Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance: Collected Essays - Softcover

Fallon, Peter K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1482696517 ISBN 13: 9781482696516

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Synopsis

In a series of thoughtful, edgy, but hopeful essays, Marshall McLuhan Award-winning writer and social critic Peter K Fallon casts a cold eye upon the American obsession with technology and the technological solution for every problem we confront. Fallon prods the reader into questioning heretofore unquestioned (and unquestionable?) assumptions: that education is aided rather than impeded by technology; that Capitalism and Christianity go naturally with one another; that racism in the United States ended in the 1960s. In the intellectual tradition of Neil Postman and Jacques Ellul, Fallon shakes the reader, wakes the reader from a technology-induced slumber to confront the reality hidden from us by our TVs, tablets, smartphones, and websites.Advance Praise forCultural Defiance/Cultural DevianceTo the names of McLuhan, Postman, Ellul, and Ong, please now add Peter K. Fallon. This isn’t so much a book as it is a placeholder for polymaths. This isn’t a collection of essays unified by a theme or subject, but rather a collection of discrete objects subjected to the same methodology. They are historical, analogical, probing, semantic, linguistic, and psychological. And not religious but spiritual, in the best sense of that beaten dead horse... If you read the essays collected herein, even some of them, you will have committed the cultural heresy of the title. You will have committed the act of contemplation, in defiance of the noise, rush, bright colors, and distraction from the unmitigated disaster of technological society’s clustercuss all around you. And that will be a deviant thing to do. –Read Mercer Schuchardt, Wheaton College (from the Foreword)Neil Postman suggested that all of the social and behavioral sciences would be best understood as a form of moral theology. Without a doubt, he would have heartily approved of this well-written and thoughtful collection of essays by Peter K Fallon, who writes in the tradition of Jacques Ellul, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Postman himself, and brings deep insight, grounded in the media ecology intellectual tradition, coupled with a sharp wielding of ethical criteria, to matters of contemporary and universal human concern. – Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham UniversityBoth a student of renowned Communications theorist Neil Postman and the winner of the Media Ecology Association’s Lewis Mumford Award (named for Postman’s own intellectual hero), Peter K. Fallon is the perfect tour guide through our techno-mediated environment. He adheres scrupulously to Postman’s conception of media ecology as nothing less than an exploration of the ways in which our communication habits and technologies enhance or impede our chances for survival... In the words and spirit of Jacques Ellul--one of the intellectual heirs Fallon pays homage to in the book--”Contemplation as Defiance/Deviance” is “a call to the sleeper to awake.” – Eric Goodman, Producer, Composer, Performer: Thus Spoke the SpectacleFor nearly two decades, Peter K. Fallon worked for NBC News. Today, he is a media scholar and a powerful critic of the television he once produced... These essays by a writer of conscience and acute observation insist on the continuity between our media and our moral lives. Fallon’s evident passion for the potential of media, and his pointed criticisms of the moments when television and other media betray their promise, affect all who read his thoughtful books. – Anne-Marie Cusac, George Polk Award-winning investigative journalist; author, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America

About this title

About the Author:

Peter K. Fallon is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Roosevelt University. A veteran of more than two decades in television, Fallon left NBC News in 1999 to teach at Molloy College in New York in their Department of Communication Arts. His 2005 book Printing, Literacy, and Education in Eighteenth Century Ireland: Why the Irish Speak English is the winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in 2007, and his second book, The Metaphysics of Media: Toward an End to Postmodern Cynicism and the Construction of a Virtuous Reality, won the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Technology for 2010. Fallon recently completed a two-year term as editor of EME: Explorations in Media Ecology, the international scholarly journal of the Media Ecology Association.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1482696517
• ISBN 13: 9781482696516
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 154