Media

FROM VOL. 122 George Marsden discusses the influence of public intellectuals in America during the 1950s and their concerns for national moral consensus. (22 minutes)

Todd Gitlin argues that we simultaneously resent and crave the experience of media saturation, and that it ultimately cheapens our lives. (33 minutes)

Todd Gitlin on the ways in which television and other media have shaped our ways of having emotions

Marshall McLuhan on the necessity of evaluating how — not just what — various media convey

Todd Gitlin on the effect of media on our sense of time

FROM VOL. 150 Eric Jacobsen argues that the emblematic items of the car windshield, the television, and the cell phone — “three pieces of glass” —have led to alienation from people and the places where we live. (22 minutes)

Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie discuss philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s thought on Nietzsche and on the effects of digital media on concepts of freedom, desire, and receptivity to others. (14 minutes)

Oliver O’Donovan describes the distinctive character of publicity in modernity, which drowns us in a flood of ever-changing representations that do not serve the common good. (37 minutes)

Media theorist John Durham Peters wants us to reexamine the purposes of media and how fundamental media are. (59 minutes)

Alan Jacobs discusses some principles he’s compiled to help us think well (and charitably) in our cultural context, and he warns us to be attentive to the ways technology displaces previously fixed communities. (53 minutes)

FROM VOL. 152 Jeffrey Bilbro advocates a Christian posture toward our contemporary digital media ecosystem that addresses its disorienting and disintegrating effects. (23 minutes)

Neil Gabler and C. John Sommerville discuss how the mentalities conveyed by our experience with communications media work against the nurturing of community. (36 minutes)

FROM VOL. 48 Gary Cross argues that Americans are uniquely susceptible to the temptation to define ourselves by what we buy. (10 minutes)

FROM VOL. 59 Todd Gitlin discusses the effects of media saturation on our mental and emotional lives. (14 minutes)

Christopher Lasch on the subversive effects of the expectation of novelty

FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr

FEATURED GUESTS: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Jeffrey Bilbro, Zena Hitz, James L. Nolan, Jr., Bishop Robert Barron, and Jason Blakely

In anticipation of this Fall’s Areopagus Lecture entitled “‘For Freedom Set Free’: Retrieving Genuine Religious Liberty,” we present selections from interviews with three MARS HILL AUDIO guests who have raised questions about the modern understanding of freedom. (27 minutes)

Thomas de Zengotita describes how communication media contribute to the widespread sense of entitlement and of identity as an autonomous chooser. The postmodern self is what Zengotita calls “the flattered self,” increasingly believing itself to be the center of the universe. (59 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright