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- The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture
The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture proposes that modern technology seriously influences every aspect of culture and personality. Technology shapes our beliefs and values and even how we think of ourselves. It affects religion, morality, education, language, communication, and sexual identity. Every institution, every organization, is brought under its purview.
This book attempts to awaken the reader to the destructive side of modern technology that exists side-by-side with its constructive side. What modern technology is destroying, however, is the very meaning of being human. The essay "The Media Creates Us in Its Image" makes this case most dramatically.
The book asks the reader the following question: Is what you have gained from the use of modern technology more important than what you have lost? How do we once again bring technology under our control in the face of its inexorable "progress"?
Richard Stivers is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Illinois State University. He is the author of Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and Its American Stereotype; Evil in Modern Myth and Ritual; The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline; Technology As Magic; and The Illusion of Freedom and Equality. He gave three lectures based on three of his books to the European Commission in 2006.
“Richard Stivers has created a rich feast for thought in The Media Creates Us in Its Image. . . . Few have written as powerfully as Stivers on the technological threat to true education. . . . While the thinking and research are always deep, the clarity of Stivers’ writing, as well as the universal importance of technology in our lives, invites a wide audience to benefit from this book.”
—David W. Gill, International Jacques Ellul Society
“With this collection of essays, Richard Stivers exposes the realities of life in a technological environment, where efficiency is the watchword. His insights challenge us to respond and act in ways that preserve our humanity. His analyses juxtapose the individual with the collective, organization with disorganization, the visual image with the word, and false with true meaning. Stivers’ erudite mind presents us not with conventional academic exercises, but with urgent matters of existential concern.”
—James van der Laan, Illinois State University
“A highly insightful collection of essays that is useful for both the neophyte and the Ellul scholar that allows the reader two ways of looking at the works of Jacques Ellul. Taken individually, each of Stivers’ well-thought-out essays provides an in-depth exploration of a specific idea in an easily comprehendible style. Taken as a whole, the collection summarizes the vast range of Ellul’s ideas.”
—Franz A. Foltz, Rochester Institute of Technology
“A very good overview of the author’s research to advance our understanding of technique by elaborating the intellectual gift of Jacques Ellul.”
—Willem H. Vanderburg, University of Toronto
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