the second eclectic

Expertise and Wisdom

2012-01-25T17:41:00.000-06:00

"The expert is an ignoramus." McLuhan and Postman both derided the expert. They characterized the expert as one who strips context away from his own small field of expertise. The expert looks at the figure and ignores the background. This makes sense, given McLuhan’s and Postman’s own areas of expertise and their constant call for attention to the environments that technology is creating. Environment is context.

But McLuhan and Postman weren’t alone. None other than G K Chesterton also derided the expert. In his book, Orthodoxy, he writes, “Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”

Postman argues that one cannot be an expert about “childrearing, lovemaking, and friend-making.” Sorry Dr Phil.

The expert is created for one purpose, Postman argues, and that is to solve a particular problem. To say nothing about how the problem is understood or whether worthwhile questions are being asked. But the expert brings expertise—a very narrow vision—to bear on old problems, examining only "relevant" information and ignoring the rest. But the expert can become myopic, telescopic, microscopic. This is the weakness of the expert.

We don’t typically think about expertise as having weaknesses. Experts are honored for their clearsightedness, not derided for their myopia. And while their research do indeed provide valuable insights, their narrow focus can distract our attention like a good magic trick. Like everything, the benefits of an expert come at a cost.

The illusions of expertise don’t have us totally fooled, fortunately. Consider characters like Matlock, House, and Sherlock Holmes. They all defy expertise with an instinct for examining the context—the environment—for details, details to determine guilt, discover the cause of disease, or solve the mystery. We know—somehow, somewhere—our collective culture knows that we need more than expertise.

We do have a place for this kind of knowledge. We call it wisdom. And while I wouldn’t exactly call House’s instincts “wisdom,” I do think his instincts are learned. Wisdom is often defined as insight borne of long experience. It’s grounded in context, and can’t be uprooted from it.

Good proverbs have this sort of earthiness in them. They often use concrete imagery and nature metaphors—context. They draw us out of our byte-sized information and open up the world. They bring the wide world into our small one. And as we hold together these two worlds, we become the connection between them.

The Autocorrect Principle

2012-01-18T08:28:00.000-06:00

You’d never know it, dear reader, but the Q key on my keyboard doesn’t work. How is it then that Q appears here, you ask? It’s a hassle, I’ll be honest. I mouse around. It’s a copy-and-paste job.

Because of my computer’s handicap, I truly need autocorrect for inserting Qs as needed. Without it, I’d be buying a new computer. All because of a broken button. For me, autocorrect is essential.

Some people are poor spellers, so I understand why autocorrect was invented. I’m an editor by day, but even I have words I regularly misspell—separate, perseverance, bureau. Just last week I was handwriting a note and found myself in the middle of a word I wasn’t sure how to get out of. I pushed on through, then stopped, sat back, and looked at it. A twinge of fear reverberated through me. How did people ever survive without autocorrect? My trusty computer beckoned like a warm home, broken Q and all. This wouldn’t have happened with my computer.

It was print culture that really gave rise to the notion that words should be spelled the same way every time. Before writing, words were sounds, not objects. Spelling referred to speaking, not writing. After all, casting a spell is an act of speaking. Reading was something you did more with your ears, not your eyes.

Autocorrect builds upon our print-based notions about uniform spelling. For my part, I appreciate the standardized spellings we’ve agreed to. It’s useful and efficient—everybody using language like common operating system so to speak.

Although autocorrect has drawn fire because of text messaging fails, it didn’t start there. It first took shape in word processing programs. Microsoft Word has its variously colored squiggles to suggest corrections. But what processes words more relentlessly than autocorrect? Autocorrect is the fullest manifestation yet. And all for a noble aim—good spelling.

Yet autocorrect is about more than good spelling. We want better, clearer communication. Good spelling is simply a means to that end. Sure, you can text with misspellings, acronyms, and abbreviations, but you always run the risk of miscommunicating. Autocorrect serves to reduce bad communication by ensuring good spelling. Of course, we know the fallout of this thinking. We see now how autocorrect can derail meaning by demanding good spelling. Damn You Autocorrect illustrates how autocorrect can spell correctly but still miscommunicate in humorous and sometimes tragic ways.*

Autocorrect spells a word right but chooses the wrong word. And no amount of good spelling can make up for a loss of meaning. This is the irony. Autocorrect spells well but communicates poorly.
This is the first lesson of autocorrect: Overused technology reverses on itself. What began with print-culture’s emphasis on uniform spelling has become autocorrect’s misguided hyper-vigilance. Reversal is what’s happening here.

So how can autocorrect start accounting for meaning and not just spelling? That’s a reasonable question. And, if they haven’t already, you can bet that programmers are asking that question and answering it with more complex programming.* They’ll develop advanced programming to compare misspelled words to their context and create statistical models based on massive amounts of data to determine whether a word is right or wrong and make a suggestion. And they will probably achieve their goals. It will be impressive technology. It will be autocorrect for our autocorrect. And it will be efficient and handy and helpful.

Consider for a moment if autocorrect had never been introduced. Doesn’t a reader have a better chance at discerning meaning from a misspelled word than from the wrong word spelled correctly? After all, the rightly spelled word is more deceiving than a poorly spelled one. The misspelled word contains clues to the writer’s thinking. But autocorrect demolishes those clues. Instead, we continue using autocorrect, and looking for ways to correct autocorrect.

This is the second lesson of autocorrect: When our technology creates new problems, we tend to solve them with more technology.

Hence, we use seatbelts and airbags—we protect ourselves using additional technology so that our death-defying speeds continue being defied. We could slow down, but seatbelts and airbags save us that hassle. Likewise, we could learn to spell better, but autocorrect saves us that hassle. Our first instinct is to fix technological problems with technological solutions.

This tendency makes the first lesson relevant again: Overused technology reverses on itself. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to step back and ask, “Is there a less (or non) technological solution?” As the joke goes, when NASA went to the moon, it spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would write without gravity. Russia’s solution—a pencil. Surrounded by technology, we can overlook simpler solutions.

Finally, let me pose this. Does the autocorrect principle exist in bigger systems and structures? Do we aim for good spelling in an effort to produce good communication but actually end up with meaningless results? Do we achieve intermediate goals at the cost of ultimate ones? Do we get the two confused?

We can easily recognize and grasp the problems created by autocorrect. But what about technologies on a bigger scale? What if the autocorrect principle happens on the scale of a corporation, government, or globe. Technologies of this magnitude do exist, only they’re much harder than autocorrect to identify and grasp—so are their mistakes. We have processes and programs automating relationships between employees and departments and whole companies. They’re called “protocols” or “best practices” or “standard procedures.” But does the intermediate goal of efficiency actually derail us from reaching our ultimate goals?

Our world has many social ills; the question is, “Is the autocorrect principle to blame?” Our world has sweatshops in Asia and high unemployment in the United States; why is that? Why are we damning laborers to terrible working environments and poor living conditions when we could be easing their burden by supplementing their work with jobs where unemployed workers need income? Our intermediate goal is efficiency. What’s our ultimate goal?

Am I pointing the finger anyone? Certainly not. Blame has no place in this discussion; it’s as nonsensical as blaming autocorrect for miscommunicating. Autocorrect is simply doing what it was programmed to do.

Likewise, businesses, government bureaucracies, and the Internet are doing what they are programmed to do. They’re autocorrect on steroids. Yes, they get plenty right. But they also create new problems. Except this time it’s not about the wrong words, it’s about abused lives. It’s not a matter of misspelling, it’s a matter of injustice. And like autocorrect, no one is to blame.

The lessons of autocorrect are harbingers on many levels. Will overusing technological systems reverse into a jumble of meaningless but correctly spelled products? Has it already? Will we go on fixing social and environmental problems with more and more technology? The Autocorrect Principle should remind us to step back and decide whether good spelling is more important than good communication—whether efficiency is the goal or the means. The clues may be in the misspelling.

*If you don’t know about autocorrect, here are a few more appropriate examples: link
* Yep. link

The Conquest of Nature

2011-12-28T09:50:00.005-06:00

C.S. Lewis, 1944, The Abolition of Man.

“. . . the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use these things. . . . Any or all of the three things I have mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men. . . . From this point of view, what we call Man’s power of Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. (54-55)

“. . . . The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by prenatal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. (59)

“At the moment, then, of Man’s victory of Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. (67-68) (emphasis added)

“. . . Every conquest over Nature increase her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyze her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature.

Langdon Winner, 1977, Autonomous Technology (link).

In the case of modern technology, critics of technology see that “man overcomes his bondage to economic necessity only by submitting to bondage of a different, but equally powerful sort. The conquest of nature is achieved at a considerable price – an even more thorough conquest of all human and all social possibilities” (Winner 1977: 187). (emphasis added)

Morality, Sin, and Technology: In the Context of Relationships

2011-12-06T07:22:00.018-06:00

First Thread
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis includes an appendix, “Illustrations of the Tao.” Lewis’s “Tao” is a collection of moral principles, of laws guiding morality. The Enlightenment used the term “Natural Law.” And it has been called other things throughout history. The Tao’s morals are self-evident premises, Lewis argues; they cannot be proved (or disproved), only accepted. The Tao cannot be gotten underneath or behind. It simply is.

Lewis lists 8 laws in the Tao. Perhaps there are others, but Lewis identified these 8. As I reviewed them recently, I realized this—they all have to do with relationships. Take a look.

1. The Law of General Beneficence. Google assents to this one in their maxim, “Don’t be evil.” In a positive form, it means to do good for humanity.

2. The Law of Special Beneficence. Where Google expresses a worldwide sentiment, someone like Mother Teresa would embody this narrower view: “Do good to each man.”

3. Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors. This one is clear, “Children obey your parents.”

4. Duties to Children and Posterity. We hate child molesters and don’t have any reservations about doing so. This judgment is a moral one.

5. The Law of Justice. Our world is not a just place, yet we long for it to be so. We don’t each define it the same way necessarily, but we can usually agree that justice should be served and strived for.

6. The Law of Good Faith and Veracity. Honesty still is the best policy.

7. The Law of Mercy. Much like duties to children, this principle lauds compassion. We admire mercy in those with authority.

8. The Law of Magnanimity. “All that is required for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing” (Edmund Burke). A man must submit his body to his spirit, and his spirit to its most honorable aims, such that he is willing to sacrifice or even die for his convictions. Sacrificing for a noble cause requires courage and self-discipline.

As you can see, the Tao exists only within the boundaries of relationships. The Tao informs what our relationships should look like.

I do not typically think of morality this way. More often, I envision it as an impersonal legal code, having to do with ideas or ideals or good practices. I’m often tempted to think that I can break moral principles without hurting my relationships. But that is a contradiction in terms. At base, relationships are the context for the Tao.

Second Thread
So when we break the Tao, we are affecting relationships. Breaking the Tao has no other meaning. Sin, to give it a name, twists, bends, even destroys an otherwise open, authentic, transparent relationship.

Sin is a loaded term, diluted with misperceptions and misrepresentations. This dilution prevents us from seeing sin for what it is—a relational break. Sin is relational. Both sin and the Tao are meaningless apart from relationships.

In the Christian story, sin destroyed numerous relationships—famously called “the Fall.” Among these broken relationships were:

1. Man’s relationship with God

2. Man’s relationship with Man

3. Man’s relationship with Creation

4. Man’s relationship with Himself

Sin bent relationships so that they could not run straight. Because people break the Tao, relationships veer off course without constant correction and monitoring. And even with constant vigilance, we cannot achieve perfect relationships.

But here’s the thing, even if a relationship is quote-unquote broken, that is still a type of relationship. We might call the relationship nonexistent, true, and though it might be unreconciled, it is still a relational category. Perhaps the only relationship that cannot be defined as a relationship is one with a person I am not aware of in any way. Perhaps.

So, suffice it to say, the Tao exists within relationship, and so does sin.

Third Thread
Like these first two dynamics—the Tao and sin—there is a third phenomenon that is also founded within relationships—technology. Not only is technology concerned with relationships, relationships are the subject of technology: A spoon mediates my relationship with soup. Light bulbs mediate my relationship with night and darkness (and the sun). This blog mediates my relationship with you. If there is a technology that does not involve relationships, I cannot think of it.

I see technology involved in a number of different sorts of relationships. Among them:

1. Man’s relationship with Man

2. Man’s relationship with Creation

3. Man’s relationship with Himself

4. Man’s relationship with Time and Space (a facet of Creation, above)

Technology inserts itself between Man and the other. It mediates the relationship. Technology extends man’s reach as he reaches out to the other. Sometimes, the technology becomes the relationship, or can. And it is clear, I hope, that technology alters—and sometimes constructs—that relationship. Relationships mediated this way are not identical to unmediated relationships. Thus, technology warps relationships in some way.

Threaded Together
So if morality is inherently relational, and both sin and technology impact relationships, my question is this—Are sin and technology different? And if so, how?

I’m not asking if using technology is sinful. That’s not my question. I’m also not asking if we can make technology into an idol. We can, but that’s not the concern I’m raising.

In the paradigm of relationships, in the context of morality—how is technology different from sin?

I truly hesitate to ask this question. I am not saying that we should equate technology with sin. Some argue that language is a kind of technology. What then?

By what factor, can we distinguish technology’s relational impact from sin’s? We can say that technology “warps” and “distorts” relationships. But is it actually different from the way sin “breaks” and “destroys” relationships? Remember, even a broken relationship is a kind of relationship. So, we could legitimately say that both sin and technology distort relationships. Is technological distortion different in kind from sin’s effect?

This is a real question to which I have very little to answer. I don’t know how to begin to resolve this comparison and distinguish between them. To me, there does seem to be a difference, but I do not see a way to identify it. I welcome any insight others would offer.

Singing on the Job

2011-11-22T08:47:00.006-06:00

If you look up "train songs" on Wikipedia, you will find a list of hundreds of songs that conjure up the rhythm of the locomotive. The railroad has a rich history of inspiring music. But it may be that it was music that actually kept the railroad alive.

I recently met a fiddler and banjo player who is working on his masters in folk music. He wore a Civil War-style cap. He lives, currently, in Tennessee, "up in the mountains, in a shack," as he described it. "I go down to the valley for work." I thought I detected the mourn of a train whistle in his voice.

He told me about some of his research into folk music and its heritage and culture. With the immense train cars regularly compressing the tracks, the iron rails began to bow over time. Railroad companies hired crews to repair the warped rails by heaving them back into alignment. The men on these crews, he told me, were called "gandy dancers." Among the essential skills for a gandy dancer was a sense of rhythm. Without it, a man simply couldn't have done his job. But rhythm would only get the crew half way. What the men really needed was a song.

Warping a forged steel rail required a lot of power. Those train cars weighed tons. Realigning them could have taken no small amount of effort. Gandy dancers repaired them by hand and as a crew. This they could only do in unison, keeping time to true up the rails. They needed a tempo and a cadence that they could work into together. They achieved this unison with songs.

Music synchronized their motions. And the rails were made true.

Gandy dancers on the railroads weren't the only musclemen singing on the job. Sailors too needed music to synchronize their efforts, my folk musicologist explained. “The Great Lakes region has an equally rich musical history to that of railroads." The heavy canvas sails required numerous men working in concert. Hoisting anchor, likewise, required a similar synchronicity.

Synchronizing the sailors’ pulls were singers called “chanty men” (pronounced like “shanty men”). Chanty men were hired for this one job: to sing songs that would keep time for the sailors raising the sails. Timing was a necessity, and music cleverly synchronized their work.

Another group of hairy-chested singers included lumberjacks, who had their own shanty boys (of another etymology entirely) keeping work on tempo through music.

Singing men like these seem foreign to us and our modern culture, but their memory has not been completely lost. Pop culture retains echoes of them. The Seven Dwarves whistling while they worked hearkens back to time when music synchronized work.

Or think of the raucous German beer gardens keeping time with sloshing mugs. Their forerunners—the local tavern—were likely places where working men intersected and shared their songs. They didn’t talk about work. They sang about it.

