Richard Stivers
Biographic Data
| ID | 145849 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Stivers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Stivers |
| SIGNATURE | STIVERS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Illinois State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Media Creates Us in Its Image
Propaganda in all its forms is the culture of a mass society. The media transmits propaganda to form public opinion and recreate the human being. Reversing the Western ideal of a rational and free individual, the media creates a childish conformist ensconced in the peer group, who acts unconsciously
Our Brave New World Today
Aldous Huxley is perhaps the only author to have written a work of science fiction and a work of nonfiction to ascertain whether fiction had become reality. Both Brave New World (fiction) and Brave New World Revisited (nonfiction) are discussed and compared with Jacques Ellul’s work on technology
The Fate of Equality in a Technological Civilization
The meaning of equality has been radically altered since the Enlightenment. In the 18th century, equality acquired political and economic meanings specifically in the contexts of democracy and capitalism. Today, the context in which equality is understood and practiced is technology as our most immediate and compelling environment. Moreover, the reality of equality contradicts the ideology of equality within this technological context: The ideolo…
The Illusion of Freedom and Equality
Vulgar Music and Technology
Rock music, rap, and heavy metal are all forms of vulgar music. Vulgarity refers to actions and communication that are “common, noisy, and gross,” and are “untranscendent.” A technological society is a vulgar society in its base of materialism and exclusive concern with power. Its excessive rationality produces a need for escape, for ecstasy, for the release of instinctual power. Vulgar music mimics a technological society and provides compensati…
Technology and Terrorism in the Movie Brazil
The movie Brazil calls attention to the relationship between technology and terrorism. Terrorism appears to be a threat to the order that technology creates. But terrorism forces technology to adapt and change so that technology perfects itself as a system. In the movie, terrorism is equated with any form of bureaucratic deviance so that everyone is more or less under suspicion as a terrorist
The Need for a “Shadow” University
The modern university has become a subsystem within the technological system. As such, the university has lost its autonomy. Every aspect of the university— administration, pedagogy, research—has become specialized and technical. Success, power, and efficiency are its only values. An alternative to the modern university is briefly explored
Irish Families in the Twentieth Century: Exceptional or Converging
Irish families were characterized as being patriarchal, stem-extended, large, strong, and stable for much of the twentieth century. Studies completed during the 1930s and 1940s propagated this depiction. These characteristics made Irish families an exception to the convergence of family patterns going on worldwide. Historical scholarship and empirical data are used to assess the accuracy of this characterization, chart changing patterns, and comp…
Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society
The Role of Statistics in Management Magic
Technology and magic both represent the human will to power—to dominate nature and ultimately humans. In a technological civilization, magic imitates technology. Modern management often entails psychological techniques (the human relations approach) and organizational techniques (the scientific approach). The heart of the latter is statistical measurement and prediction of the future. This article examines the magical use of statistical measureme…
The Technological Personality
If technology is the single most important factor in explaining the organization of modern societies, it is likewise the key to understanding the modern personality. The technological personality is the psychological counterpart to the technological society.Technology indirectly destroys the basis of a common morality and so leaves human relationships vague, insincere, and potentially dangerous. The technological personality possesses a façade of…
Roderick Seidenberg
Roderick Seidenberg, a friend of Lewis Mumford, was an architect with a sociological perspective on technology. He understood that technology had become a system and that it needed to be situated within a historical context to understand its impact on humans. In this article, his work is compared to that of Jacques Ellul
Chapter 8: Shades of Loneliness
Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Technology, Character, and Personality Chapter 3 Technology and Stress Chapter 4 Cultural and Psychological Conflict Chapter 5 Culture and the Neurotic Need for Affection and for Power Chapter 6 Compulsive and Impulsive Styles Chapter 7 Narcissism and Depression Chapter 8 Paranoia and Schizophrenia Chapter 9 Shades of Loneliness
Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational
Technology, Literature, and Art: An Introduction
Visual Morality and Tradition: Society’s New Norms
Modern morality is fundamentally a visual morality. Moral paradigms are embedded in the visual images of the mass media, which have supplanted language as the primary context for moral knowledge. A technological civilization is ultimately one whose only value is that of power. The visual images of the mass media are the “language” of technology; as such, they are about what is (material reality) and what is possible (always a technological possib…
The Computer and Education: Choosing the Least Powerful Means of Instruction
The computer is a threat to the intellectual and moral education of students. It reduces words to their most abstract meaning, thereby objectifying meaning. Moreover, the computer promotes logical thought at the expense of dialectical thinking. The computer is behind the proliferation of random information, all of which is at the disposal of the individual user. This fosters a cynical worldview that information is random and exists to be exploite…
The Legend of "Nigger" Lake: Place as Scapegoat
The term scapegoating has had three principal meanings that have not always been clearly differentiated: biblical, anthropological, and psychosocial. Originally, the scapegoat was a term used to refer to the first of two goats in the Leviticus ritual, the one chosen to carry (symbolically) the sins of the Hebrews into exile. In the 19th century, anthropologists generalized from the biblical ritual and applied the term to a wide range of rituals, …
Technology as Magic: The Case of the University
Towards a Sociology of Morality
Surely the absence of a sociology of morality has to be one of the major weaknesses of academic sociology, and a mysterious one at that. For Durkheim, one of sociology's founding fathers, morality was to have a central place as an object of inquiry; moreover, he was passionately interested in it on the existential level, as was Weber
Technique Against Culture
The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline
Preface. 1. The Absence of Morality, or Morality Assumes New Forms. 2. Success Morality: From Economic to Political Ideology. 3. A Morality of Happiness and Health: Advertising as Liturgy. 4. From the Moral to the Technical: the Necessary. 5. From the Moral to the Normal: the Ephemeral. 6. From the Moral to the Visual: the Compensatory. 7. A Morality of Power, A Morality Without Meaning. 8. Against the New Morality
The Festival in Light of the Theory of the Three Milieus: A Critique of Girard's Theory of Ritual Scapegoating
The Festival in Light of the Theory of the Three Milieus: A Critique of Girard's Theory of Ritual Scapegoating Get access Richard Stivers Richard Stivers Richard Stivers is Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61761-6901 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LXI, Issue 3, Fall 1993, Pages 505–538, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LXI.3.…
Historical Meanings of Irish-American Drinking
Towards a Sociology of Morality
Surely the absence of a sociology of morality has to be one of the major weaknesses of academic sociology, and a mysterious one at that. For Durkheim, one of sociology's founding fathers, morality was to have a central place as an object of inquiry; moreover, he was passionately interested in it on the existential level, as was Weber
Irish Families in the Twentieth Century: Exceptional or Converging
Irish families were characterized as being patriarchal, stem-extended, large, strong, and stable for much of the twentieth century. Studies completed during the 1930s and 1940s propagated this depiction. These characteristics made Irish families an exception to the convergence of family patterns going on worldwide. Historical scholarship and empirical data are used to assess the accuracy of this characterization, chart changing patterns, and comp…
A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype
The Collective Definition of Deviance
A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype
Journal Article A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype. By Richard Stivers. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. 197 pp. Illustration, charts, tables, notes, table sources, and index. $13.50.) Get access JoEllen Vinyard JoEllen Vinyard Marygrove College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 65, Issue 1, June 1978, Pages 215–216, https…
A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype
Hair of the Dog
Part five: Irish ethnicity and alcohol use
This paper examines the changing meanings the Irish‐American pattern of heavy drinking has undergone from the nineteenth century to the present: a first stage heavy drinking was symbolic of Irish‐American identity; a second stage in which it was both a product of the American ethic of consumption and American identity, and finally, a third stage when with the rise of the “new ethnicity” both the meanings of the first and second stages are brought…
