When the news broke that John Henry Newman would be declared the thirty-eighth Doctor of the Church, I was planning a new course around his work. I had decided to call it “The Ethics of Influence.” Its premise, as my students at Notre Dame will learn in the spring, is that Newman’s example can be a balm for our beleaguered and battle-worn digital age.
Newman was a self-described “controversialist,” and he held the view—radical at the time—that the spread of truth in our world depends on “personal influence.” My idea was to place Newman’s lifelong quest to understand the nature of personal influence alongside today’s influence gurus peddling persuasion tips and tricks. I also wanted to pair his insights with research on our declining in-person social interactions and the attendant rise of online influencers and parasocial (one-sided) relationships. I imagined Newman as an unlikely Virgil, guiding students through the inferno that is the contemporary information ecosystem—where impersonal technologies masquerade as miracle cures for what they, in fact, tend to exacerbate: loneliness, lack of connection, loss of intimacy.
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