Similarly, U.S. slave plantations of the 19th century begat negro spirituals, keeping time for the work in the fields.

More recently, Jack Sparrow and his "yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" recalls the songs of chanty men. Even Pirates needed music. Anarchy didn’t hoist sails.

"The arrival of the steam engine and paddlewheel brought an end to these songs," my folk musicologist told me, touching his cap. There was that train whistle again. The machine made these songs obsolete. These songs had sprouted from a culture to meet the need for synchronized labor. But they had also nurtured that culture and made it a living being. The din and hiss of steam and gears replaced the songs and rhythms of the sea and rail, the forest and the mine. From their perch under the sky where their clarion voices kept time, the ships’ chanty men were buried below deck where their songs turned into clanging pistons.

My Month without a Microwave

2011-11-16T08:18:00.004-06:00

For the past month, I have been without a microwave. My roommate moved out, got married, and took the microwave. I know, this seems unfair. I've come to terms with it and moved past it. Despite these deep rifts, we remain friends. I considered it a mark of maturity on my part.

The plan all along has been to get a new microwave, and its delay can only be blamed on my own procrastination. That and my penchant for social experiments in technology. This microwave-less month was just such an opportunity, so I took advantage of it.

I've been living as a bachelor now for more years than I had anticipated, and slowly I've begun to adopt practices which could legitimately be called cooking. This includes knowing how to preheat the oven, draping a towel over my shoulder, and having a spice rack. For a bachelor I feel these are real accomplishments. I consider them marks of character as well. Nonetheless, I still shop for groceries as infrequently as possible (for anything, for that matter). I cook as infrequently as possible and have developed a "leftovers strategy" at restaurants. I can spot predestined leftovers well before I've ordered a meal or turned on the stove. What I lack in enthusiasm for cooking, I try to make up for with a dash of foresight.

That said dinner tonight required the following ingredients: milk, Frosted Mini-Wheats. The measurements aren't an exact science. With cooking, I've learned what you can eyeball and what you should use a teaspoon for (e.g., garlic). Tonight, no precision was necessary.

So, I've been living without a microwave. But more than that, here's what surprised me most: I haven't really missed the microwave. I've found, in fact, that not having one has forced me to cook real meals most evenings, or to eat cold sandwiches. Maybe that menu sounds like a sparse existence to you, but to me it sounds healthier than almost any edible item I've microwaved for 3 minutes. (In fact, in microwaving food, I've discovered this principle: As microwave time increases, taste quality decreases.)

Being without a microwave also forced me to learn some old-fashioned tricks. I had to call my mom in week 3 to ask how to reheat leftovers. You just add a little milk or water and put it on the stove. I didn't know.

This ignorance is the interesting reality of technological progress. When new technology supersedes the old, you quit learning how to do things "the old-fashioned way." The options created by new technology aren't necessarily more. Sometimes they're less. Often, I can accomplish many of the same things, but the method changes. And old methods are lost. A microwave gives me different options than a stove, but I never used the stovetop to its own full potential.

During my month without a microwave, I ate better and healthier than during any month with one. I made real food. There was no fallback plan (except for Mini-Wheats). I may have spent more time cooking and standing in the kitchen, and that's only a drawback if efficiency is your only priority. Yet, I didn't notice a loss of time—of course, I only eyeballed it—and the pace was nice. Learning how to cook—I mean real food—is a benefit I don't get when the microwave is around.

The very presence of a microwave changes the environment by changing the options. It changes what kinds of food I have on hand, whether it’s boxed meals in the freezer or raw ingredients in the pantry. An environment itself can change because of an object within that environment. It can change what foods the grocery has, and how big the freezer section is. The same is true for shovels, smartphones, and lightbulbs. Technology reshapes the environment it inhabits. And new technologies spring up in turn.

The microwave changes the options and the environment, but it also alters what I know and what I know how. It doesn't force me to do anything, sure, but I have to resist it, and make cooking a conscious priority. If I'm ever to learn how to cook, ever to become more than just a bachelor, I have to decide against the microwave. It's a mark of maturity.

If the microwave’s presence in my kitchen changes the environment that much, how much more does the Internet’s omnipresence change our surroundings? If it hasn’t, it will.

As much as a microwave can change an environment, its absence can transform as well. Not only that, it can change me. Living without a microwave has helped me see myself and my food differently. That is a real change. But it’s me who’s changed.

That shouldn’t be ignored. Our technology changes our relationships to the world, and in so doing, changes us.

My month without a microwave helped me see how I relate to food—Is it an object to use and consume or a process to enjoy? Is food objectified and eating pragmatic, or is food the fruit of our labor and eating its reward?

Bridle attacks techno-determinism, and proves its view

2011-11-08T09:02:00.011-06:00

In a recent talk he posted on line, James Bridle criticized the views of “techno-determinists.” (link) He clearly has an understanding of techno-determinism, enough to summarize its thesis, which is more than most people have. And I recommend listening to his whole talk (20 mins).

However, I think he’s missing the forest for the trees. He's so focused on the process of reading, that he's missing the unintended consequences. Take a look at what he’s saying. At first, he sounds perfectly convincing, but upon further review, he actually undermines his argument and proves techno-determinism’s case. I’ve highlighted how he does so.

(9:09) There’s a techno-determinist view that says that new technology makes people behave in new ways. People have always behaved differently than we’ve liked to believe. Because it’s always been anecdotal and people have always been proud of this. The network reveals these behaviors. It doesn’t necessarily produce them. But now we can act on them and change the way we do stuff.

(8:45) Amazon looked at statistics and the way people were reading and they saw they people weren’t finishing books. And so the obvious result [i.e., solution] is to make shorter books. It’s one definite approach to it. And it’s a way in which the velocity of the material allows us to react to people’s behavior in new ways. But it’s very key that it’s not a new behavior.

Let’s allow that Bridle is right on one level: The likelihood of your finishing a book doesn’t necessarily change if you have an ebook or a paper book.

But look at what is changing: Amazon is making shorter books. We’re changing books to fit people’s reading habits. We're making decisions based on information generated by technology. This is techno-determinism’s point: We are changing what we do.

These changes are not insignificant. No, perhaps reading habits don’t change, but the information we have changes the products we create. The actual products themselves may in turn reshape our reading habits, even if the text itself still requires us to read.

Bridle can call our attention to the trees of reading, but the forest is changing because of the new information generated by technology.

* * *

That said, I think Bridle has a very nuanced understanding of the digital revolution and what it means. He also has a humility about it. At the end he fields this question: “Do I feel that loss of connection to the physical?” Here’s what he says,

I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m trying to puzzle it out. All of these things are efforts to work out what is happening here. . . . I’m messing about on the boundaries between physical and digital in order to understand what is happening because most of the traffic is into the digital and we don’t know what that means yet. It’s producing strange cognitive effects and we have to try out lots of different approaches to see what happens there.

Bridle seems to be acting as a probe in order to understand the digital revolution. And that is something a techno-determinist like McLuhan would heartily applaud.

Desiring the Kingdom Review

2011-10-21T08:27:00.000-05:00

One of my unfolding mantras on this blog is "what we do shapes who we are." I believed it before I read Desiring the Kingdom, but Smith was arguing from a similar conviction. That was a major reason I felt his book was fitting for review on The Second Eclectic (link).

Another reason is that Smith's analysis of environments—the mall, the entertainment culture, and the university—can instruct our own practice of analyzing the environments technology creates. Smith shows us how to look past the surface to see what the practices mean, and what kinds of people those practices shape us into. Technology shapes what we do, so how is it shaping us spiritually? That question drives this blog.

The Sacramental Worldview

Smith's book helped me to better understand why McLuhan was a Catholic and how his sacramental worldview informed how he saw technology shaping us.

When Smith turns to the church as counter-formation, he describes a liturgical church service (ch 5). Evangelicals will be familiar only a few of these practices. But more sacramental denominations, I think, see church practices as habit-forming and soul-shaping. The connection between habits and the soul is logical in the sacramental worldview.

The mantra "What we do shapes who we are" reflects this worldview. Why? Because it sees the human holistically—body and spirit are united, woven together, and intimately shaping each other. Neither exists or moves without the other. Neither grows apart from the other. This explains, for me, how McLuhan's Catholic worldview so informed his thinking about technology's impact on the human person.

He recognized that technology shapes what we do. And because "what we do shapes who we are," then technology shapes who we are. This is sobering for us cloaked in technology's extensions. And this is something that spiritually-minded evangelicals fail to account for.

Criticism

I don't think Desiring the Kingdom is perfect however, and I do wish that Smith had approached a few things differently.

First, while I appreciated Smith's exegesis of secular liturgies like the mall, the entertainment culture, and the university, I wish his analysis of them had been more robust. His analysis at the practical level didn’t equal his insights at the theoretical level. He somewhat necessarily spoke in generalities, but I wish he had offered more specifics. Smith's exegesis is decent and valuable, but it seems a bit lacking in concrete details and clarity. It felt a bit veiled and vague. This disappointed me.

I agree with his perspective, but it wasn't his exegesis of these environments that convinced me. I think he could convince more skeptics with more precision and more (or better) examples connected to the more mundane patterns that people might recognize in their own lives. Mirrors like that would give readers pause, forcing them to really examine Smith's claims.

Second, Smith's choices of the mall, entertainment, and the university make for good pop-culture critique, but some more mundane practices would have proved fruitful as well. The work environment, most specifically, is a rich source for analyzing habits. How does my daily computer use for hours upon hours shape me and my soul? I find that I desire human interaction the longer I work is an environment like that, even though people are huddled in offices and cubicles not ten feet from me. How do those offices and cubicles shape our souls? Our jobs undoubtedly shapes us as people everyday, and we need to better understand that. And we need the tools to do so.

Another environment I would suggest looking at is the car, and commuting along with it. How do our daily, 25-minute commutes shape us as people? Does our navigating road systems and enduring traffic congestion shape our souls? How? People spend hours each day in their car. It is certainly a more influential liturgy than the mall.

Finally, a bit whimsically, what about something like showering? Most people in the West do this daily. There has been research done into how bathing influences our identity and our morals. There's a nugget of truth in here, and it supports Smith's thesis in Desiring the Kingdom.

Lastly, Smith's discussion of church liturgies was too long and too ecclesiologically complex. He clearly has spent a lot of time thinking about the practices of the church body, but his work in this book was too detailed. He is often prescriptive about the church liturgy, interpolating theological meaning too early. He packs every liturgical practice so full of theological significance that the reader has overstuffed suitcases that can't quite hold everything and are impractical to carry. The theology and meaning that he finds in the church's practices seem over the top and overly optimistic.

Furthermore, I think Smith failed to unveil the deep need for good church practices. This vacuum left his great prescriptions to stand around like mothers without children. With the mall et al., Smith examined them as "a foreigner" experiencing them for the first time. He should have approached the church gathering the same way. He should have looked at the liturgical shape of large gatherings, loud bands, long worship sets, preaching-centered services, with videos and lights and auto-tuning—things evangelicals are familiar with. This could have exposed this form of church to some much needed natural light and helped evangelicals to see their own practices apart from the special-effect lighting. It also would have painted a picture to contrast against Smith’s more robust, sacrament-driven gathering. In summary, brevity and contrast would have illuminated Smith's vision of the good life as he imagines it.

Conclusion

Desiring the Kingdom was the right book at the right time for me. It put some things into the words that I'd already been thinking—the sure sign of a good book. For that reason, I was predisposed to liking it and to being convinced by Smith’s argument. But then, that reinforces exactly what Smith believes: We pursue the things we love; we choose what we want, whether it's good for us or not. And by God's grace, we will come to love the things that are good for us—above all, Himself.

Free Kindle Book: From the Garden to the City

2011-10-10T09:04:00.000-05:00

John Dyer's book, From the Garden to the City, is free for Kindle today. John is probably the leading blogger today on critiquing technology from a Christian perspective. I anticipated his book and bought the print edition the week it came out. It's an accessible, informative analysis of how technology is shaping ourselves and our environment.

Check out his blog (link), and go get the book for free today!

The Amazon Highway

2011-10-06T07:40:00.001-05:00

One-hundred years ago, rutted dirt roads were still pretty common in the United States. Most families still owned a horse to engine their buggies. Or they could unhitch it and bridle the engine itself. Those who had cars didn’t have such liberties even though they traversed the same rutted roads. All of them, though, were busting wheels and axles and getting stuck in the mud.

Then came the Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln Highway, begun in 1913, became the first highway to span the United States, New York to San Francisco. It was ambitious, visionary, ahead of its time.

The Lincoln Highway started humbly enough with “seedling miles.” These were country roads between country towns. They'd been paved with concrete, smooth and clear and mud free. These agriculture-invoking seedling miles sprouted up first in Illinois and then elsewhere. The new technology wasn't cheap. The $10 million-dollar price tag for the project is equivalent to $230 million dollars today, and most of it was privately funded. But who paid to pave these country roads? And why?

Carl G. Fisher was the man who came up with the idea and spent more than a decade promoting and building it. He recruited donors like Henry Joy and C.B. Seger to fund the project and expand the roadway. Henry Ford, for his part, thought the government should fund road improvements and abstained from the project.

So who were these guys? Well, “Fisher operated what is believed to be the first automobile dealership in the United States in Indianapolis” (Wikipedia), and he invented the acetylene headlights used in most early automobiles; Henry Joy was president of Packard Motor Car Company; and Seger was president of the United States Rubber Company. Their interest in the highway system becomes clear when you connect the dots. I wonder, though, if at the time, these connections were as clear to those still horsing around. Even if they were clear, the investments were a risk. What if people didn't buy the cars?

These early highway pioneers had a vision. Fisher, Joy, and Seger recognized that more roads would demand more headlights, cars, and tires. "When you reduce friction, make something easy, people do more of it." Smooth, well-maintained roads did exactly that.

Implicit to their vision was an understanding of the relationship between the medium and the message. The demand for their products grew because they improved the right medium—roads. But not just any roads. They already had those. They needed a medium that capitalized on the strengths of their new technology. So these men built smooth highways for swift cars. They reduced friction. People bought cars and tires and headlights. With the right medium, these men expanded their messages, and lined their pockets.

Today, Apple and Amazon are transforming publishing in similar ways. Someday, one hundred years from now, some young, brash, upstart media ecologist may write, “One-hundred years ago, paper books were still pretty common in the United States, and readers were still getting their text stuck in narrow gutters. How times have changed.” But times probably won’t have changed that much—at least, not for the medium and the message.

With Amazon’s new reduced prices for fireside-invoking Kindles and the new color touchscreen Kindle Fire, we’re once again seeing the impact of mediums. Amazon began as a humble distributor of content, a channel, like the rutted roads of yore. But quickly, Amazon is paving its roads with the Kindle, creating smoother transportation for content. And "when you reduce friction, make something easy, people do more of it." Jeff Bezos said that—last week, when he was introducing the Kindle Fire.

Of course, the Kindle isn’t an open-air highway; it’s a toll road. Even those purchase transactions are so automatic—and frictionless—as to be practically invisible.

But why is Amazon succeeding in this business where other competitors are failing? HP’s TouchPad failed miserably, and Research In Motion’s PlayBook is performing well below its projections. Apple, of course, is doing fine. But why?

The answer is content. For Apple, that content was first music and now apps (although even the apps are really carriers of content as well). For its part, Amazon has books to drive on its highways—an unprecedented library of books. It’s this availability of content that really drives the use of the iPad and the Kindle. Without content, other competitors don’t stand a chance. The innovators of the Lincoln Highway understood this. They had content to put on the highway, and the better the medium the more cars they would sell.

Amazon is taking cues directly from the Lincoln Highway playbook. Amazon is providing consumers both the highways and the cars to drive on them. Unlike the Lincoln Highway, who exactly owns the car is still a bit unclear. You can read the cars as long as your like, but you can't take them off Amazon's highway. After all, Amazon doesn't want you riding a horse down the old rutted roads, where text can still get stuck in the gutter.

