There will be no mass scale recovery of the beautiful and the true, in art, media, and society, unless we get priesthood right. So I suppose, we're talking here of "The Media of Priesthood". Lets do a mashup of two articles, and cross-pollinate a couple ideas to give us a fresh perspective on the possible reasons for large scale mediocrity in Catholic media and arts. This is a speculative working-paper. Your thoughts and comments would be most welcome below.

The first entry is from Frank Schaeffer, the insights expressed in his book, Addicted to Mediocrity: Contemporary Christians and the Arts.

Let me be clear. Too many artists already raise artificial barriers to creation: they can't write, or think, or paint, they claim, unless they're seated at a pristine desk, with southern light, perfect silence, and a dozen sharpened pencils all pointed west. These are not aids to creation, or marks of real discipline: they are a group of excuses not to create if the conditions are not met. I am not saying, "Don't bother to create unless your whole life is in perfect order." I am saying, "Creation will require your whole life."

For years, I had seen my early commitment to prayer and writing as separate concerns. Now I wondered if my spiritual disciplines and my creative disciplines had been more deeply bound than I knew. The actions of discipline are simple, but the barriers to discipline are spiritual, rooted in anxiety, despair, and fear. And approaching them as if they're simple matters of practicality will only result in the failure that most artists already know so well.

Sony today revealed two new professional camcorders based on extensive customer feedback in the "NXCAM™" line-up. The NEX-FS100E is a new E-mount professional camcorder equipped with a Super 35mm motion picture sensor and is a further addition to Sony's 35mm line-up. The HXR-NX70E is the world's first rain and dust proof professional HD camcorder and is ideal for use in unforgiving environments. Sony's expanding NXCAM line-up, including the existing HXR-NX5E provides a superb solution to many shooting applications.The NEX-FS100E – Digital Super 35mm made affordable.

 Originally announced in November 2010, Sony can now reveal the full specifications of the new NEX-FS100E. The NEX-FS100E is equipped with an 'Exmor™' Super 35 CMOS sensor specifically designed for shooting motion pictures. This large, super 35mm equivalent sensor is capable of producing footage with a shallow depth of field similar to that of a film camera. Thanks to this cutting edge sensor technology, it is possible to record the image in 1080/50p AVCHD format as well as capturing 1080p quality slow and quick motion.

Every art transmutes reality to one extent or another—but if the point of the transmutation is not to go deeper into reality, than what the artist creates is simply a funhouse reflecting the triviality of his own mind rather than things themselves. How sad that Canvas is being backed by several prominent investors and venture capital firms, including Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor who was one of the earliest backers of Google. How sadder still that when the 15-year-old Poole created 4chan, he ran it from the secrecy of his bedroom with his parents totally oblivious as to what he was up to.

Ours is a culture created by the minds of 15-year-olds run amuck.

Writing a novel, research paper, script or any long-form text involves more than hammering away at the keys until you’re done. Collecting research, ordering fragmented ideas, shuffling index cards in search of that elusive structure—most writing software is fired up only after much of the hard work is done. Enter Scrivener: a word processor and project management tool that stays with you from that first, unformed idea all the way through to the final draft. Outline and structure your ideas, take notes, view research alongside your writing and compose the constituent pieces of your text in isolation or in context. Scrivener won't tell you how to write - it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application.

There is a certain irony in the fact that we are presenting this information to you courtesy of the latest means of technology, but for whatever reason there was a spate of articles (several revolving around the publication of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains) in the news this past week on the possible downside of both our constant reliance on technological devices and the way in which we process information via the internet.

To begin here are two divergent points of view: Carr asks, “Does the Internet Make Us Dumber?”, while Clay Shirky opposes, “Does the Internet Make Us Smarter?”