

American culture is probably the least Christian culture that we’ve ever had because it is so materialistic and it’s so full of lies…. The problem is people have been treated as consumers for so long ...

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

Those who insist we are even more self-centered today might point to how the titles and focus of our popular magazines have shifted, as photographer Fred Ritchin notes: “I always use a quote by Paul S...

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of k...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

In the age of the spectacle, image is our identity, and our identity is unavoidably molded by our media.

Martin Lindstrom observes: When people viewed images associated with the strong brands-the iPods, the Harley-Davidson, the Ferrari, and others-their -their brains registered the exact same patterns of...

Find the room where your family spends the most time and ruthlessly eliminate the things that ask little of you and develop little in you. Move the TV to a less central location—and ideally a less com...

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Brands are the new religion.

We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture…. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s de...

The digital age is about getting what we want, when we want, how we want, and as much (or as little) as we want.

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...

Culture is shaped by the primary medium of an era. Marshall McLuhan is widely known as the father of media studies. He coined the famous phrase “the medium is the message” in 1965. And while some to...

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...

Materialism is not fundamentally an economic problem, but a cultural one... a spiritual issue. It runs to the depths of our souls, and, for this reason, needs to be understood less in terms of budgets...

People are submitting themselves to time-devouring technology. We’re a nerve-racked society where people have difficulty sitting back and thinking of the purpose of what they do.

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

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...

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commo...

The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply,” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness t...

As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, asso...

The digital age’s technological advancements boast three major contributions to the improvement of human experience, which in turn have become its undeniable values: We have access to what we want wh...

In this post-truth world, any marketing BS seems tolerable.

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...

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.