America has a Tweeter in Chief. The response is a seemingly unending stream of Facebook sites and posts and comments and likes and friending and unfriending. Drudge had a record month in January — over 1,000,000,000 hits. Is “SEE-CLICK” rewiring our collective reality? Apple’s Tim Cook seems to think so: “We are going through this period of time […]
The Areopagus and The Woodshed: Re-imagining Abuse in Social Media
In the world of social media, Twitter’s hard times have caused much hand wringing and head scratching. Once hailed as a global marketplace for the exchange of ideas, a modern Areopagus of sorts, the social network has seen its growth achieving ever flattening levels of stagnation. And as resident social media watchman, I’m beginning to […]
Internet Shame and the Price of a Reputation
If you already have a list of podcasts you pretend to listen to, put Reply All at the top. It’s a show I had avoided for a while because it’s exclusively “a show about the internet,” a medium I surrender so much of my time to already. But I quickly found that, like most of […]
Another Week Ends: Facelessness, Lent CEOs, Literacy Losers, Baseball Clocks, and North Korean Inspiration
1) Stephen Marche is certainly making a name for himself as the technological doomster, and in a supremely convincing way. He’s the one that wrote that piece we completely over-covered, called “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” and then there was that piece on our modern muse, Failure, and right in time for Ash Wednesday, we […]
On Playing Catch Up (In Case You Missed It)
God bless Portlandia. Their first season contained a skit that has proven to be more than a little prophetic. In case you missed it (ICYMI): On the surface, Fred and Carrie are emphasizing how people compete over being well informed, how prideful our relationship with information has become. They’re lampooning a world where ‘staying on […]
The Nerdy Pharisees
When I was in college, a group of pledges from one of the socially-elite fraternities on campus painted “NERDS” in large capital letter on the roof of my fraternity’s house. It was a pejorative statement. Until that act of vandalism, we didn’t know that we were nerds. We dressed nicely. We drank a lot. We […]
Social Un-Networking
There are a couple of interesting tidbits for thought coming from the social media side of things. The electronic communities that have promised us relationships in this ever-fragmenting age are now enabling us to disconnect. First, The New Yorker recently informed many of us of an app called Cloak. Its purpose? Unlike other social media apps that help […]
NYC Preview: The Passion of the Childish Gambino: Online Honesty and Instagram Authenticity
Mockingbird has been around since 2008, and the earliest post we have on the subject of Social Media is 2009, in which we studied the phenomenon of getting busted on Facebook for real-life lies. In the five years since that post, we certainly haven’t lost our fascination with the subject- it’s been one of our […]
What Would Jesus Tweet? The Gospel in the 21st Century (Conference Recordings!)
An enormous thank you to all the fantastic people at St Francis in the Fields Episcopal Church in Louisville, KY, who made the What Would Jesus Tweet mini-conference possible earlier this month! What a privilege it was to meet so many new friends; the warmth and graciousness of the welcome we received was nothing short of overwhelming. To read a (very generous!) re-cap of the event, go here. The recordings are now available, both on our Resources page and here, in the order in which they were given. Click on the talk titles to download, or on the players below to listen:
Talk 1: What Would Jesus Tweet? – David Zahl
Talk 2: Everybody’s Anxious, Nobody’s Bored – David Zahl
Everything New Is Moralism Again – The Rev. Jacob Smith
The Psychology of Salvation – Dr. Eric Johnson
Talk 3: What We Talk About When We Talk About Freedom and Closing Q&A – David Zahl and Jacob Smith
Confessions of a Sad, Tweeting Batman On Word-Porn
What happens when you mix equal parts family crisis, a comedic coping mechanism, and an insatiable desire to be an internet star? Well, according to Twitter funnyman Sammy Rhodes, not a recipe for happiness. Popular comedy Twitter-er Sammy Rhodes is a pastor hailing from the Midwest who nabbed the twitter handle “@prodigalsam” back in 2009. […]
When Even Our Boredom Doesn’t Make Us Bored
A fascinating–and disturbingly convicting–article came out in The New Yorker’s Oct 28th issue called “Only Disconnect,” by Evgeny Morozov (what a name!). In it, he walks through several books and essays, past and present, that point out what we’re all seeing, that “We’re under assault by connectivity, receptivity, the tyranny of the now.” Morozov takes […]
