Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce), Living Screens reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, it contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualized as a “plastic” form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation. Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties, and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.

"In Glow Kids, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras will examine how technology-- more specifically, age-inappropriate screen tech, with all of its glowing ubiquity-- has profoundly affected the brains of an entire generation. Brain imaging research is showing that stimulating glowing screens are as dopaminergic (dopamine activating) to the brain's pleasure center as sex. And a growing mountain of clinical research correlates screen tech with disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression, and even psychosis. Most shocking of all, recent brain imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person's developing brain in the same way that cocaine addiction can"--

How does the future look to us? Well, clearly we realize we now live in a world of screens, from the microcosmic universe of to smartphone . . . to the imposing vigil of the multiplex giants, looming over us in Imax and 3-D--more "real" than real--and to all the screens in between, from computers to iPads, to muted, high definition flat-screens pouring out images in homes, restaurants, banks, businesses, schools, doctors' offices, and hospitals, and on and on everywhere we turn. We cannot change this reality, so what these Christians, and so many like them are doing is trying to find ways to redeem what we put on these screens: what message we are sending out in word and image to the watching world. So, clearly, our task, whether we have been called to create or not, is to join these artists as "screen redeemers," assisting the Holy Spirit in reconciling the world to God (2 Cor 5:18-19) through helping the pervasively influential means of the media adjust its goals to the mission of Jesus Christ.

Discusses how a person's view of the world influences how a person lives and argues that Christians are called not only to personal faith but to a biblical worldview.