An unseasonable thinker

how Ellul engages cybercultural criticism

Andoni Alonso

pp. 115-128

in: Helena Mateus Jerónimo, José L. García, Carl Mitcham (eds), Jacques Ellul and the technological society in the 21st century, Berlin, Springer, 2013

Abstract

Jacques Ellul is a scholar difficult to classify. His more than 40 books and hundreds of articles have contributed to theology, sociology, history, and economics. Today in the era of the Internet, global communications, and the dominance of technology, Ellul is often dismissed as a techno-catastrophist or misleading heretic. Also labeled a Christian "neo-luddite," Ellul did indeed produce an analysis of contemporary technology as potentially leading to catastrophe – and few people are pleased by such criticism, especially when the economy appears to grow without limits and there are more and more goods for consumption. In a "low cost" culture technological criticism is not an easy sell. Until recently we lived in a world of the Apocalypse Postponed (Eco 1994).

Cited authors

Ellul Jacques