Democracies depend on buy-in; citizens need to believe in certain basics, starting with the legitimacy of elections. Trump both runs the government and runs it down. The electoral system, he asserts, can’t be trusted. Voter[…]
In the coming years, as most of America got online, some variation on the cyberporn cycle would repeat almost continuously: about chat-room child predators; about online games; about the emergence of social media; about sexting[…]
As the internet of 2017 has changed, so has the internet user. We are now in the majority, and our experience is defined by plenitude and freedom, still, but also by a growing sense of[…]
Looking at a screen is not living. It’s a concentrated decoding operation that requires the keen, exhausting vision of a predator and not the soft focus that allows all doors of perception to swing open.[…]
The internet of the 1990s was a perfect canvas for alarmism: hard to define, easy to misunderstand, growing rapidly but not yet vital or even familiar to those most inclined to worry about it. But[…]
While modernity promised Jews and other minorities that they could move from the margins to the center, it’s the reverse that may have actually occurred. In the era of radical globalization and the internet, it[…]
These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise[…]
Anderson explains the use of language and symbols that help reinforce communal identity and unity. Online Jewish communities also provide these types of symbols and language. For example, the Orthodox movement uses pictures of a[…]
Trolls work through abstraction, leveraging the internet and irony to carve out a space between actions and consequences. Becoming president has blown Trump’s cover: There’s nothing more consequential than this. Trolls are typically outsiders, and[…]
Like Chabad, Aish provides links to information about their schools and drop-in classes. The website has articles like “Nobituary” with a photo of Whoopi Goldberg, and the caption attached states, “One Jew’s creative way to[…]