Desiring the Kingdom by James K A Smith: A Summary

2011-09-28T22:56:00.000-05:00

Our daily activities have lasting effects on our souls. Somewhere inside us, we each know this is true, but we have a hard time understanding how it happens and why. It doesn't help that we tend to believe that the body and the soul have nothing in common. James K A Smith, in his book Desiring the Kingdom, sets out help us think clearly about these issues. But for him, it begins in an unexpected place—worship.

Worship is the product of desire. That thesis is at the heart of Desiring the Kingdom. We worship what we desire.

Worship is also the tool of desire. We use worship to pursue what we desire. Thus, for Smith, when we worship, we act. Worship is all the activities we do to get what we want. In the same way that we work in order to eat, live, buy, travel, or retire, our worship is the active pursuit of what we want.

Many will consider this notion of worship a bit odd. For them, worship is a state of mind or heart. Many believe worship is an attitude. But for Smith, worship is much more than that. Worship is active, not only mental or spiritual. At the bottom of Smith's perspective is a holistic, integrated understanding of being human.

Human beings are not spirits caged inside bodies, like Plato believed. We are spirits and bodies, minds and mouths, hearts and hands, fused together and inseparable.

Being fused liked this means that who we are influences what we do—our identities drive our actions, from soul to body. Our identities, which are comprised of thoughts and ideas, but also visions and passions, motives and wills. Being fused like this means the it also works in the opposite direction, from body to soul—what we do shapes who we are. That is, our activities shape our identities. Our activities, which are comprised of social events and personal hobbies, but also habits and practices, rituals and routines. Smith simply calls them "liturgies."

Lliturgies—where habits and practices shape desires—are what Smith sheds light on in his book. He shows how our daily activities have lasting effects on our souls. These liturgies may be "religious," but they may also be "secular." Either way, they are all still liturgies. What we do really does shape who we are. You could even call it "spiritual formation."

Most would look at the practices of worship and believe that we humans have a lot of control in the process. Not Smith. Smith draws our attention to the environments around us. He looks at four environments in particular: the mall, the "military-entertainment complex," the university, and the church. He looks at each one and explains how it influences what we do and how they, in turn, shape our desires. Those desires, in turn, point our hearts toward certain objects, which ultimately become the aim of our worship. Yes, it's cyclical.

The more we practice the liturgies of the mall or the university, the more we desire certain objects (which those environments typically offer). This is worship—the practice of wanting. And practice makes perfect.

Simply put, Smith outlines a process of formation that looks something like this:

environment —> social practices —> a person's habits —> a person's heart —> desires —> actions for obtaining the object (that is, worship) —> identity (because we become what we behold)

Now some might bristle at the individual's seeming powerlessness in Smith's process—we are pressed into the mold of our environments—but this impotence is not the end of the story. If Smith's outline is right—the better we understand these dynamics, the better able we are to subvert the process and practice counter-formation. Power is not always a matter of resisting but of redirecting. (Paul's ambition for the gospel was redirected ambition.) If we understand the process of formation, we will be better able to use it for our own purposes. Understanding it will also reveal how the common environments of our daily lives are already shaping us and our worship. More on those environments later.

First, a question. We've all experienced times when our "heart wasn't in it." We know the disconnect that can occur between our actions and our desires. Sometimes we do things out of obligation or tradition or habit. How then can activities really shape the heart? This is the objection I've heard evangelicals make against Catholics most often. "Traditionalism."

For all this talk about worship and formation, James K A Smith began his book discussing education, and specifically pedagogy—the practices and activities involved in education. Students can easily identify the most common teaching method—lecture. There are a few exceptons—in childhood education, for example, children hear stories and engage in guided-play, and in the sciences, students often have some sort of lab practice. However, lecture predominates today's classroom. This is normal pedagogy. We even have "lecture halls."

Pedagogy seems like a far cry from worship and human formation, but not in Smith's view. Smith argues that pedagogy is actually a set of practices, an environment itself. A lot like liturgies. This means that education and its methods could be understood according to Smith's paradigm of formation above. It also means that pedagogy shapes human identity toward its own ends. A lot like malls and universities do. Those ends, for most contemporary education, are, Smith argues, based upon a certain theory of spiritual formation—how identity is shaped

In the educate-by-lecture paradigm, knowledge and information are primary. Modern education assumes that what we know shapes who we are. It is a rationalist approach. Thus, education focuses almost exclusively on informing students. Information provides knowledge, and knowledge forms identity. In this paradigm, humans have an iron will, one that is not easily distracted once you "set your mind to it." Therefore, if we give people accurate information, they will make good choices. The problem is, it doesn't happen that way. People have plenty of information, and still make choices contrary to "common sense." Why? The answer is related to the answer to the "traditionalism" question we were asking earlier—How can habits really shape the heart?

For Smith, the answer is imagination. Imagination is not purely knowledge or information. It carries values with it. There's a dimension of desire to it. Imagination uses knowledge and ideas and creates a picture from them, a vision we call "the good life."

The good life is "an implicit picture of what human flourishing looks like" (52). It is a set of hopes for relationships, justice, play, nature, work, family, and more. It is everything we love and want, so we pursue it. In our pursuit, we act in ways that we believe will bring about our vision of the good life. This action is worship. Imagination directs our worship.

We are made to love. Our imagination furnishes us with a picture of what to love, what to pursue. Our habits and practices work at bringing that picture to life. This is worship.

So where do our pictures of the good life come from? Culture is constantly presenting us with some version of its own, hoping to motivate us to pursue (i.e., worship) this picture. Smith looks at three of these cultural environments: the mall, the "military-entertainment complex," and the university. For each one, Smith observes the rituals and routines of each environment. Then he identifies what objects those routines are pointing us to. Typically they are objects that justify the existence of the environments and reinforce their priorities. Yes, it's cyclical. After analyzing these three, Smith moves on to discuss an environment for counter-formation: the gathered church.

For Smith, the church is the place where the desire for God can and must be shaped. It will not happen otherwise. In an long chapter, Smith examines 14 practices of the church and layers each one with extensive theological meaning: The Church Gathering, Liturgical Time, Call to Worship, Greetings, Song, The Law, Confession and Assurance of Pardon, Baptism, The Creed, Prayer, Scripture and Sermon, Eucharist, Offering, Sending Out, and Beyond Sunday. Smith's church practices are decidedly sacramental, foreign to many evangelicals, but in keeping with Smith holistic understanding of human nature.

Finally, Smith returns to education, and to his opening question, where the book began: "What is education for?"

Ultimately, for Smith, a Christian education is about forming, not informing. It's about forming students into "radical disciples of Jesus and citizens of the baptismal city" (220). They are formed as God's image bearers (which he defines convincingly, on 163-4, appealing to Richard Middleton) whose task, empowered by God's Spirit, is to help creation realize its potential as God had intended it. Nothing less than a restorative work.

So what sort of "Christian university" is Smith envisioning that could accomplish this? What's his vision of the good life at college? Smith sees student life as being segmented in at least three ways, and he advocates removing these partitions. Removing the first partition means reintegrating the local church with college chapel services with college classrooms. The second means reconnecting the classroom, dorm room, and community. The last means reuniting body and spirit for students, contra Plato. Removing these partitions works toward holism in a student's life.

It's a holism that makes sense in light of Jesus' answer to the religious teachers of his own day. "You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength." We commonly call it love, but it could also be called. And it's a worship that involves our whole being.

Church in the Technological Society

2011-09-21T08:28:00.001-05:00

Technology has one goal—efficiency. Whatever else humans use technology for—and those uses are many—efficiency comes first. That's what technology wants.

Shovels are more efficient than your bare hands. Bullets, more efficient than your fists. The telegraph is more efficient than the Pony Express. Email is more efficient than either one. GPS is more efficient than an atlas. Dyson claims to have the most efficient hand dryers for wicking away wetness—ever. Efficiency is the goal of technology, and most of us want it that way.

Efficiency alone justifies technology in most people's minds. We adopt it for efficiency's sake. Technology makes promises, using words like faster, more, easier, better, less time. Start looking, and you'll see efficiency being lauded everywhere.

The ease of efficiency distances us from the curse of the Fall—toil. God said to Adam, “The ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat. . . .”

Okay God, but have you seen what John Deere is manufacturing these days? Air-conditioned cabs. Forty-row harvesters. Cup holders. There ain’t much moisture our brows.

Whatever our reasons for using technology, we must make a deal. We must sign a contract with technology. Technology wants efficiency, and if we agree to its terms, we can use it for whatever goals we have. But technology’s methods alter our own practices and in the process often transform our goals. Sometimes efficiency simply distracts us, and we forget. We enjoy the luxury. We don’t have to work as hard. How can that not be good?

Churches often sign technology’s contract as much as anyone else. For all its in-the-world, not-of-the-world rhetoric, the church has overlooked technology.

Here’s how it often happens.

The lead pastor of a zealous, Bible-believing church casts his vision: “We want to reach more people for Christ.” Parishioners in the pews nod their heads. It sounds good. We can get behind that. We certainly can't oppose it. Of course we want to reach more people for Christ! That’s the Great Commission!

Did you notice that word "more"? More is a technology promise word. More is quantity, and in today’s technological society, quantity is feasible. How? "We're going to reach more people by using more technology, more amplifiers, and more video screens."

No, the lead pastor won’t say that, though it is a big part of the answer. He is not being deceptive though. He is just as susceptible to technology's sleight of hand. We can't blame him.

So what will he say? How will we reach more people?

One way is to empower pew-sitters to go into their workplaces and neighborhoods and share the gospel. Certainly many church leaders are passionate about this approach (they call it discipleship). But in a technological society, this method isn't the first option. Technology is.

More often, you’ll hear pastors exhorting their congregations to invite outsiders to come hear him speak. Why? Because technology makes larger audiences possible. Amplification and video venues—and parking lots—enable hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands to hear one man speak on stage or on screen.

Why is this method our first choice? Because technology shapes our methodology.

Audio and video technology convinces churches that they can let a single man do most of the work. It’s more efficient that way. Technology makes it possible, so church leaders reformat their methods to harness the technology.

It’s more efficient than doing the harder, longer, slower work of empowering insiders and sending them out, even though that too sounds like the Great Commission. Discipleship seems quite toilsome at times. We can mitigate this toil though by amplifying—or projecting, or broadcasting—an evangelistic message. Who needs grace? Whatever a pastor says about Jesus, his technology is saying something as well. Instead of building relationships, churches use sound systems and video projectors. Instead of sending its people into the community, churches build bigger auditoriums or multiple sites.

For churches in the technological society, strategically neglecting technology can arrest an imagination in ways that noise and light no longer can. For people bombarded with signs and wonders, it is the mundane that becomes holy.

Studying Abroad

2011-09-12T10:35:00.001-05:00

I've joined Twitter. You're invited to join me in the experiment (link). I'll be sharing articles on media ecology from various angles.

Now, this . . .

I was at the mall this weekend. That's pretty unusual for me. I just finished reading a book that, among other things, exegetes the mall as a medium, its practices, and its values (more on that in a future post).

The experience felt sociological to me, like a tourist. Walking around, I had a goofy grin on my face. All I needed yet was a digital camera around my neck and comfortable shoes.

Here are some things I overheard while I was visiting.

Reality Check

One high-school guy to his friend: “Why can’t we be born rich? We’d be miserable, sure, but at least we’d be rich. Have a couple of DUIs. . .”

Delayed Gratification

A 20something woman sporting a new bracelet she’d just bought to her entourage of friends: “I’m in love with it. It’s perfect. It’s exactly what I’ve wanted. For a while now.”

Tough Choices

Mom: “Would you consider getting some Star Wars stuff? Otherwise you could totally get more LEGOs. It’s totally up to you.”
10-year-old son: “That’s a hard decision.”
Mom: “It is a hard decision. You can take some time to decide.”
Pause.
10-year-old son: “Well, maybe I could have both if I get something smaller in the LEGOs . . .”

Well-being
Me in Urban Outfitters looking at books.
Salesgirl: “Are you doing okay?”
Me: [Nodding]

Value

Black guy into his cell phone: “Yiiiiiieah. 2 for $5. Yiiiiiiieah. Heh heh.”

Failure to communicate, or, Better late than never
20something guy on the second floor of Urban Outfitters to his friend: “I thought you said you wanted to go in here.”
Friend: “I didn’t want to go in here.”

An outsider's insights about Twitter.

2011-09-06T08:36:00.000-05:00

I am an outsider to Twitter. I have never had an account, and nearly everything I know is second-hand. I see tweets leaking into Facebook with their inscrutable @ symbols and hash tags. More recently, I have been surfing over to Twitter and clicking on random feeds just to see what they look like and what people choose to tweet. Still, I am an outsider.

I've avoided Twitter mostly because I don't need another website to feel obligated to. Why do I feel "obligated" in the first place? Email and Facebook are enough. And Google Reader keeps me happily current with subjects I'm interested in. However, I have found myself looking for a way to share articles I read. And for that, I've been considering Twitter.

Before leaping though, I decided to record here my impressions of Twitter. Once you're initiated, once you know more, you forget what it's like not to know. So for the sake of remembering, I'm writing this. I think it could be helpful to compare the view from the inside and the outside.

So here's a list of my second-hand knowledge of Twitter, with some explanation.

The environment.

One-way attachments. Twitter doesn't require mutual relationships, even though it's considered social media. Twitter is similar to broadcast mediums in permitting one-way attachments. Any person I follow need not follow me, or even acknowledge me.

That said, I am told that direct messages require that both parties follow each other. In the real world we use words like friend, acquaintance, associate, colleague, lover, and others. In Twitter, these are all lumped together into something like "mutual followers."

It's interesting to think of a friendship in such terms. There could be some truth in it. Friends are constantly leading and following each other.

Binary Proximity. Twitter levels the playing field, as they say. It's touted as being very democratic for this reason. But Twitter also equalizes proximity. Twitter has two distances: follow and don't follow. It's binary. Those I follow, be they celebrities or significant others, are all equidistant. Famous people are as close as friends, and friends are as far away as famous people. Those I don't follow are infinitely distant, but I can make them equidistant just by following them. Twitter doesn't acknowledge anything in between.

Soundbytes. Famously, Twitter is a soundbyte medium. This is one reality of the Twitter environment that most people recognize. It's also the most visible, but a good introduction to media ecologies. While Twitter spurs on the news, enables conversation, and equalizes proximity, it does so in a very superficial way. Twitter conversations burn like news paper. They light quickly and burn up just as fast. Can Twitter sustain a conversation of real value?

I think the soundbyte environment intensifies many of the issues that I mention below, most clearly the news frenzies, the shallow conversations, and the lack of privacy.

Other observations.

News. "Isn't Twitter just Facebook statuses?" I first asked. I was quickly corrected. "This is how I get my news!" and "It's faster than any other news source because there isn't any red tape." Well, yes, except you need access to the Internet, a Twitter account, and a minimum number of followers who will retweet it. And those followers need to care about that piece of news. And that piece of news must compete with all other tweets—whether they're news or not.

News frenzies. Twitter spreads news but it also, to some degree, generates news. The recent kerfuffle surrounding Rob Bell's Love Wins or Mark Driscoll's "anatomically male worship leader" comment may not have gathered so much steam without Twitter's kindling. The tweets of cooler heads are rarely retweet-worthy.

Topics. Hash tags emphasize topics, as I understand them to function, and they allow users to track conversations surrounding those topics. I'm all about conversations about specific topics. So I'll probably like this.

Conversation. If by conversation, you mean trading one-liners. I like complex ideas, and I typically fail with text messages, so I could be frustrated by this.

