In the Summer 2005 issue of The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen continues her insightful series of articles on technology and culture, especially those technologies that we might call “consumer technologies” rather than “producer technologies.” She’s not interested in large data-processing, communications, travel, or manufacturing systems, but in things like iPods, cell phones, video games, and online dating services. These are technologies that re-configure the way we sustain relationships and order our experience in time and space. They also affect the way we regard and use language, our habits of thinking and imagining, even our sense of self.

In her latest essay, “The Image Culture,” Rosen joins a venerable tradition of reflection on the comparative cultural and expressive possibilities of images and words, and considers how the ubiquity of images erodes their power. Along the way she brings a number of commentators into the discussion, including Susan Sontag, Marshall McLuhan, and Mitchell Stephens, as she discusses how programs like Photoshop and PowerPoint have transformed our relationship to images and to verbal language.

Perhaps Rosen’s most helpful contribution to this continuing conversation about image-based technologies (which includes such diverse voices as Jacques Ellul’s 1981 The Humiliation of the Word and my own All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes) is her more general observation about how we assess the cultural effect of new technologies. In a discussion of some of the judgments of NYU media professor Mitchell Stephens, Rosen comments: “Like any good techno-enthusiast, Stephens takes the choices that we have made en masse as a culture (such as watching television rather than reading), accepts them without challenge, and then declares them inevitable. This is a form of reasoning that techno-enthusiasts often employ when they attempt to engage the concerns of skeptics. Although rhetorically useful in the short-term, this strategy avoids the real questions: Did things have to happen this way rather than that way? Does every cultural trend make a culture genuinely better? By neglecting to ask these questions, the enthusiast becomes nearly Panglossian in his hymns to his new world.”

Rosen’s questions for techno-enthusiasts are broad enough to be appropriate for use in assessing almost all instances of cultural change. If these and related questions are not asked, we will never know when we ought to resist certain changes, when we are obliged (by the ramifications of our love of God and of neighbor) to be counter-cultural. The kinds of questions Christine Rosen has been raising in her articles are exactly right for parents, pastors, and teachers who care about healthy cultural lives for themselves, for those under their care, and for society at large.

