Category Archives: Modern Culture

Measuring the Internet

I remember back to the good old days of Alta Vista when they could actually count the number of pages on the ‘Net. Like McDonald’s hamburgers, the number of websites and pages now appears too large to measure. Nevertheless, here’s a really fascinating site that attempts to quantify the Internet in terms of type and […]

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Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation

Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation* argues that modern western society (and particularly American society) is moving from a relatively literate print-based culture to a post-literate technology culture. Bauerlein’s specific focus is on the new realm of social technologies (“e-mails, text messages, blog-postings and comments, phone calls, tweets, feeds, photos and songs” (p. x)) that he […]

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Is modern music going down the drain?

I recently came across an interesting article on the musical legacy of our current decade (2000-2009). The article, written by Kris Millet for Culture Magazine, takes a dim view of this century’s musical output. His central thesis is that the technological fragmentation of the last 10 years has destroyed our ability to follow a band […]

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Firefighting: A Public Good?

In a 2008 speech for TVO, Naomi Klein discussed the shrinking public sphere in the United States. Already small by Western standards, America’s public sphere appears to be shrinking by the week. One of the few realms of American society that is still considered to be a public good is firefighting and disaster relief. But […]

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My Review of Neil Bissoondath’s Selling Illusions

Neil Bissoondath’s book, Selling Illusions, offers an unusual argument for a Canadian book, particularly since a non-white immigrant writes it. Selling Illusions opposes Canada’s official, sacred cow policy of multiculturalism. Generally speaking, Bissoondath’s book is a well-written treatise that discusses a potentially dry subject in clear, jargon-free prose. Nevertheless, his arguments suffer from some surprising […]

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