Social media vs reality

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about how the Internet is impoverishing our minds, souls and relationships. But Matthew Gallion has written what may now be my favorite articulation of why we should worry about the web in his post on Social Media and...

Family movie night: The 2×2

Like everything in life, the conundrum that is Family Movie Night can be reduced to a 2×2 table. Common Sense Media has solved a lot of our household media selection challenges, but it’s yet to resolve this one. Your kids will find this movie…  ...

How to use Thesis to customize your teasers by page and category

I use the Thesis theme for my WordPress blog. Thesis is much beloved in the WordPress community because it allows a high degree of customization using its two pages of configuration menus, so even if you know nothing about PHP or CSS you can do a lot to customize your...

How to win friends and influence people…through social media

Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people could be described as the father of relationship marketing and the grandfather of social media. Two recent blog posts revisit the book and highlight its implications for the social media era. J. Eddie...

The single woman’s guide to texting

My husband and I are closing in on our 10th wedding anniversary, and for the most part, that is great news. About 11.5 years out of our past 12 years together have been very very happy, and if you zero out the months that were tense because one of us had a new Macbook...

An evangelical perspective on information overload

I was fascinated to come across an evangelical take on the problem of information overload. Becky Sweat’s article in The Good News reads: information overload can distract us from the most important priority in our lives—our relationship with God. Indeed, a...

thirtysomething meets the Internet

When I was sixteen I hated Jane Austen. I read Pride and Prejudice, but couldn’t get beyond the anachronism. Every plot point rested on the impossibility of speaking directly and honestly: Mr. Darcy, if you could simply explain yourself to Miss Bennet, I’m...

The upside to teen life online

Frankasaurus has a great blog post about her experiences growing up online, comparing the impact of chat rooms on a socially awkward teenagers with the experience of using social media today. As she writes about her early years in online chat: It wasn’t long before I...