Related reading and listening

  • The destructive perils of speech without a real partner — Josef Pieper and Marc Barnes on how chatbots pervert the nature of conversation
  • Machines and misanthropy — Nicholas Carr on how technology has transformed our understanding of progress (and people)
  • Alienation and autoamputation: the price of power — Nicholas Carr on the numbing effect of technology
  • Disengagement from the world — Nicholas Carr encourages us to consider how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world and whether — like a good tool — they present a more inviting world or close us off from that world. (30 minutes)
  • Publicity and representative images in society — Oliver O’Donovan describes the nature of publicity as the force that mediates our communication with one another, creating common interests and then rapidly subsuming them into newer ones.(Lecture 3 of 3; 57 minutes)
  • Life more abundantly — Jeanne Schindler advocates for a return to an understanding and prioritizing of sensory experience — real engagement with the real world — as foundational to learning and living. (35 minutes)
  • Technophiliac obsessions —
    FROM VOL. 141
    Literary and media scholar Grant Wythoff talks about the “father of science fiction,” Hugo Gernsback. (26 minutes)
  • Utopian dreams and cynicism — John Durham Peters discusses the history of the idea of communication, saying that our hopes are too high when we believe that the solution to social discord is just better communication. (49 minutes)
  • What adolescence misses —
    FROM VOL. 94
    Mark Bauerlein talks about the ways of learning and living practiced by contemporary youth, how they impact the acquisition and use of knowledge and form intellectual habits, and what this means for the future of our society. (16 minutes)
  • Helping boys become virtuous men — Teacher and chaplain Mark Perkins describes forms of formation that take the body seriously 50 minutes
  • The temptations of talismanic technologies — Jeffrey Bilbro on the persistence of techno-utopianism
  • Living in a tool-i-fied world — Joseph Minich on how the ubiquity of technology makes atheism entirely plausible
  • In the Image of Our Devices — Nicholas Carr considers how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world. (66 minutes)
  • The recovery of an integrated ecology — In this essay, Michael Hanby unpacks the summons of Laudato si’ to an ecological way of life based on a proper understanding of creation in its fullness and integrity. (57 minutes)
  • The downward spiral of all technocracies — Andrew Willard Jones explains the two paths that exist with the development of new technologies: one which leads to an expansion of the humane world and one which exploits and truncates both Creation and humanity. (65 minutes)
  • How social media truncates relationships — In this lecture, Felicia Wu Song explains how social media industrializes and monetizes our relationships, forming us in modes of relationships and identity that are detrimental to ourselves and to society. (41 minutes)
  • In technology, we live and move and have our knowing — George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology
  • On the Degeneration of Attentiveness — Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)
  • On Eugenics in America — Christine Rosen explores early eugenics support in the early 1900s and current “participatory evolution” practices. (50 minutes)
  • Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)
  • Humans as biological hardware — In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
  • “The system will be first” —
    FROM VOL. 27
    Robert Kanigel describes the transformation of work due to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s concept of scientific management. (11 minutes)
  • Choices about the uses of technology — This Feature presents interviews with David Nye and Brian Brock related to how we evaluate adoption of new technology and how technology influences our thinking. (31 minutes)
  • What it means to be a person —
    FROM VOL. 147
    Sociologist Craig Gay argues that in order to address the challenges of a technological approach to the world, we need to recover the Christian tradition’s robust theology of personhood. (24 minutes)
  • The problem with dynamism without direction — Paulina Borsook on the biological paradigm of technolibertarianism’s love of spontaneous dynamism, whatever the costs
  • The libertarian spawning-ground of tech bros — Paulina Borsook on high tech’s long-standing animosity toward government and regulation
  • Tech bros and public power — Paulina Borsook discusses the “bizarrely narcissistic” and ultra-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. (22 minutes)
  • Voluntarily silencing ourselves —
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    John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes)
  • Souls in cyberspace —
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    Douglas Groothuis examines the worldview and mythology behind the creation and marketing of the Internet. (13 minutes)
  • Life in a frictionless, synthetic world —
    FROM VOL. 17
    Mark Slouka explores the worldview of techno-visionaries who aim to create a new era of human evolution. (11 minutes)
  • The digital revolution and community —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes)
  • Metaphysical impulses beneath techno-utopianism —
    FROM VOL. 38
    Erik Davis describes his research on how humans’ fascination with technology is permeated with “mythic energy” and gnostic aspirations. (11 minutes)
  • Post-Christian America and the “unlimited technological future” — George Parkin Grant on technology and the Puritan legacy of “unflinching wills”
  • Education that counters alienation — In this lecture, Jeanne Schindler explores how digital technologies warp not only education but our experience of being human. (30 minutes)
  • What is lost with labor-saving devices — Romano Guardini on what is lost when cultural pursuits eclipse natural order
  • Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
  • Technology and the kingdom of God —
    FROM VOL. 63
    Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes)
  • The gift of meaningful work — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler argues that genuine work is inherently meaningful and facilitates an encounter with reality and therefore, ultimately, with God. (36 minutes)
  • Diverting language from its richest possibilities —
    FROM VOL. 75
    Steve Talbott discusses the rich capacities of language and how technology diminishes them. (18 minutes)
  • The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
  • Automation and human agency —
    FROM VOL. 150
    Philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford laments the losses of human skill that correspond with gains in mechanical automation. (21 minutes)
  • A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)
  • Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
  • Seeking control, in white magic and The Green Book — Alan Jacobs on C. S. Lewis’s critique of the modern pursuit of god-like control
  • Rosen, Christine — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Christine Rosen is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism.
  • Life, liberty, and the defense of dignity — In a 2003 interview, Leon Kass discussed his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. The unifying theme in the book’s essays is the threat of dehumanization in one form or another. (36 minutes)
  • The surrender of culture to technology —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Neal Postman discuses the ways in which how we think about the world has been influenced by communications technology, even in its earliest forms. (11 minutes)
  • A.I., power, control, & knowledge — Ken Myers shares some paragraphs from Langdon Winner‘s seminal book, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977) and from Roger Shattuck‘s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996). An interview with Shattuck is also presented. (31 minutes)
  • Technology and social imaginaries — In this interview from 1999, cultural historian David Nye insists that societies have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established, a definite momentum is established. (19 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 158 — FEATURED GUESTS: David Setran, Vigen Guroian, Michael Dominic Taylor, Thomas Pfau, Jason Paone, and Matthew Levering
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