Todd Hayen Remember the bad kids in high school? The ones who didn’t make it onto the honour roll or the dean’s list? In my day they were the long-haired kids (the boys) who wore James Dean-style denim jackets and smoked in the bathrooms. I doubt if those kids in the ’70s even knew who …
Sylvia Shawcross With the end of winter comes a death rattle deep from the throat of the cold. It has sputtered snow in between the rain and left the spring grasses white wet waiting. We dreamed and prayed for the warmth but it still does not want to stay. It flirts with us then disappears …
Johan Eddebo Background: the epistemology of modern mass media I often come back to Neil Postman’s 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s a penetrating analysis on the cognitive effects of media technology. His focus is mainly on how the format and mode of communication influences the character of content and how that content then trains us, …
Todd Hayen Any group of human beings who are supposedly in a free society and who have a leader (or a council of people who lead), assigned by that group to make decisions for the common interests of the group, must rely on their own “self-regulation,” above and beyond the leaders’ government, in order to …
J R Leach In the digital age, the incessant calls to action reverberate across the virtual landscape, summoning legions of fervent warriors to wage battles against perceived evils. This rallying cry, echoing the urgency of a multitude of crusades, permeates our online existence. Be it the casual dehumanization of entire swaths of people to the …
Todd Hayen The ultimate “good for you” is to be dead. At least that is what it would be if some outside authority, or entity, was watching our human behaviour and assessing what looks to be the “best” for us–meaning that if we are dead, nothing bad can happen to us. I would assume that …
Todd Hayen I read Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto when I was 17, and I got detention for it. Actually, I got the detention for reading it in class, and then got a lecture for being interested in its subversive un-American content by the assistant principal while I was in detention. The details are …
Sylvia Shawcross Out there the freezing rain settles crystals on the high snow and in the trees and dens the animals are warm and dreaming. Inside the people in their homes hope to heavens they don’t have to go out in “that” because life is hard enough without sliding and slipping and skating on treacherous …
Todd Hayen Everyone knows Maslow and his pyramid of needs, right? Don’t feel bad if you don’t; it is just one of those psychological concepts psychologists like to come up with to illustrate explanations of the weird human mind. Not to diss Maslow, he was pretty cool. And a lot of these guys (and gals) …