Eavesdropping. I can follow anyone on Twitter. I can eavesdrop on any conversation they're having with another user. But is it eavesdropping when a user is broadcasting himself? I'm not sure what you'd called that—castdropping? If these birds have tweets, surely they have droppings too. Whatever the case, you can follow anyone and anyone can follow you. And you may not want just anyone listening in. Google + and now Facebook are attempting to stem this lack of privacy. Will Twitter follow suit? The soundbyte reality, though, seems inherently impersonal, so privacy will probably prove less of an issue.

Attention getting. @ symbols seem to empower users to snatch the attention of a specific person. Is this akin, in real life, to interrupting a conversation? Calling someone on the phone? Tapping them on the shoulder? Making eye contact? Shaking them? Yelling their name? It seems like a strange practice to me. Maybe I'll better understand it if I try it out.

Sharing links. Often, I see people linking to articles. Are they looking to dialog about them? These tweets seem quite singular without much background or context.

Shared experiences. Just like on Facebook, people like to draw attention to good, bad, awkward, irritating, flattering experiences. Hashtags seem to promote this practice by gathering them in one place. Like PostSecret, FMyLife, and Fail blog, these tweets confirms that we're not the only one who's had such an experience or feeling. It also suggests that we're not unique in our experiences.

Is Twitter identity-driven or issues-driven? Twitter accounts are provided to individuals—but also to corporations, bands, churches, and other groups. On the other hand, hashtags emphasize issues and concepts. So is Twitter more identity-based or issue-driven? It seems to fundamentally be identity driven. It would be interesting to see an issue-based social network. I suppose some crowd-funding sites might be a bit like that. But, in the end, for websites to work financially, they need to be identity-based in order to target, advertise, and monetize.

Conclusion.

Outsider that I am, these are my impressions and analysis of Twitter. With hesitations, I'll try out Twitter. I intend to primarily post links to articles I've read on media ecology. So if that interests you, I'd love to have you be part of my experiment (info to come).

In a few months, with some insider experience I hope to reflect more on what I wrote here, tweak it, correct it, learn from it, and talk about it.

Technological Inflation

2011-08-30T08:34:00.000-05:00

When I commute to work, I often see the same cars. There's a red Honda Civic, a four-door with a spoiler, ground-effects, and VTEC decals on the side. Inside is a bad-ass bald guy with a graying goatee. He looks like he'd drive a Harley, not a Honda. There's another car, a turquoise Toyota Yaris, that I follow some days all the way to work. There's always two people in the car, a man and a woman, and she always drives.

If we were all on foot, how would things be different? The dynamics, the habits, the patterns, the routes? If I encountered bad-ass goatee guy, I would avoid eye contact and quicken my pace. I wouldn't see the Yaris couple together because he wouldn't need her to chauffeur him to work. He'd have to use his own two legs. Without cars, I could describe their faces and their bodies better than. And they'd probably know my mine too.

Sometimes, driving down the highway, I imagine all the cars being invisible. I imagine seeing the people as they ride around. They are seated, facing forward, organized two abreast. A foot or two above the asphalt hurdle these clusters of bodies.

I try to see through technology this way, comparing modern practices to their old-fashioned equivalents. Sometimes I imagine horse-drawn carriages instead of cars and cowboys on horses instead of motorcycles. I imagine them stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Eisenhower, the horses neighing and stamping their hooves. It reminds me of how absurd our technologies can make us sometimes.

What was the equivalent of the clover-leaf highway interchange 150 years ago? Crowded intersections of people milling about, or something else entirely. Such face-to-face intersections would have required some social etiquette too. Four-way stops retain something like that—the legal right of way. Sure, some people would disregard expectations and step on each others' toes now and then, but it is harder to be impolite when you can see their faces. These days, the most you can usually see is a hand (or a finger) in a windshield.

Let's do another imagination experiment: What would be the equivalent 200 years ago of our modern communication habits?

Can you imagine all the postal workers we'd need for all the messages we send every day? Instead of email, we'd have thousands or millions of postmen delivering mail every which way. Imagine messenger boys delivering your status update to your 309 Facebook friends. And then delivering all return messages to you and everyone else who commented on it. It's unfathomable. But we live in a world now where the equivalent is possible. It happens everyday—millions of times.

Today, instead of using things like roads and horses and messengers, we do all this with wires and computers and electricity. In fact, computers adopted the word "relay" from the Pony Express, which used it to refer to fresh horses that replaced tired ones (The Information, 143).

Communication and transportation were once inseparable (except in Africa). Today we think of them as two very different things. But really both are a matter of moving things from here to there. Technology has divorced the two, and made their unity harder to recognize, or even imagine. We have different mediums for the messages. Wires and waves transport words and images. Sidewalks and streets communicate people and cars. The mediums have changed, and the messages have taken divergent paths. And all we're left with is our own restricted imaginations, of people with real faces and interchanges that require etiquette.

Creeped Out: What smart phones can teach us about eReaders.

2011-07-06T08:15:00.005-05:00

(Taken with my telephone)

Sometimes I entertain myself by imagining a weight scale, like the scales of justice. On one side is the smart phone. On the other, all the objects displaced by the smart phone. Among them are the obvious ones: a telephone, a handwritten note, a camera, a video camera, and a PDA.

When cell phones first came to market, you could do one thing with them: talk. The idea seems quaint now. A decade and a half later, the first text messages were sent—the length of the average postcard. As cell phones got smaller and spread like germs, the features mutated too. Soon people were carrying "camera phones" around, sending photographs to each other. Then it was video phones. Home videos over airwaves. We were sending pix and flix messages, not just text messages. Why limit yourself to 160 characters when a picture is worth a thousand? In the aughts, cell phones besieged the PDA market and conquered it too, marrying communication and organization in a single device. From that union, smart phones were born. The new generation became the standard, nursed by dedicated operating systems. Today, cell phones are nothing less than computers in your pocket.

With the advent of apps, smart phones are really displacing so much more than computers though. Think of what you have available on your smart phone now: a dictionary, an alarm clock, a meteorologist, a GPS device (itself displacing an atlas), a Bible, a CD player, a photo album, a rolodex, a board game, a calculator, a calendar, a flashlight, sticky notes, a guitar tuner, a translator, color-blindness corrective lenses. . . .

Really, the only things not on my imaginary cell-phone scale of justice are groceries, sunscreen, screwdrivers, and the vibrating bumblebee back massager I have.

What began as a tool (or even a toy) for talking is now (an environment) used more and more for things other than verbal communication. It's hardly a phone at all. I've complained to friends that making a call on my smart phone is one of the hardest things to do. It's easier to find out what song is playing on the radio than it is to call someone I know.

Cell phones have experienced what is called "technology creep." Because they have the capacity to do more, more is added.

Technology creep, I submit to you, is the fate of most portable electronics. Among them, I would include eReaders. At the moment, the fences surrounding eReaders are artificial barriers—perhaps chosen, perhaps restricted only by our current paradigm for "book." In any case, the drive to add features and outdo competitors will send the eReader in the same direction as the cell phone. We will do other stuff on eReaders besides read. And someday, like talking on the cell phone, reading may be the hardest thing to do. You're already seeing it happen with things like the iPad.

What does this mean for the book? Will reading be an collateral victim of technology creep?

Books, for the purpose they serve, are a technology without artificial limits. Unlike cell phones and eReaders, we've reached the limits with books: We print on both sides of the paper. We use them for one thing: reading. As a medium, books are as creeped out as they're going to get. Sure, you could use it to prop up the couch that's missing a leg, but then what would you do with your old cell phone?

High-Tech Hugging

2011-06-01T07:41:00.000-05:00

Where I work, our tech department has been rolling out a new communications system. With it, nearly all company communication is integrated and computer-based. One of the features is Instant Messaging. I realize IM isn’t anything new, but this is my first experience with it in a corporate context. I haven’t really IMed anyone since I was 17. I quit one night after I stayed up until 2 a.m. I’d had enough.

Fortunately, I haven’t had any late night chats with colleagues. Yet. But recently I was IMing a colleague, asking him to send me a document I needed. He promised to send it, and I responded and concluded by typing “Thanks!”

I paused. I looked at that exclamation point. It looked far too enthusiastic to me. I certainly appreciated that my colleague was sending me the file, but I wasn’t overjoyed about it. That exclamation point suggested something closer to “overjoyed.” I hit Enter anyway. The end.

The hype of that exclamation point got me thinking again about the ways in which the medium shapes the message. What I mean is that, when we communicate, we have to adjust our message to the technology we’re using. In this case, it was IM. On IM, I could only type text, so I only had a couple ways of punctuating my gratitude. I made a list.

“Thanks!”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks . . .”

“Thanks :)”

“Thanks”

Each punctuation mark suggests something different. I was going for business casual. Which one said business casual? The period is a bit understated and formal; it feels like I’m just going through the motions and really don’t care at all, and maybe that I’m a little cold and entitled. The ellipsis suggests there might be more. Who knows? Wait for it. Wait for it. The emoticon is a bit weird in the corporate world. There's no business casual about it. It suggests that I’m smiling at my own words, being playful, maybe a bit ironic. The unpunctuated “Thanks” is similar to the period: mostly indifferent about the whole matter. Business indifferent, but not business casual.

All that to say, there are a lot of ways to textually communicate gratitude, and for the most part the variety we have is sufficient. But we’re still restricted to communicating with typed words in uniform fonts. Instant Messaging requires text to communicate. There’s not another option—use text.

The real question I'm asking is, How does the technology limit communication? We typically focus on how our new technologies enable communication, but they also disable communication in certain ways. For example, we must use words. IM requires, “No gestures, postures, tones, inflections, or facial expressions allowed.” Even if I type some gesture like “” or “ROFL,” I’m still typing it. It’s still text-based communication.

I mean, if I had been speaking face-to-face with my colleague and had wanted to express my gratitude, maybe I could have gone ahead and hugged him. Do away altogether with “Thanks exclamation point.” Really, when you have a hug at your disposal, what more do you need? Sure it’s awkward. Sure you’ll probably be having a meeting with HR soon. But you can’t hug someone over IM. That’s what I’m trying to say. IM enables text-based communication. It disables hugging.

Email, instant messaging, phone calls, text messaging, and even Skype enable long-distance communication, but they all disable hugging. This disability is what we often fail to recognize. We think of what technology can do. And we are advertised all of its possibilities. But those possibilities distract us long enough to get adopted and be integrated into our lives before we realize the things it doesn’t let us do—things like hugging. Sometimes it takes decades to realize this. Sometimes we never do.

So maybe in this case, with hugging, IM is well-suited to the corporate environment. Maybe it’s a good thing that coworkers leave their hugs in their cars and don’t bring them into the office.

But what about in the other parts of our lives? We’ve integrated most of these same technologies into our personal lives as well, if not more so. IM, text messages, email. How are those technologies disabling us from really communicating—from using gestures, postures, tones, inflections, or facial expressions? How can an emoticon in a text message really help us distinguish between sarcasm, irony, playfulness, laughter, and gratitude? It can’t. In nearly every communications technology, we have to use words for all those things. And words are a medium too—a technology just like a computer is technology. And sometimes words work no better than emoticons do.

I am frustrated by these limitations on a regular basis. It happened to me again last week. I felt like my arms were cut off. But I’m not the greatest with words. I have to use a lot of them to say anything meaningful. I wish I were pithy, but I am verbose.

Not long ago, I went to buy some new dress shirts for work (business casual). I always have to buy shirts with extra-long sleeves, otherwise my wrists get cold. What I’m saying is, I’m way better at hugging than talking sometimes. And you can’t mediate that.

Amish Technology

2011-05-10T08:24:00.001-05:00

Last year, I decided to take the train to visit my grandmother 12 hours away. It was my first time on something other than a commuter train. I wanted to try train travel for the novelty of it, and also for the nostalgia of it. The train was part of the experience, not just the means for getting to my destination. It's not the most efficient way to travel, but that's not the point. Obsolescence does that. It's why we still have horses and carriages.

Among the novelties of my experience, I was surprised to see some Amish on the train. They were unmistakable—sturdy clothing, straw hats, bad haircuts.

Seeing them on the train presented me with a paradox. The Amish are known for not using cars, telephones, or electricity, so how could they be okay traveling by trains? It didn't seem to make sense.

Until recently, I believed that the Amish had simply decided one day in the 19th century to cease all progress—to draw the line and go no further. The line seemed quite arbitrary to me. Why the 19th century instead of the 16th, the 12th, or the 1st? But while their appearance and lifestyle appears to be a 19th-century agrarian one, I was more or less completely wrong about everything else.

The Amish were once technophiles. One leading scholar on the Amish said that until the 1920s, "the Amish were often the first ones in a community to buy the new inventions as they came on the market" (Kraybill 1989:173). This is not the reputation they have today. Today, the Amish do not own cars, but they will hire drivers to take them places. They do not have phones in their homes, but many Amish families share "phone shanties" (think, wooden phonebooths). They do not use electricity, but they have refrigerators, generators, and flashlights. We think of the Amish as epitomizing the Luddite philosophy, so how do we reconcile that with their use of these 20th-century innovations?

To many, these paradoxes seem erratic, illogical, or plain hypocritical. Some outsiders may simply shrug and pity the Amish for such apparent flawed logic. The truth is that "the Amish have an elaborate system by which they evaluate the tools they use" ("Look Who's Talking," Wired). The Amish approach to technology is not a carte blanche rejection of technology, nor is it unconditional acceptance.

The key to understanding the Amish paradox is through something called "Gelassenheit." Roughly translated, the term means submission. In the Amish context, it specifically refers to yielding absolutely to a higher authority.

Gelassenheit isn't just this single value though—it is a constellation of principles that the Amish community has defined and been defined by. Gelassenheit has produced the picture we have of the Amish today. Donald Kraybill (1989:26) identified five dimensions to Gelassenheit, each with defining characteristics: (1) Personality is reserved, modest, calm, and quiet. (2) Values include submission, obedience, humility, and simplicity. (3) Symbols include dress, horse, carriage, and lantern. (4) Ritual involves baptism, confession, ordination, and foot-washing. (5) And structure is intended to be small, informal, local, and decentralized.

The Gelassenheit posture toward technology could probably best be summed up with this question: "Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?" The Amish have a radical commitment to community. "Their selective use of technology, thus, hinges on an implicit assessment of [technology's] long-term impact on community life" (Kraybill and Nolt, 1995). Technology is evaluated by the community for the community.

I would call this type of approach "limited adoption." The Amish use technology but limit how and where they use it. The Amish, as you will see, have proven adept at creating limits that allow them to maintain conscious, overt control over the technologies they use while also harnessing their benefits.

So what does "limited adoption" mean for cars, telephones, and electricity?

Cars. For the Amish, limited adoption of the automobile has meant drawing the line between use and ownership (Kraybill 1989:168). The Amish will use cars, but not own them. Neither will they drive them nor get driver’s licenses. Instead they will hire drivers to transport them as needed.

By not owning vehicles, the Amish fulfill numerous dimensions of Gelassenheit. They maintain humility by not being caught up in the status-seeking of what kind of car they drive. They maintain the interdependence of a close community and resist the independence afforded by automatic mobility. They retain the human scale of living instead of the automotive scale. Thus, they have walkable communities instead of driveable suburbs. They maintain greater separateness from the world by being limited in their capacity to go beyond the community. They maintain their modest and reserved character by resisting the fast, free-wheeling attitude intrinsic to car culture.

Telephones. For telephones, the road to limited adoption was harder to navigate. The phone's perceived purpose is to "bring people together." But first, phones expect people to be separated. Then, they make separation seem palatable (in concert with the automobile). "In a highly mobile society, the phone connects people separated by thousands of miles, and yet, for the Amish, bonded by face-to-face interaction, [the telephone] was a separator" (Kraybill 1989:145). Face-to-face communication is important to the Amish, but the phone erodes it almost imperceptibly by offering approximate communication. Thus, in their approach to the telephone, "Amish leaders have tried to maintain the primacy of communication in the context of community" (Kraybill and Olshan 1994:105).