Evil in Modern Myth and Ritual
Evil in Modern Myth and Ritual
Evil in Modern Myth and Ritual
Historical Meanings of Irish-American Drinking
The Festival in Light of the Theory of the Three Milieus: A Critique of Girard's Theory of Ritual Scapegoating
The Festival in Light of the Theory of the Three Milieus: A Critique of Girard's Theory of Ritual Scapegoating Get access Richard Stivers Richard Stivers Richard Stivers is Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61761-6901 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LXI, Issue 3, Fall 1993, Pages 505–538, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LXI.3.…
Technique Against Culture
The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline
Preface. 1. The Absence of Morality, or Morality Assumes New Forms. 2. Success Morality: From Economic to Political Ideology. 3. A Morality of Happiness and Health: Advertising as Liturgy. 4. From the Moral to the Technical: the Necessary. 5. From the Moral to the Normal: the Ephemeral. 6. From the Moral to the Visual: the Compensatory. 7. A Morality of Power, A Morality Without Meaning. 8. Against the New Morality
Towards a Sociology of Morality
Surely the absence of a sociology of morality has to be one of the major weaknesses of academic sociology, and a mysterious one at that. For Durkheim, one of sociology's founding fathers, morality was to have a central place as an object of inquiry; moreover, he was passionately interested in it on the existential level, as was Weber
Technology as Magic: The Case of the University
The Legend of "Nigger" Lake: Place as Scapegoat
The term scapegoating has had three principal meanings that have not always been clearly differentiated: biblical, anthropological, and psychosocial. Originally, the scapegoat was a term used to refer to the first of two goats in the Leviticus ritual, the one chosen to carry (symbolically) the sins of the Hebrews into exile. In the 19th century, anthropologists generalized from the biblical ritual and applied the term to a wide range of rituals, …
The Computer and Education: Choosing the Least Powerful Means of Instruction
The computer is a threat to the intellectual and moral education of students. It reduces words to their most abstract meaning, thereby objectifying meaning. Moreover, the computer promotes logical thought at the expense of dialectical thinking. The computer is behind the proliferation of random information, all of which is at the disposal of the individual user. This fosters a cynical worldview that information is random and exists to be exploite…
Visual Morality and Tradition: Society’s New Norms
Modern morality is fundamentally a visual morality. Moral paradigms are embedded in the visual images of the mass media, which have supplanted language as the primary context for moral knowledge. A technological civilization is ultimately one whose only value is that of power. The visual images of the mass media are the “language” of technology; as such, they are about what is (material reality) and what is possible (always a technological possib…
Technology, Literature, and Art: An Introduction
Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational
Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society
The Role of Statistics in Management Magic
Technology and magic both represent the human will to power—to dominate nature and ultimately humans. In a technological civilization, magic imitates technology. Modern management often entails psychological techniques (the human relations approach) and organizational techniques (the scientific approach). The heart of the latter is statistical measurement and prediction of the future. This article examines the magical use of statistical measureme…
The Technological Personality
If technology is the single most important factor in explaining the organization of modern societies, it is likewise the key to understanding the modern personality. The technological personality is the psychological counterpart to the technological society.Technology indirectly destroys the basis of a common morality and so leaves human relationships vague, insincere, and potentially dangerous. The technological personality possesses a façade of…
Roderick Seidenberg
Roderick Seidenberg, a friend of Lewis Mumford, was an architect with a sociological perspective on technology. He understood that technology had become a system and that it needed to be situated within a historical context to understand its impact on humans. In this article, his work is compared to that of Jacques Ellul
Chapter 8: Shades of Loneliness
Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Technology, Character, and Personality Chapter 3 Technology and Stress Chapter 4 Cultural and Psychological Conflict Chapter 5 Culture and the Neurotic Need for Affection and for Power Chapter 6 Compulsive and Impulsive Styles Chapter 7 Narcissism and Depression Chapter 8 Paranoia and Schizophrenia Chapter 9 Shades of Loneliness
Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Art (11 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works)