Digital Universe: The Global Telecommunication Revolution
  • The Book
  • Table of Contents
  • Links
    • Chapter 1 -- Introduction
    • Chapter 2 -- Thinkling about Moore's Law
    • Chapter 3 -- Critical Perspectives
    • Chapter 4 -- Origins of the Internet
    • Chapter 5 -- Internet Evolution
    • Chapter 6 -- The Web
    • Chapter 7 -- Telecommunication and the "Flat" world
    • Chapter 8 -- Digital Media Convergence
    • Chapter 9 -- The Public and Private Internet
    • Chapter 10 -- Censorship and Global Cyberculture
    • Chapter 11 -- The Dark Side
    • Chapter 12 -- Wired and Wireless Communication Technologies
    • Chapter 13 -- Virtual and Augmented Worlds
    • Chapter 14 -- The Future of the Digital Universe
  • Educator Resources
  • Author
  • Purchase

Links to content related to Chapter 3 -- Critical Perspectives


A helpful website dedicated to the life work and publications of Jacques Ellul is maintained by the International Jacques Ellul Society. The link to it is here.

One of Ellul's primary publications on technology where he defines "la technique" is accessible online:
Ellul, J. (1962, Fall). The technological order. Technology and Culture. 3, 4. p. 412. Click here to access it.

A moving eulogy to Neil Postman by former student Jay Rosen can be accessed at the Press Think site here.

The sobering article "Why the future doesn’t need us" by Bill Joy in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine can be accessed here.

Nicholas Carr is the author of The Big Switch (2008) about the advent of Cloud Computing as a universal information utility -- the book is a companion text to the Digital Universe book in my "Technologies of Public Communication" graduate seminar. His most recent book is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010) -- which in Carr's insightful critique is not a positive trend. The central thesis of his critique can be accessed here in an article Is Google Making Us Stupid? published in the July-August 2008 issue of Atlantic magazine.