For the Amish, limited adoption resulted in "phone shanties." The Amish rejected installing phones in their homes because phones interrupt and demand priority when they are ringing. Instead, the Amish have built small buildings that look a lot like outhouses. Then they put the phone inside, often with an answering machine. These shanties serve numerous nearby households. "The Amish believe that a home phone separates but that a community phone integrates" (Kraybill 1989:148). The shanties also provide a nearby means for calling in case of emergency (the Amish have adopted most medical technology). Phone shanties reap the benefits of the telephone while also upholding Gelassenheit values of community and separateness from the world. The Amish retain conscious control and use the telephone on their own terms. The Amish don’t abibe by the telephone’s expectations. Instead, the telephone defers to their values.

Electricity. With electricity, the Amish have limited its adoption but also invented alternatives that maintain their values. Unlike the car and the phone, electricity doesn't have one single intended use. Instead, it’s tranformed into all sorts of uses. Thus, rejecting electricity means rejecting everything that is powered by electricity from furnaces and fridges to power tools and electric fences. Rejecting electricity has many consequences that can hardly be foreseen. But the Amish have proven adept at resolving such problems in creative ways.

Electricity's multiple uses has resulted in multiple solutions on the part of the Amish. Essentially, the Amish have alternative means for powering everything except light bulbs and electronics. They've practiced limited adoption by using 12-volt batteries, fuel, air power, and hydraulic power. Batteries and fuel generators require consistent monitoring, so the Amish retain conscious, overt control, not passive awareness of their electrical consumption. Using these types of power sources instead of electricity maintains separateness from the world—from electronic media like TVs, radios, and the Internet, and from national power grids.

Perhaps, to our way of thinking, this "limited adoption" seems arbitrary. But this posture is grounded in Gelassenheit, not impulse. It's not arbitrary. It's intentional.

The Amish approach to technology and other aspects of life has its faults. However, I think their Gelassenheit and practice can inform our thinking. It can help us think about how we could approach technology with predetermined values instead of uncritical adoption, which characterizes much of American technologism.

In some ways, the truth is that the Amish are still at the cutting edge of technology. They are probably more thoughtfully engaged with technological development than most Americans are—even if it doesn't include Apple. They think seriously about the long-term effects of technology, and about what technology does to them. "Although the Amish may not enjoy all the conveniences of modern life, they are in control of their technology and intuitively grasp its long-term social impact" (Kraybill 1989: 164). In contrast to the American love affair with technology, the Amish have opted for conscientious engagement.

If we are to learn from the Amish and their "limited adoption" approach, we too need a sort of Gelassenheit of our own. We need to have predetermined values that inform our attitudes toward new technologies. If you were putting together your own Gelassenheit, what would you include?

Computers without Keys, Books without Pages

2010-12-14T08:45:00.002-06:00

In the 90s, my sister went to college. With her went a SmithCorona word processor. It wasn't a typewriter, although you fed sheets of paper into it the same way. And it wasn't a computer, although it had monitor. It was a word processor. It was used for a single purpose—writing papers.

While she was there through the mid-90s, the computer age came to the masses. The Internet was born and home computers became a domestic staple—or nearly so. By the time she graduated, her word processor already looked Jurassic. After her last paper, even though it was still in great shape, I don't think her SmithCorona was ever used again.

That word processor was a bridge—in appearance and function—between the typewriter and the computer. The fact that it used paper and had a monitor seems paradoxical to us, like a hybrid. And in some sense that's what it is. The typewriter was evolving into the computer, but the transition wasn't complete. It was in that awkward adolescent stage. Yet, even today, the transformation of the computer is not complete. I'll explain why in a bit.

First, consider these two analogous instances—the horseless carriage and the radio-turned-television variety show. These two technological transformations will help us understand what we're seeing today.

If you saw some of the earliest automobiles (before 1900), you might mistake them for a carriage. The wheels will fool you: They're oversized and spoked just like a wagon's. Indeed, initially, automobiles were thought of in the same light as carriages: People called them "horseless carriages." They even had a magazine of the time called "Horseless Age." If you think about it though, it's funny to identify an object by something it lacks. (But not much has changed, actually. Today we have wireless Internet and cordless mouses.)

Or take early television programming. When popular radio variety shows transitioned to TV, they retained their variety show format and just added the visual component. Today, the only person still doing that is Howard Stern and a few late-night comedians (sort of). But early on, TV shows and movies (or “talkies”) retained strong similarities to radio in format. Most of the information was still communicated verbally, not visually. One example is "The Philadelphia Story" from 1941 whose dialogue catered to the radio-trained ear. Eventually, of course, the visual element introduced by TV changed the format of TV programming. Today, radio and television programming have few common characteristics. What little coverage they do share though (news and sports) doesn't use the same programming.

These examples illustrate a pattern: Old technologies and formats are always adopted into the new technologies and new media. The limitations, designs, expectations, and strategies of these old technologies and formats continue for a while. So, for example, radio scripts become TV scripts, and wooden carriage wheels are sufficient for automobile speeds. But eventually we realize these "limits" are based on old technologies, so we begin to adapt to the new environment without those limits or expectations. (Although, there are new limits in the new technology.)

This is why the computer's transformation is not complete. The computer still currently retains remnants of typewriters: keyboards. The same is true with cell phones that have key pads. But the iPad and the iPhone are beginning to pave the future. Touch screens are removing the spatial limitations of keyboards and keypads. When that transition reaches a tipping point, expect to see new configurations for letters and numbers. Why do we need buttons for them at all? Something completely new could be devised. People are already experimenting with it.

In the future, keyboards and keypads will appear just as antiquated as carriage wheels and variety shows.

But let's not stop there. Let's allow this pattern to illiminate one more technological change that's occurring: eBooks. Where I work, there's continual discussion about making book content flexible enough to fit into variety of electronic formats. This means making paper books available in digital formats for Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, and dozens more.

But as we've seen, our first impulse with new technology is to put old content into it—think radio variety shows. But when we put old content into new media, the perceived limitations disappear and the content begins to change. In publishing, we're trying to put the variety show format into the television medium. And sure, we can do that and it will work for a while. But it is not the future of digital reading. "eBook" will someday probably be a funny term, like "horseless carriage." Electronic books are not books at all. Sure, both carriages and cars transport people and good, but they are not the same thing, even if they serve similar purposes. Neither are books the same thing as eBooks, even though we want them to serve similar purposes. The electronic format has its own set of assumptions that will reformat the books we put into it.

So what format will "books" take in the digital context? That’s a great question. There's a lot of experimenting going on out there, with embedded video clips, hyperlinks, character blogs, book trailers, dynamic indexes, iPhone apps, you name it. Already there's one significant change: flipping pages horizontally versus scrolling down vertically. You read the book from left to right horizontally. But in a digital it's a vertical column. But the digital context is not limited to either of these. Someday, we could have some combination of the two. And, depending on whether we scroll horizontally or vertically, that may connote some sort of meaning much the way a paragraph now indicates a shift in focus. We will also be able to create layers, so that we could move forward or backward. Why stay on a single plane?

I'm not sure if the book can be adequately transformed for a digital context and retain its original purpose. What I'm saying is, I don't know if book technology can be improved upon for the purposes it serves. I think users of the Kindle et al. will disagree with me. I certainly may be wrong. But the artificial limits that have been created for the Kindle and the Nook are just that—artificial.

If books ever migrate far enough into the digital context to reach a tipping point, I think they will be transformed. At that point, the book may go the way of the computer keyboard or the telephone keypad. And when that happens, expect to see things reconfigured.

Related Links:

New touchscreen typing (link)

Comic Books in the Electronic Medium (video)

The New Normal

2010-12-07T08:43:00.003-06:00

Today I'm sharing a few articles I've collected around the Internet.

Goodbye, Yellow Pages. The phonebook is finally going the way of the carrier pigeon (link). We’ve all seen it coming. The Internet has simply made it obsolete, the argument goes. The article I read points out the great environmental advantages of this transition. I love the first sentence.

“This can only be great news for the environment. We all know the arguments against annually printing tens of millions of tons worth of paper—the nasty stuff inside the ink, a fatuous use of paper recycled or not, the waste of energy creating, packaging and delivering them.”

Measuring the environmental impact of printing phonebooks would certainly be possible if we had just a few pertinent numbers. What’s more difficult to calculate, however, is the electrical expense of using whatever Internet-capable device will be used instead of a phonebook—be it a computer, a mobile phone, or the car we drive in to the library to use the Internet. Will there be a net reduction of environmental resources? Probably, but those are harder numbers to nail down.

Additionally, it’s important to consider that this obsolescence has social implications, however remote. Those without home Internet access are at a disadvantage. They become information poor in addition to being economically poor. To overcome it, they will need to be more resourceful in other ways. But the Yellow Pages will no longer be one of those resources.

Automated Arguments. An Australian programmer, Nigel Leck, has found a new way to argue: Use a computer program (link). He’s created a program to scan Twitter for anti–Global Warming rhetoric and compose an automatic retort, complete with a link to a relevant article. My favorite line: “Whether you agree or disagree with Leck’s (bot’s) point of view is almost beside the point.”

Will we soon have autobots spamming each other with context-relevant arguments? This reminds me of two coworkers who went on vacation at the same time. Both used auto-reply out-of-office email messages. The one sent a quick final message to the other, then shut his computer down. The two emails went back and forth until they flooded each other's inbox, shutting both down.

Such an idea might be efficient, but we’ve removed ourselves another step from genuine dialogue.

Automated Automobiles. You’ve no doubt heard about Google’s research into self-driven cars (link). The report I read listed a few benefits. Among them, “automated cars could ultimately cut the number of lives lost in road accidents each year by half.” If used in military ops, “vehicles that drive themselves could be used to reduce potential casualties in convoys that transport fuel and other supplies in war zones.”

I can’t argue with those kinds of results. In the U.S., that’s more that 15,000 people a year, more than 40 each day.

The article tried to appear balanced: “Although these vehicles will almost certainly be safer than those driven by human beings, concerns about the potential impact of hackers, software bugs and other nasty stuff will hinder their adoption.”

Framing it this way though, the article seems a bit biased. Rather than acknowledging that these may be true dangers, they are characterized merely as obstacles to be overcome. (How? With more technology.) What’s more, the vague “other nasty stuff” seems like a brush-off, and a playful one at that. It shrugs and laughs and avoids the difficult work of thinking about what those real trade-offs might be. This is the blind spot that media ecology seeks remove.

Technology and Time. Lastly, I appreciated this article on how the train pushed us to create time zones (link): "As new technology let railroad trains go even faster, the need for a better system [for timekeeping] was increasingly evident." Who would have foreseen such a necessity, except maybe Einstein?

The train hastened the disregard for space as a relevant detail. Conductors experienced the disorientation of “train lag.” Time had to become more standardized in order to reduce the disorientation created by technology.

This standardization spread to the whole social order, synchronizing everyone's lives. "Businesses followed the lead of the railroads, and people showed up for work when employers said they needed to, and customers visited stores when shopkeepers said they were open."

Why the needs of a few train-lagged conductors trumped the needs of broader society, I don’t know. The fact is, it wasn't the train conductors so much as much as the train itself that required the change. It was man adapting to the machine.

The article offers some additional clues to why this change took place: “So convenient was the system of time zones that it thrived entirely on the say-so of the railroads for 35 years. Congress did not enact Standard Time until March 19, 1918, when it also initiated Daylight Saving Time as an efficiency measure during World War I.” (emphasis added)

Two words jumped out at me: “convenient” and “efficiency.” These are essentially a single value at work—what Ellul calls “technique.” The railroad and its counterpart, the telegraph, heralded a new value system. It was the value of a well-oiled machine: efficiency.

And ever faster we go.

A few other notables

“[T]he city in which you live rewires your brain so that you walk and talk at a rate that’s considered normal in your neck of the woods.” (link)

Teenage “girls go online looking for information and don’t see it as a ‘virtual’ activity as a opposed to a real activity, as their moms do. The daughters said they use the Internet to get information that complements their ‘real-world’ activities. . . .” (link)

A venn diagram explaining the relationship between the Internet and privacy. (link)

Note: I wish I could blog about all the articles I find that pertain the matters of media ecology. If you read my blog “naturally” (without RSS), you can look on my blog under “Elsewhere” for articles I’ve read and thought worth sharing. There’s more than just media ecology stuff—you’ll see some of my other interests—but there’s plenty of articles in there.

How We Got from There to Here

2010-11-30T08:28:00.003-06:00

Lately, I've been thinking of media ecology in terms of transportation and communication. To a degree, these two things can be seen as interchangeable. After all communication is transporting words and ideas from one place to another. The highways for ideas are manifold—we call them "media."

Conversely, transportation is the communication of objects from one place to another—cars, people, goods, products. In this way of thinking, those physical objects are the messages communicated along roads and highways. Yes, you are the message of the road. Do you see it? Raymond Unwin, an early 20th-century urban designer, saw this. He recognized that a road serves "as a means of communication from one place to another."

Before electric technology (i.e., the telegraph), communication and transportation were much more closely tied together. They were even identical to some degree, or at least children of the same mother. Before the 1840s, letters et al. were transported by the same roads that people traveled. People and information traveled along the same routes. The Postal Service is a vestige of this long-lost time. Telephone lines running alongside roadways are more recent echoes too.

In the past 200 years, electric technology has deepened the division in our minds between communication and transportation. So much so that we seem them as completely distinct from one another, almost without similarity. The fact that this connection has been severed is the evidence of the way technology changes the way we think.

Communication and transportation didn't just change the way we think about space though. They also changed how we relate to space. We began to use space in new ways.

For example, it was not steel that created the skyscraper. It was the elevator and the telephone. Until Otis's "safety elevator," the height of buildings was limited by people's capacity for stairs, usually 4-6 stories. Witold Rybczynksi points this out, but is quick to add that the telephone was equally important: "The height of commercial buildings was also limited by the need for easy communication" (City Life, 118).

Telephones and elevators. Communication and transportation show up again. Their developments create the environment that makes skyscrapers possible.

Technology's Sleight of Hand

2010-11-23T09:51:00.003-06:00

(Reading Time: 4 minutes)

"Why do we praise technology's advances in the short term and demonize them in the long-term?" This was the dangling question I asked after my previous post. I didn't have an answer.

Jacques Ellul has helped shed some light though. In The Technological Society, Ellul explains how and why every technician shuns responsibility of technology's negative effects:

"A single technique and its guarded application to a limited sphere is the starting point of dissociation," Ellul writes. "No technician anywhere would say that he is submitting men, collectively or individually, to technique. . . . Thus, since no technician applies his technique to the whole man, he can wash his hands of responsibility and declare that the human being remains intact."

In other words, the technological developer (or "technician") intends for his technology to have only a limited application, to a limited group of people, and to a limited portion of a person's life. He doesn't intend to complete reconfigure the whole man, or his environment.

So, for example, the person who invented email will point out that s/he simply wanted to make communication faster and easier for people. Her vision is very narrow and specific. Of course, as we see it now, the technician's intent was quite narrow, but email's effects were quite far-reaching. It had implications for postal mail, became a source of distraction in the workplace, contributed to the decline in letter writing, and on, and on.

Can we blame all these effects on the person who invented email? No. A technician does not intend to change the environment of people's lives. They are much less ambitious than that. They simply want to make written communication faster and easier.

In other words, a technician's intent is microscopic, not macroscopic. The intent is to change one dimension of society, not a whole society. The intent is to augment an individual's written communication, not completely reorient communication.

Yet, a microscopic intent can translate into a macroscopic result.

This micro/macro distinction, I think, is one way to answer the dangling question about why we have short-term hopes while also having long-term fears. In the short term, we see the limited, micro-level intentions of the developer. But having seen enough of technology's macro-level shifts historically, we recognize that technology's impact in our lives will be much broader and more fundamental than we intend.

