The Five Biggest Influences in Culture

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Do you know who influences you?

Someone wants to give you a piece of your mind.

Do you know who has the most power over your thinking?

What should I be doing to guard against undo influence?

Watch our Truth in Two to find out (full text and hyperlink below).

If I give up independent thinking, I have no one to blame but myself.

Subscribe to “Truth in Two” videos from Comenius (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), hosts a weekly radio program with diverse groups of guests (1 minute video), and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).

Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat

 

FULL TEXT

In the January 2020 issue of The Atlantic Ismail Muhammad investigates big-tech thinking in Silicon Valley. The article entitled, “Inside Tech’s Fever Dream” is a review of Anna Wiener’s book Uncanny Valley. Wiener’s account of the mentality of those creating our technology should send shivers up our spines. She writes about the enthralling culture, the “dizzying momentum” of consumer creations. Wiener admits that she had been “Self-deluded in embracing an ethos of efficiency, hyperproductivity, and seamless connectivity at any cost.” She references arrogant software designers, impulsive investors, and excessively paid employees. As Weiner says in her book

“They had inexorable faith in their own ideas and their own potential.”

Anna Weiner is concerned about the influence of big-tech: and so should we. But at the Comenius Institute our concerns about who influences us goes further. I would like to suggest the five major influencers in our world:

  1. Big Tech, including all digital devices, any device linked to the world wide web

  2. Federal Bureaucracy, all the agencies which create American law

  3. Universities, all the professors who influence students

  4. Hollywood, all the movies made by the film-making elite

  5. Social Media, all the voices we hear from National Public Radio to FB, IG & Twitter

We should be wary of the five biggest influencers by asking these five questions every day:

  1. Who or what influences my thinking?

  2. What sources of information do I hear/read/watch?

  3. Why do I believe as I do about anything?

  4. Can I construct a reason for my point of view?

  5. How do the answers to these questions make a difference in how I think about anything?

The Atlantic article ends recounting a tech industry event. Anna Wiener describes a fellow big-tech employee who boasts of big-tech influence, “We’re the government now.” Proverbs is right. Only God’s wisdom will enable us to discern the devious ways of cultural influencers.

For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/review-anna-wiener-uncanny-valley/603058/

 

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