Michael Zimmer.org

Neil Postman is one of the primary reasons I decided to leave Milwaukee in 2001 and move to New York City to pursue my graduate education.
While searching for schools, I had discovered of the department Postman founded at NYU, and after watching this amazing interview of him, I decided to read more of his work. The first book I picked up was Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it forever changed the way I thought about media and information in our contemporary society. (My later reading of Technopoly had a similar …

Buried within this NY Times post about how some Clinton administration verterans on Obama’s transition team are surprised at some of the changes within the White House is an interesting discussion about how the reliance on real-time video links between the President and field commanders has affected the nature of their discourse:
[S]everal veterans of the White House have noted in conversations over the past two years that the secure video does not lend itself to open, vigorous debate. Instead, it can squelch it. The picture is being piped into too …

Blogging has been light lately as I’m visiting family over the holiday break.
Today, however, I came across one of my favorite essays by the late Neil Postman, cultural critic and founder of my PhD-granting department at NYU, and felt compelled to interrupt my break from blogging to share it.
The essay, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change,” was delivered by Postman in 1998 to a gathering of theologians and religious leaders in Denver, Colorado.  Postman remarked on the things we should all endeavor to understand about how society is impacted by technological …

A video honoring the 5th Anniversary of the Media Ecology Association has been posted to YouTube, featuring choice clips of (roughly in order of appearance) Camile Paglila, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman (including his famous stint on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show”), Chris Nystrom, and Terry Moran.
I recommend it for anyone who has always wondered “what is Media Ecology?”

I will presenting my paper “Media Ecology & Values in Design: A Combined Approach to Understanding the Biases of Media Technology” at the 6th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association at Fordham University today. The abstract:
In recent years, a field known as Values in Design has emerged to identify, understand, anticipate and address the ethical and value biases of media and information technologies. Upon developing a dialectical model of how bias exists in technology, this paper makes a case for the dual relevance of Value Sensitive Design to Media …

Source: Educational Technology, January 15, 1976. Vol. VII, Number 1. Back Cover
(Thanks to Richard Graham)