It's like a magic trick. It's technology's sleight of hand. When a new technology is created and promoted, our attention is drawn to the developers' intentions. We're distracted by those bright hopes, when in fact we should be pay attention to the technology. We're watching the magician instead of the magic.

At the same time, we like magic. This reminds me of something else Ellul wrote. It seemed exaggerated when I first read it, but now it makes more sense. He wrote, "Our modern worship of technique derives from man's ancestral worship of the mysterious and marvelous character of his own handiwork." Magic is delightful.

Media ecology throws the damper on all this. Media ecology is like that cynical uncle at family reunions who watches the trick and then ruins the magician's secret. We want to experience wonder and he has to go and ruin it. We want to enjoy technology with hopeful innocence, but we're also scared of the boogie man.

This micro/macro distinction for short-term intentions and long-term transformations hearkens back an older post I wrote: "The Technological Optimists and Pessimists." In it, I outlined two views of technology: technological determinism and social constructivism. Technological determinism says that societal change is foremost affected by technology. Social constructivism attributes the most influence to people and their choices.

I correlated a number of synonymous concepts to these two perspective. Along with technological determinism, I associated pessimism (expectations) and macro-level analysis (sociologically). Now, I would add the long-term fears we see in the movies. Along with social constructivism, I associated optimism and micro-level analysis. To this side, I would add the short-term intentions of developers.

As I said in "Optimists," there is wisdom is scrutinizing both perspectives, while at the same time listening to both sides—a "socio-technic dialectic," I called it. I've found the Amish to be some of the best examples of this approach—using new technology on a trial basis and thoughtfully considering its effects in light of their own explicit values before adopting or rejecting it.

I wonder if they like magic.

Links:

Last week's post: "Technology's Two Futures"

Previous post: "The Technological Optimists and Pessimists"

Technology's Two Futures

2010-11-16T09:07:00.001-06:00

In 1909, E M Forster published a short story titled, The Machine Stops. In it, Forster paints a picture of future where everyone is provided everything they need by a single, all-encompassing machine. One machine for the whole world. Each person has his own room, full of light and buttons for anything he might request, and able to connect with anyone he might want to see. There is a button for food, bed, Skype, and any sort of seminar or lecture you would want to learn anything from.

As futurists tend to do, Forster projected out in straight lines for his picture of the future. He imagines tactile buttons for any need, not a flat touchscreen. Instead of something visual, as we would imagine today, Forster imagines a sound-based sort of entertainment of seminars. His most innovative idea was the Skype-like feature, but he describes the picture as grainy and vague. He can't imagine something with very good definition.

Although Forster's vision of the future seemed limited in content, he had a much more definite concept of its quality. As the story unfolds, we learn that these rooms where everyone lives are actually underground, that people rarely leave their rooms, and they despise both traveling and the sky above. They avoid these things because they are quite inconvenient. Above ground, if people must go there, they wear oxygen masks for the tough requirements of breathing natural air. In fact, the machine will hunt you down if you get out.

Forster's description is quite depressing to us, and pathetic it seems. It lacks foresight in multiple ways. Forster's imagined advancements in technology create an hard, artificial world. But Forster's imagination of the future is not an isolated example. Look at more recent movies where technology shapes of the imagined future: Soylent Green. I-Robot. Surrogates. The Matrix. Avatar. The Island. Gattaca. Terminator.

In all these movies, technological advancement is seen as having a powerful role in shaping the environment. So why do these movies paint such bleak pictures? Is it that these movie makers are more cynical about the future in general? Do they have a keen fear of technology specifically? If so, why aren't there other movies that paint a more hopeful picture of the future and technological progress?

In these movies, the theme of man versus machine persists—and with it, the triumph of man over machine. The human spirit invariably overcomes the forces created by technology. But why does technology play such an ominous character in these imagined futures?

When I put this side-by-side with today’s average sentiments about technology, there's quite a dichotomy. The constant developments of cell phone innovations, new mobile apps, crowdsourced ideas, crowdfunded NGOs, and clever ingenuities—all this makes us hopeful and bright-eyed. The motion pictures, by contrast, seem like nightmares that burn off in the daylight.

Why do we have these two diverging views of technology? Why is our short-term expectation hopeful and excited while the long-term imaginings are fearful and alien? Why is technology pitched as the solution to every contemporary problem we face (think, TED) and the cause of every future one? The dichotomy doesn’t make sense.

Perhaps the common denominator is money. Hope sells technology for the immediate future, and apocalyptic omens make for movies that will sell. I think this is perhaps part of it. But still, why is technology at the center in both of these cases?

I recently finished reading Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society, published in 1964. In his closing chapter, he briefly alights on "A Look at the Year 2000." He recites some of the predictions by "Nobel prize winners, members of the Academy of Sciences of Moscow, and other scientific notables whose qualifications are beyond dispute." Among their predictions: "voyages to the moon will be commonplace; so will inhabited artificial satellites. . . . Sea water and ordinary rocks will yield all the necessary metals. Disease, as well as famine, will have been eliminated. . . . The problems of energy production will have been completely resolved. . . . Knowledge will be accumulated in 'electronic banks' and transmitted directly into the human nervous system." It goes on.

They seem like pipe dreams. Yet they also sound familiar. Virgin Galactic is testing commercial space flights. The "electronic bank" is already here. You're on it right now. And people have admitted they'd implant the Internet in their brains if given the chance. The other things—energy independence, clean mining, disease elimination—are all things we're still hoping for—believing technology will bring to us, a bit like Forster’s machine. These aren't the dystopias of the movies. This is our real-life hope. This isn’t the imagination that makes movies, but the one that makes the future. So why the difference?

Cars, Colleges, and Community

2010-10-26T08:54:00.003-05:00

(Reading Time: 6 mins)

Where I live there are two colleges in the area. One is a well-respected liberal arts college—of the kind that sprung up in a small towns throughout the Midwest in the middle of the 19th century. The other is a community college, one of the largest in the country, and students there get a good practical education. The liberal arts college has around 3,000 undergrads, while the community college has about 30,000. The one is religiously affiliated, the other is government funded. The first is over a century-and-a-half old, the second is less than 50 years old.

So the differences are manifold, but three facets especially intrigue me: their locations, their layouts, and their parking lots. I think these three elements are integral to both colleges' identities, but they are also reflections of how cars have shaped colleges. The differences between the two school's hinge on that single factor—the car.

First, consider the characteristics of each.

Locations. The liberal arts school is just a couple blocks from downtown. It is integrated into the community and integral to it in numerous ways. One of the few streets to cut through campus is "College Avenue." The commuter train that runs through town is likewise "College Avenue Station." Students frequent the local coffee, ice cream, and sandwich shops, and they regularly use the local library as a place to study. The college is actually named after the town, and was founded only 2 or 3 years after the town was incorporated.

By contrast, the community college is on the edge of town, accessible by a four-lane boulevard running along it's north side. The closest restaurant is a Wendy's probably a mile away. Another street cuts through campus, complete with a stoplight and a crosswalk. The school is identified by the county where it resides, rather than being named after the town where it's located. (You wouldn't know what town it resides in, actually, if you didn't live nearby.) The name suggests that its students commute in daily from all around the county.

Layouts. For the liberal arts school, only one or two streets cut through the campus. The rest terminate on the perimeter. I think more streets used to cut through, but they've been diligently rooted out. In their stead, sidewalks cut across the grassy campus at odd, natural angles like sinews conjoining the clustered buildings. There's plenty of grass everywhere—a sloping lawn unfurling in front of the campus's inaugural building. Students are regularly lounging there on blankets, ignoring the book-bags beside them.

For it's part, the buildings at the community college run end-to-end in a column along the boulevard for half a mile or more. They do not cluster. There is no center to them—except for the nominal "Student Center." The sidewalks run along between the buildings and parking lots. There's grass here too, even an arboreal preserve of some kind, I'm told. But as you drive down the boulevard the most prominent feature is the parking lots. The alphalt lots serve are the naked buffer between the buildings and the boulevard. Of course, they also make for easy access.

Parking lots. When I first started thinking about these two schools, it was the parking lots that I thought of first. At the community college, the parking lots are prominently displayed and easily accessed. The buildings are set back much like a strip mall.

At the liberal arts college, the parking lots are visible, but they are not prominent like this. They don't draw the eye to them. They are at the perimeters of the school and in the corners. Instead of centralized parking lots, the campus is clusters of buildings connected by sidewalks.

Cars. Obviously, the history of both schools plays a role here—one was founded before cars we invented, the other after. I think this is telling. I think it's the car that most directly influenced the locations and layouts of these two schools.

Without the car, the community college could not have settled on the edge of town, so far from the necessary amenities to college life. Actually, the community college expects the car because the students can't live on campus. They commute in each day. The car made it possible for the community college to divorce education from dorm life, local groceries, and eating establishments.

The liberal arts school, on the other hand, had to be integrated with its surrounding community, near food and complete with housing. Students had to center their whole lives—working, eating, studying, sleeping—on and near campus. When it was founded, students didn't have cars to give them the choice.

Community. But this is the most interesting aspect to my mind: Of these two schools, the college that has best cultivated community is not the "community college." Ironically, the term "community college" popularly connotes a lack thereof. Rather, it's the liberal arts college. It's the one that clusters together, complete with sidewalks where students pass each other every day or two, and coeds lounge on the lawn. Community life at the liberal arts college is more cohesive precisely because the streets have been rooted out and cars have been relegated to the edges and people are walking around, even if they're ignoring each other as they pass.

The community college doesn't have that. It's bifurcated by streets and centered around parking lots, by cars that split people apart and atomize their lives—so that eating, sleeping, studying, and even drinking are things they do away from campus and away from each other.

Why is this relevant to us? It's instructive because it provides a tangible microcosm of what cars mean for community. If we are struggling to understand what cars mean in our lives, in our cities and suburbs, then the community life at community colleges can show us.

Liberal arts colleges hearken back to a time before cars. We idealize them and romanticize them because they embody a way of life that's simpler. But these old liberal arts colleges have inadvertently retained a culture before cars—of what towns were like when people walked everywhere, ran into acquaintances, stopped to talk, and tried to evade wearying personalities.

We joke about the "bubble" that such colleges create for themselves, but my guess is that towns were once enclaves of a very similar, and even deeper sort—yet without knowing it.

Community colleges, on the other hand, came of age after cars had reformatted our lives. Cars reformatted colleges too, especially "community colleges." But more than colleges themselves, cars reformatted community.

Running Smoothly

2010-10-19T08:18:00.003-05:00

(Reading Time: 4.5 mins)

Growing up, I lived outside of Flint, Michigan. Flint was like Detroit's little brother, an automotive town, filled with GM assembly plants and United Auto Workers. Friends in my neighborhood had dads who worked second or third shift and drove new pickup trucks.

Driving out to the mall with my parents, we would pass the Truck and Bus plant, a gray, 5-story warehouse surrounded by parking lots glinting with new cars.

Once when my grandparents visited, I skipped school, and we went to a Buick assembly plant nearby. We toured the plant under the bright fluorescent lights, walking behind shiny yellow lines, or watching through windows.

The workers heaved, snapped, bolted, and screwed parts into place. The cars crawled like rush-hour traffic through skeletal hallways, wall-less and ceiling-less. Instead of walls, car parts stood like troops of soldiers ready for action: door panels, steering columns, headlamp components, windshields, trunk lids.

When Henry Ford created the assembly line for his Model T, it was a breakthrough in mass production. Like a good sentence, each letter, each part, was installed sequentially, inserted at just the right place. Deconstructing the car and composing it in a linear process, Ford produced millions of vehicles, all virtually identical.

Cars and their assembly lines have grown more complex–with assembly and sub-assembly lines–but the worker's task hasn't. The assembly plants grew bigger, and the lines longer, but the process was divided again and again into narrowed tasks, into simple repetition.

More and more, computer-aided machines assist or replace human assembly work, using hydraulic arms and the like. The repetitive movements of the assembly line can be timed precisely and programmed to be flawless. Now, I don't really pity the worker who loses his job, or is relocated because a machine has replaced him. He's better off, in my opinion, doing the work a machine can't do—something that requires more of him than rote repetition.

But as computers and machines continue to replace workers, workers take on the jobs in between machines. The worker becomes a sort of buffer between one machine and another, making sure that the process continues smoothly, like grease between gears.

As more and more of his job is taken over by computers, the more specific his work becomes. He zooms in further and further on a single step in the process. Eventually, that step gets broken down into component steps. He understands each step more intimately and each step is subdivided and becomes more basic, repetitive. As a result it becomes mechanized—technical, efficient, and precise.

When a machine can do the job, the worker will either lose his job, or he will fit into some even smaller space between two even smaller gears where the process has not yet been neatly figured out. In this way, the worker constantly works on a narrower piece of the whole.

I see this in my own work as well, which is far from an assembly line but empowered daily by a computer. I sit working on a piece of writing, correcting errors and fixing mistakes. When a pattern of mistakes emerges, I use the computer to help me find every occurrence. The deeper I go, the more ways I see to divide the process into component parts. I find myself working in between computer programs and automatic scripts, getting them to work with each other.

I'm no longer using the computer to help me. I'm helping the computer do my job. Am I the only one who has experienced this?

I don't say all this to decry the use of computers and machines. Instead, I want to understand how they funnel users into narrower roles with more redundancy before eliminating us altogether. I want to understand how we continually break down our jobs into discrete steps that can be mechanized. Machines have created an environment for us where we're forced to do these repetitive tasks. Because we hate repetition (it creates calluses after all), we seek ways to eliminate it from our lives . . . by mechanizing it.

This reflex of relying on computers reduces our role into being the grease between ever small gears. It also forces us into managing computer-aided activities. Even more, for me at least, it causes me to feel frustrated at the things that cannot be programmatically resolved. I come to resent the computer for the tasks it leaves for me to do.

Is there an alternative to this assembly line model of work? Do we have a choice other than becoming grease between gears?

The assembly line is the solution we came up with based on a single value–efficiency. Ford created the assembly to increase production and reduce costs. That's efficiency. We adopt that value as our own every time we choose to assign our repetitive tasks to a computer or a machine. It's hard to see an alternative. This is because we can't see an alternative that doesn't sacrifice efficiency. And that sacrifice does not seem to be an option.

But what if it was?

Praying on TV

2010-10-13T08:28:00.002-05:00

(Reading Time: About 5 mins)

What do you do when you hear a pastor pray on the radio or see one pray on TV. Do you pray too?

A few weekends ago, on a road trip, I listened to a sermon on CD. From the beginning of the recording, you can tell the crowd is rambunctious, the way the pastor is reacting to them. He's amused by it, but he's determined to harness it, to focus the audience's energy into prayer.

First, he tells them why he wants them to pray–why they need to pray. Then he helps them focus on what to pray for by giving them a specific area to pray for, each followed by maybe 30 seconds of silence.

Prayers of thankfulness. Silence. Confession. Silence. Requests for the gathered believers. Silence. Requests for outsiders. Silence. Requests for self. Pause. Then the pastor closes it up, leading a collective prayer.

Mind you, I’m listening to this at 70 miles-per-hour on the expressway. A Harley passes me. I slow down for a semi. I speed up. Blinker. Check blind spot. Mirrors. Lane change. Cop. Slow down. Check rearview mirror till the cop’s out of sight. Speed up. All the while, the recording continues, the prayer and silence endures, punctuated every minute or so by the pastor’s methodical instruction, guiding the prayers of righteous people.

I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to pray too? I had no idea how recent this recording was. It could have been from 10 years ago. I had no context other than what I heard. The pastor made no references to current events.

Could I really latch onto that holy crowd through this recording with my prayers? Even if I could have, I was driving, distracted. I wasn’t immersed in the experience, gathered with other believers praying. My experience wasn’t the slow, focused attention the pastor had cultivated. Mine was something more like this:

Prayer of thankfulness. A Harley passes me. Silence. I slow down for a semi. Confession. I speed up. Silence. Blinker. Requests for the gathered believers. Check blind spot. Silence. Mirrors. Requests for outsiders. Lane change. Silence. Cop. Requests for self. Slow down. Check rearview mirror till the cop’s out of sight. Pause. Speed up. Pastor prays.

What was I supposed to do? What was my role? my identity? Was I an observer? a participant? The same question confronts me every time a pastor prays on TV. Am I supposed to pray too? If I close my eyes, I can’t see the TV. This is weird. I’ll just watch.

Now, I admit that I can disengage just as much even if I'm present in the sanctuary. I recognize that God's Spirit can work despite the medium. I praise God that's true.

But I don’t think I’m the only one who experiences this strange disorientation toward prayer when listening to a sermon on CD or on TV. I don't think I'm the only one wondering: "Am I supposed to watch, listen, or participate?"

Since the pastor’s not even here with me or I with him, there’s no shared presence. We are not present together. I don't belong to those rambunctious believers. I don’t know who I am in this context. We as the audience are no longer "we." We have no identity as a people, like movie goers told to silence their cell phones. We are isolated in the dark. Separated. Watching. Detached. When the pastor calls for a show of hands, why should I raise mine? He can’t see me. It’s a meaningless gesture. When the pastor prays, shouldn’t I go on watching? That’s what the screen expects me to do, even if the pastor doesn’t.

I fear the same will come true (or is already) in churches where pastors are projected onto a video screen. There, the pastor is no longer present.

Why does presence matter? Because Immanuel matters. Because for some reason, God didn't project a hi-def image of himself. He sent himself, embodied. God became present with us. When pastors disembody themselves—when they are discarnate—they disfigure Immanuel, even if unintentionally. Projected pastors deny the importance of God with us. They distort the purpose of the Incarnation.

Video screens and CDs are unrelenting. They can't change. They can't be other than they are. We cannot adjust them to affirm Immanuel. As long as we use them, we will always have to accommodate ourselves to them.

So what can pastors do who have already structured their churches around the video-venue multisite model? First, I suggest that anytime someone prays upfront, the screens go black. This will be a strong statement to everyone watching. It will be a powerful affirmation of who we are praying to: the God of the second commandment. It will compel every person to ask why the screen goes dark when we pray. It will force them to reflect on what prayer means.

Second, stop projecting absent pastors on screens. This is a structural change. It will require creativity and planning. It will require restructuring Sunday morning services and leadership development, resolving parking issues and child care, and discovering what Immanuel means for the church. I don't pretend to believe that I'm asking for something small. But if taking down a video screen requires that much reorganizing, doesn't that tell us something about how central it has become?

Artificial War

2010-10-05T08:16:00.001-05:00

“How do drones change the nations that use them?”

This is the question that Peter Singer is asking. By “drones,” Singer is referring to unmanned planes performing military missions previously executed by pilots in cockpits. Robotic development in military and intelligence operations poses significant questions about what “war” means. War has always involved risking human life, which, in the U.S., required justification by the President and Congress. Without these risks, does the President still need to justify a declaration of war? Does he need to explain his reasons for spending money to develop new technologies and risk their destruction?

The U.S. isn’t the only country using technology to decrease the risk to human life. More than 40 countries are doing so on some level, Singer says.

With this sort of technological trajectory, will our countries one day be waging wars robot v. robot? Imagine a drone with the mission of seeking and destroying an unmanned tank. At that point, the war will be a matter of economics more than anything. It will be an artificial war, if you will. The extensions of man will be so far extended, that men won’t even feel the effects of war.

Of course, the reduced risks to human lives will be the benefit that drives the technological development, and this is certainly a good thing. But what will the unintended consequences be?

Wars will become an economic matter, like the housing crisis. As a result, our weapons will no longer be bombs and bullets. Instead, they might be stock exchanges and currency trading. We already use economic sanctions and trade embargoes in a similar way.

With computers and technology at the forefront of war, electricity and information will matter more than food stuffs and Kevlar. It will be a battle of computer viruses and counterintelligence, or of power surges and reconnaissance. Information and computer programming may become more important than how many troops you have. We won’t be fighting for land but for information. It will become a battle between whoever can create program the best robot.

HT: The Economist

Related:

The Real Iron Man Suit: Man sheathed in his extensions.

Social Networking and Social Activism

2010-10-01T08:56:00.003-05:00

So it seems that Malcolm Gladwell is wading in to some media ecology questions too. I guess we can all quit now.

Here's what he had to say in an online Q&A over at The New Yorker.

On the Internet’s transience:

The essential fact of the internet is that nothing is permanent. AOL was once the king of online—remember? I doubt that anything that is done electronically will facilitate social activism all that much—at least not unless you’ve put a real world structure in place first.

On technology’s impotence:

This is what drives me crazy about the digerati. They refuse to accept the fact that there is a class of social problems for which there is no technological solution. Look. Technology is going to solve the energy problem. I’m convinced of it. Technology is going to give me a computer in ten years time that will fly me to the moon. Technology is going to build a car that goes 100 miles to the gallon. But technology does not and cannot change the underlying dynamics of “human” problems: it doesn’t make it easier to love or motivate or dream or convince.

On using Twitter to motivate social activism:

The issue isn’t informing people. It’s organizing people. Twitter is great at the first. But not so great at the second—and Dr. King and his counterparts needed organizations, not communications tools. Remember in the 1960’s you could reliably reach upwards of 95 percent of the black community in urban areas in the South through the church. And there you had their undivided attention for an hour! Who needs Twitter when you have sermons and regular prayer meetings?

The Public Mind

2010-08-10T08:52:00.003-05:00

(Reading Time: 9 minutes)

Less than a year after joining Facebook, I found myself going through my day asking, "How could I word that in a Facebook post?" I was thinking in Facebook statuses. All my thoughts began, "Adam is . . . ." It was like obsessively playing MadLibs. It drove me crazy.

Even now with my blog, I spend time asking myself a similar question: "Is this idea something I could write a blog post about?" Or, as I've heard it said, Is it "blogworthy"?

These are the simple quirks of Facebook and blogging. They're part of the culture wrapped around them—the lifestyle surrounding "friends" and bloggers. But could these quirks grow into deeper habits?

Blogs, Facebook, and YouTube have changed our lives in many ways. Before blogs, what did people have but private journals? Before Facebook, we planned parties via email, and we didn't know who'd RSVP'd. Before YouTube, we ate what television served. Now we can cook our own meals.

But these Internet outlets incurred a bigger sort of change: We’ve been empowered to publicize our private lives.

Sure, reality TV was doing that to a very limited degree. Now anyone can do it. Bloggers can publish their ideas, just like I'm doing. "Friends" can tell nearly everyone they know what they're doing or thinking, and share photos from vacations and weddings and last night's party.

And Facebook has continually pushed to expand the publicity of our private lives—and gotten a lot of resistance.

This "new public" has been hailed as a new level of democracy for ideas and entertainment. The threshold has effectively disappeared. Anyone, literally, can publish themselves for a potential mass audience. Before Web 2.0, there was no mechanism for this. Before, you had gatekeepers. Today, there's only competition for attention.

Many saw this as an innovation. But really, I think this is the inclination of the Internet, and we were simply discovering it.

The Internet is an acoustic environment because it's an electric environment. In an acoustic space, anyone present can be heard if they shout loud enough. On the Internet, everyone is present and shouting. When blogs, Facebook, and YouTube arrived, they were simply cooperating with the Internet's acoustics.

Blogs, Facebook, and YouTube have expectations. Blogs are text-based, so we write stuff. Facebook asks "What's on your mind?" so we think stuff. YouTube is video-based, so we show stuff.

When I was a kid, I wrote letters now and then. I mailed them to my grandfather or to a girl—or, one time, to Hershey's. I don't do that anymore. I just shoot off emails. Anymore, my emails are rarely meaningful or intentional. They're sent to coordinate projects and schedules, share documents or information, or to pass along an article of interest. The vast majority of my emails are informational. Only rarely do I express my opinions and ideas in an email.

Opinions are what a blog is for. But I know how public a blog is. I don't feel comfortable sharing personal or private thoughts there. Instead I share ideas that are "blogworthy": things that might be useful to others, things that are already being talked about, things that are, well, public. Yes, a blog is public, so I share public ideas. That's what a blog expects—publicity.

So because a blog is a public venue, when I have "blogworthy" thoughts, I take note of them. But with private thoughts, well, I don't write those down.

How long does it take to start a habit? 7 days? 21 days? I think that we have mental habits too. And just like a bow-legged cowboy, those mental habits shape us.

Here's a generalization: I think that what we do shapes who we are. If I spend hours every day at the gym, my body will begin to change. If I spend years learning to speak Chinese, my brain will create new circuits and make new connections. If I watch a TV sitcom religiously, my sense of humor will probably mirror that for a while ("That's what she said"). What we do shapes who we are.

So then, if outlets like blogs, Facebook, and YouTube have expectations for what we think and do, are they shaping who we are?

If I make sure to remember public ideas, and care less about private thoughts, which am I more likely to continue having? Or remembering? Over time, what we do shapes who we are.

The privacy debate surrounding Facebook is a conversation worth having. But the Internet's expectation is that we will publicize our private lives. For the Internet, what's relevant and valuable is what is publishable: a status update, a blog post, a video. It is a technology that cannot compromise. It doesn’t have the will to choose. It is incapable of compromise. Publicity is in its nature. It cannot defy it's nature because it’s a program, not a person. We can resist it, but we cannot change it. To use Facebook is to publicize ourselves. It can do no other, and we cannot expect it to.

But for me, there's a bigger, deeper question. About Facebook, yes, but also blogging, YouTube, and probably the whole Internet.

The longer we use the Internet, then the more we live by it's expectations and values, and the more public our lives become. As we do, will we tend to think more publicly too? Right now, we contrast public and private, outside and inside. I'm not asking whether we'll finally throw up our hands and expose our deepest thoughts. I'm asking whether we'll simply think public thoughts and ignore private thoughts—nursing the public mind and starving the private mind. If public relevance and value are the criteria, will we come to devalue the interiority and reflection cultivated by books? Will we cultivate public minds? Will the public mind become who we are, by force of habit, and simply supplant our private selves? Will our public selves become who we truly are?

The exterior self began with language. It made leaps forward with writing. Writing has expectations like the Internet, that we'll publicize our minds. Plato saw this, even as he wrote about it. But even as he wrote, he resisted writing's expectations. The best thoughts of a philosopher can't be written down—or shouldn’t—Plato said. Reality as it is can't be adequately presented in writing. It can only be apprehended by a mind "after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing." In other words, habits shape who we become.

But Plato wrote something that struck me odd. I couldn't figure out his reasoning. He wrote: "One can be sure, if the writer is a serious man, that his book does not represent his most serious thoughts."

A serious man won't bare his soul in writing? Did Augustine ever read this? He was a serious man. The book was called "Confessions." Or what about Tolstoy's own "Confession"? If that wasn't serious, I don't know what is.

As I worked through this post, Plato's words returned to mind. His book does not represent his most serious thoughts.

I guess Plato's words made me want "serious thoughts" too good for words. I wanted privacy. But what Facebook and blogs and YouTube expect are publicity. The Internet doesn't value private thoughts, serious thoughts. Only public thoughts are worth anything. Only written words matter.
The more I write my thoughts and make them blogworthy, the more I may think like a blog. The more public our lives become on Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger, the less we think privately about anything —because, well, what's the value of thinking private thoughts?

Elsewhere:

NY Times: "I Tweet, Therefore I Am" "Some perspective on the perpetual performer’s self-consciousness. That involves trying to sort out the line between person and persona, the public and private self."

Salon.com: "The Breakup 2.0" Facebook is returning us to a pre-electronic sense of public ettiquette.

More Media Ecology Blogs

2010-07-29T07:59:00.003-05:00

I continue to comb the Internet for other bloggers who are writing about how technology is shaping the environment we live in. I posted a list about 6 months ago (here), and I've collected a few more since then. Here they are.

Andy Tedd @ CEMP: Tedd posts 2-3 times a month articles he's found relating to "creativity and innovation in the UK media industry." CEMP stands for Center for Excellence in Media Practice, "a research and innovation centre based in the Media School at Bournemouth University."

Brett Oppegaard: Oppegaard teaches at Washington State University and has a more optimistic view of technology as environment.

J Metz's Blog: Metz wrote some good pieces in May on PowerPoint presentations. He has a good grasp on how various media engage audiences differently. For example, reading is a private endeavor that disconnects an audience from the speaker and each other; asking them to read stuff breaks down the relationship.

Rough Type: This is Nicholas Carr's blog. He's been grabbing headlines in the news for his book The Shallows. His posts, for the time being, are really adding new support for the claims in his book.

Steven Berlin Johnson: Johnson wrote Everything Bad is Good for You, which I critiqued in dialogue with Postman on this blog (here). He's an optimist. It's good to hear both sides.

Text Patterns: Alan Jacobs is an author and professor. Apparently, his next book will surround issues of media ecology. He joins the ranks of media ecologists who teach English by day (a la McLuhan, Ong). He's posting articles and bits he's collecting, I'm assuming, in his research for the book.

The Technological Optimists and Pessimists

2010-07-20T08:41:00.003-05:00

(Reading Time: 6 minutes)

Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky have been sparring this year on the Internet's effect on our lives and minds. Each writer published his own book on the subject in 2010.

Each author's view is reflected in his book's title. Carr's The Shallows takes a decidedly pessimistic, or at least cautionary, view of the Internet's effects. He argues that "we're training our brains to be more adept at skimming and scanning and surfing" at the risk of losing "more attentive, solitary modes of thinking–-contemplation, reflection, introspection, and the like" (from an interview with Open Culture).

On the other side is Clay Shirky and his book, Cognitive Surplus. He sees the abundance of information as a boon for society. Cognitive surplus, Shirky explains, is the result of "cumulative free time" intersecting with "public media." Public media like the Internet "enable ordinary citizens . . . to pool that free time in pursuit of activities they like or care about." But he admits that "our cognitive surplus is only potential" (27). What really matters is what happens when we realize that potential, when we create things in our free time using public media—things like Wikipedia or ICanHasCheezburger.

So, we have Carr the pessimist and Shirky the optimist. Carr's Internet is handicapping our ability to think deeply, and Shirky's Internet is empowering us to massively collaborate. If you combine these views, you can sum everything up with a redneck proverb: "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."

But the labels "optimist" and "pessimist" gloss over a more accurate picture of the two perspectives. A better pair would be technological determinism and social constructivism. I came across this pair, reading an award-acceptance speech by a woman named Susan Douglas. She was addressing the question, "How do new things happen?" To answer it, she painted these two extremes as opposing views for answering the question. Here's how they would fit Carr and Shirky.

Technological determinism might be summed up in the McLuhanism, "We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." Douglas described McLuhan's Understanding Media as "one extended exercise in hard-core technological determinism." This is, in broad strokes, Carr's pessimistic outlook. As technologies develop, they make some things possible and other things impossible, some things more likely to happen and other things less likely. Radio for instance made broadcasting possible, but made seeing impossible. Air conditioning made summers in South Carolina more bearable but made neighbors less neighborly. Technology determines the capacities and limits dramatically, and in turn, change us and our society.

Social constructivism, I would argue, is Shirky's optimistic outlook. This view believes that people create change, not technology. It's man over machine, not machine over man as technological determinism would have it. Douglas writes, "scholars began to emphasize the evolutionary and collaborative nature of invention." The word "collaborative" sounds exactly like Shirky's pooled free time. Douglas sides more with the social constructivist outlook and cites examples like the bicycle and the radio as results of collaborative inventing. She acknowledges human agents like the press and ham radio operators, ideology and corporate-state interests, as having shaped technology and society. Social constructivism concludes that human agency is the primary factor in shaping society.

So this is a more in-depth way to classify the perspectives of Carr and Shirky. Carr the technological determinist. Shirky the social constructivist. But isn't it both? It would certainly seem so.

There is a third way to describe the positions which Carr and Shirky take. This one considers their views of history—that being macroscopic and microscopic. Douglas writes, "those who adopt a 'macro' view of history and society tend to give technology a much more causal role, while scholars doing more 'micro-level' analyses . . . tend to give technology itself minimal agency." She attributes this "middle-level theory" to Thomas Misa.

In this third set of categories, of course, Carr takes the macroscopic perspective, and Shirky the microscopic one. To some degree, their arguments and styles of writing reflect their macro and micro perspectives. Carr argues using scientific research and surveys—very macro. Shirky, though, argues using case studies and anecdotes—micro—the stories of ICanHasCheezburger, Wikipedia, and South Korea's beef protests.

I think both methods deserve scrutiny. Surveys certainly do point to broader trends, but they discount individual decisions and personal agency, which can be history changing (which Gladwell has shown). This is where Shirky's method deserves a hearing. But on the other hand, Shirky's case studies ignore the broader trajectories indicated by Carr's cited research. If case studies were meaningless, surveys would be prophets and biographies would be worthless. But neither one can establish a conclusive upper hand.

I think, thus, that both methods deserve critiques. As they are, each author's method talks past the other (just like Postman and Johnson, in my previous post). Comparing case studies and surveys is apples and oranges. We must instead critique each one in its own way, consider the underlying assumptions inherent to technological determinism and social constructivism, and then perhaps we may have some common ground.

In some sense, Carr and Shirky are covering new ground on old bicycles. They've dusted off psychology's nature-nurture debates and rode them around in a different field. Shirky is certain that nature is the primary agent, the people and content are the driving factors in creating change, in answering Susan Douglas's question, "How do new things happen?" Carr, on the other hand, advocates for the power of the environment—nurture—in effecting change, focusing on systems and structures as the determinant forces.

In truth, I think McLuhan's maxim wasn't too far off in answering Douglas's question: "We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." The change goes in both directions—not just one or the other. There is human agency and technological agency—and they are changing each other, and being changed. This is where Douglas has found herself after 3 decades of research and writing in this field: in the middle way. She calls this view “technological affordances.” I would prefer something like “socio-technic dialectic.”

In this dialectic, both Shirky and Carr have something worthwhile for readers. Shirky is proclaiming the power of human potential. Carr is warning of technology's rigid mold. We, the readers, must listen to Carr's warnings and Shirky's encouragement. We must understand how our tools are shaping us because we are the only side that has the sense to make a choice. Technology does not. We are also the only side for which the change matters. Thus, we must constantly consider the new hills of the likely and the unlikely, and the new horizons of the possible as well as the new impossibilities.

“How Do New Things Happen?” by Susan J Douglas

“Cognitive Consequences: An Conversation with Nicholas Carr” by Open Culture

“Connect the Dots” my previous post on Postman and Johnson

More links

UPDATE: Shirky has his share of detractors: Alan Jacobs and George Brock.

Connect the dots.

2010-07-13T08:26:00.005-05:00

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Twenty-five years ago, Neil Postman argued that with TV we are "amusing ourselves to death." More recently, in an Internet-age response to Postman, Steven Johnson argues that "everything bad is good for you," including video games, television, Internet, and film.

Neil Postman builds his argument by breaking down television into its component parts: photographs and the telegraph. He argues that both of these media inherently decontextualize their content.

Photographs are inherently out of context. They can be nothing else. The content is photographed so that it can be viewed in a different context at a later time. Far from picturing a figure and its background, the photo combines both into one object. The context becomes content. Instead, words provide meaningful context to explain the pictures. This is why newspaper photographs have captions.

The telegraph, TV's other component, dislocates events from geography. It takes information from a context where it is pertinent, meaningful, and relevant and removes it to a location where it has little or no import. Only rarely will this information affect the daily life of the far-off reader. Thus, primarily it is simply interesting, but it is not relevant. It's entertainment with an alias: News.

By combining these irrelevant events with those contextless images, the television is inherently a decontextualizing agent itself. Try watching the television news without sound and imagine watching it without captions. You will see how meaningless the images are by themselves. Words—spoken and written—provide the context.

Neil Postman further argues that without language, there is no logical relationship between context and content—no propositional move to help viewers make sense of the content. Thus, for Postman, the TV as a medium makes mincemeat out of sequence and logic, which rely on propositions. The television trains viewers to ignore context. In the end they are less able to connect context with content at all.

That is one side of the argument.

On the other side is Steven Johnson arguing that “everything bad is good for you.” He builds his argument by looking at video games, TV, the Internet, and film. But his argument deals almost entirely with the contents, and not the medium at all. As a result he and Postman a past each other.

Nonetheless, Johnson's book is worthwhile for at least two reasons. First, he offers some legitimate arguments about how these cultural products could be making us smarter. Secondly, his arguments work to actually support Postman’s observations more than undermine them, even though Johnson juxtaposes himself with Postman.

Johnson's primary argument rests on the increasing complexity of video games, TV, movies, and the Internet. They require more deft thinking by players, viewers, and users, he argues. And I think he's right as far as it goes. But our increasing intelligence, I believe, says less about media complexity and more about our drive to make meaning out of chaos. I'll say more about this a bit later. First let me outline some of Johnson's points.

First, Johnson analyzes the complexification (his word) of plots for various shows over the last 50 years (70). He traces plot complexity as it develops from Dragnet, through Starsky and Hutch, to Hill Street Blues, and onto The Sopranos. Basically TV shows once had a single storyline (like Dragnet) but now they have multiple plots that alternate and intertwine (like The Sopranos). This complexification, for Johnson, culminates with a 1997 episode of Seinfeld called "The Betrayal." The scenes are shown in reverse chronology (88) and are virtually incoherent without repeated viewing (repetition being a necessity for successful syndication).

Later, he discusses this complexity trend in the film industry as well. He points to movies like Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He quotes from a interview with the screenwriter for Eternal Sunshine. The writer explains how he uses non-linear storytelling to engage the viewer in a conversation (164). In this Johnson is right: Participation happens when the audience is required to "fill in" information to make the plot coherent. They are constantly connecting the dots to create closure and complete the picture. (Humor requires much the same thing.)

Let me pause here. Remember, Postman argued that TV removes content from context, creating incoherence and making sequence into mincemeat. Isn't this exactly what Johnson is describing? Non-linear storylines and inverted chronology? This is the message conforming to its medium.

Lastly, Johnson argues that this desire to participate culminates with the Internet. The Internet is quintessentially electronic—vastly networked but rarely closed or complete. We don't expect anything to be the final word on the Internet. Instead, Internet users collect the various scatterplot points. They themselves are the lines connecting the dots into a coherent picture or at least a general trend. Users become the means for closure. They are involved in making the picture, and in making it meaningful. This is what participation means.

But the images we create from the various bits we collect around the—these images still have no context, just like the photograph. There's no logical connection between the image and wherever it finds itself—say, an RSS feed. After you're done reading this blog, you'll read another, and perhaps you'll notice some connected element. But you make this connection. In this way, Internet users find themselves part of an image, one without context.

As I mentioned to earlier, Johnson's complexification theory points more to our relentless drive to make meaning. Whatever increase in intelligence we gain is incidental. With an episode like Seinfeld's "The Betrayal," movies like Eternal Sunshine, and the Internet, our lives are increasingly chaotic and unintelligible. But we are meaning-seekers and so, given these bits, we connect them together mercilessly into something that seems to make sense. We force them into coherence. We demand meaning. But our media resist meaning. They resist a seamless integration between content and context.

Johnson's complexification is simply electric media's propensity toward meaninglessness, where content and context are obliterated. TV, film, and the Internet are making mincemeat of sequence and logic. Complexification is not the result of increasing intelligence but the requirement of increasing media unintelligibility. Whatever intelligence Johnson identifies is instead humanity's relentless drive for meaning.

In the electronic age, our pursuit of meaning runs counter to our technology's tendencies. Our intelligence is in our increasingly creative ways of connecting the dots.

UPDATE: Newsweek published today a piece about the decline in childrens's creative intelligence. Like Felix Salmon, I'd be interested to hear Steven Johnson's reaction. (HT: Fourth Floor Baker)

UPDATE: Alan Jacobs speculates about how Clay Shirky will respond to the findings published in Newsweek.

Epistemology in the Written Age

2010-07-06T13:46:00.004-05:00

When I was in elementary school, and after I could write, I started collecting facts. I know, right? I collected other things too, like baseball cards, but that was normal, so it’s my fact collection that my family still gives me a hard time about. I even compiled these facts into a fact book—notebook sheets of paper, staple-bound. If I had become a Ken Jennings of sorts, I think my biographer would have recounted this as sort of harbinger for later trivia fame, but alas, the book was quite fruitless.

Upon further reflection, however, I realize that my fact book produced the exact fruit that one should expect—poor memory. Instead of retaining information, I outsourced it. Instead of recollecting, I simply did the collecting.

This period in my life was my "written age." I collected and compiled bits of historical trivia that interested me. With those ideas safely stored in writing, I promptly set about forgetting them and moved on to other important endeavors.

It was much the same in the written age of world history, between 2000 BC and 1500 AD. The same features existed there: collection, compilation, ignorance. Here are a few ways that writing shaped the way writers think and live in the world.

Ideas. In oral culture, the word had been an event to experience. In literate culture, the word started to become an object to examine. Words as objects could now be collected and compiled. Ideas and information became tangible.

Before the written age, the idea of facts simply didn't exist. The idea of ideas didn't exist. Ideas were not discrete things until their ephemeral sounds could be made into discrete objects as words.

In the same way, creating a fact book only became possible when I became literate and capable of writing. Beyond that, it became a real possibility that facts themselves could be collected. Facts didn't exist as a concept prior to writing.

Memory. In oral culture, human memory had stored every important piece of knowledge. In literate culture, many pieces of knowledge were outsourced to a written record. This freed up the mind and memory to ponder additional and new ideas. This made thinking itself a pastime, not just a vital resource to serve present existence. In this way, reflection became a new source of knowing. Experience was not the only teacher in class anymore.

Similarly, my fact book outsourced the maintenance required for what I deemed "important information." As a result, I could simply forget it. (Instead, I could devote my memory to less important minutiae.)

Connected with the outsourcing of memory are two additional developments of the written age: history and distance.

History. In oral culture, the past had been subsumed in the present. In literate culture, the past was separated from the present and became a discrete thing—history.

Writing not only recorded history but also created history by creating artifacts of language and culture. In the same way, my fact book is an artifact of my history. It records history about other things in the world and is informative in that—very limited—sense. But besides its content, it is a piece of history about me also.

The Library of Alexandria embodies this idea. Those books were artifacts of their time and records of other times. But when the Library was destroyed, the past was subsumed by the present. The past no longer existed in a conscious sense, even if its effects remained. Without writing, present circumstances were used to theorize about the past and not the other way around. With writing, history can be better explained chronologically, not in reverse.

Distance. In oral culture, the self had been immersed in action and events of the natural world. In literate culture, the self began to create distance from the natural world. This psychological distance allowed the individual to turn inward for reflection. Like words, the self was distinct and could be examined and reviewed—like objects in a mirror (and still closer than they appear).

It would be hard to exaggerate the effects of writing on the human mind. Writing changed the ways we think about the world, about ourselves, and about ourselves in the world.

The Internet is making us smarter dumber

2010-06-22T08:26:00.006-05:00

(Reading Time: 4 minutes)

Recently, I attended a church where they handed me a bulletin. On the cover was this image.

On the left are sepia-colored pages from an old 2-column Bible. The image fades right to a second image. This one is a computer screen shot of Bible text online with navigation menus on the top and "community contributions" along the side. The sermon series centered on Acts, with the theme "One God. One Story."

The implication, of course, is that no matter what format we read our Bibles in, God's work in the world is the same.

In the English language, the direction of our writing is left to right. Thus, we think of progress as moving in the same direction—left to right, top to bottom. Thus, with the old paper context on the left and the new digital context on the right, the design suggests progress, and it "feels" balanced to our sensibilities.

I say all this for two reasons. First, everyone senses that big changes are afoot. Our transition into the digital context has been disorienting, upending nearly every corner of society. These changes, we sense, have few parallels in history. Second, the print context we've lived in for centuries has predisposed us to think in certain ways. Our print world has shaped us, even if we don't realize that left to right suggests progress. In the same way, our digital disorientation will work us over.

That's partly why we already sense the changes.

The world is changing in historic ways. I do not doubt that most every generation has thought such things. So, with humble naivete, I submit that it is more true today than it has been in the last 500 years. Why? People are comparing the advent of the Internet and personal computing to none other than the printing press and the mass public that it created in the 15th and 16th centuries. The printing press brought about the Reformation, the Renaissance, religious wars, and subsequently the Enlightenment and modernism itself. The electronic age will likely effect similar shifts—not least of which is postmodernism.

These comparisons are not limited to academics or to extremists. The public seems to be accepting this idea and agreeing with it. Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows, is certainly contributing to the popular-level agreement with these historic shifts. He's certainly generating plenty of conversationon the Internet—where else?

But when I say that "the world is changing," I must amend myself. It is not the world that is changing. It is us. We are changing in historic ways, to degrees we haven't known since the advent of the printing press and all its effects. But how?

Mr Carr is bringing that question to the general public. Wall Street Journal asked it this way: "Does the Internet make you smarter or dumber?" To answer the question, Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr go head to head with articles arguing the two sides—smarter and dumber—respectively.

25 years ago, Neil Postman made the dumbing-down argument himself, suggesting that with TV we are "amusing ourselves to death." And in a more recent, Internet-age response to Postman, Steven Johnson argues that "everything bad is good for you," including video games, television, Internet, and film.

So the argument is not new, and sides have been taken and will be taken in the future. But behind this question is a tacit agreement on all sides—the electronic age is changing us. No matter whether it's making us smarter or dumber, it is making us.

This implication is not insignificant. McLuhan said, "We shape our tools, then our tools shape us." And no one in the discussion is disagreeing with him, not Shirky or Carr, not Johnson or Postman. The question is not if technology is changing us, but how it is.

Most people will surrender to technology's swift advance, not mindlessly, but certainly without a second thought. But for followers of Jesus, being like Christ is one of the definitive goals. For that reason, it is important that we not also be pressed into the mold technology is making. We are called rather to surrender to Christ and be shaped by him. This means questioning what our computers, cars, and cell phones are doing to us. And not only to us, but to others. And not only to us and others, but to the relationship that forms between us.

As we move from left to right, we must ask whether we should not be moving right to left in some cases.
________________________________________________

Nicholas Carr says the Internet is making us dumber.
Clay Shirky says the Internet is making us smarter.
Steven Johnson says increased content consumption is all that matters.

How Fiction Works in Electronic Culture

2010-06-15T09:04:00.001-05:00

(Reading Time: 8.5 minutes)

In 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse christened the American telegraph with the words, “What hath God wrought?” It was a turning point in world history. It was the introduction of electronic media and the annihilation of distance.

Just 13 years later in 1857, Gustav Flaubert published his famous novel, Madame Bovary. In the words of James Woods, author of How Fiction Works, Flaubert’s writing “decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration” (39). “It all begins with him” (39).

Wood calls Flaubert’s style “free indirect narration.” He asserts that, “There is almost no area of narration not touched by the long finger of free indirect narration” (25).

I would like to amend Wood’s claim, however, and argue that the telegraph “decisively established” free indirect style, and not Flaubert. This does not discredit Wood’s claim, or even Flaubert’s perfection of the style for fiction. I don’t doubt Wood’s expertise, which far, far outstrips my paltry reading and writing. His expertise is evident in his deft analysis of fiction’s development since the 1600s.

I only argue that the telegraph established a style, which Flaubert then put work for modern realist narration. Indeed, I accept without argument—or even the capacity to argue—that Flaubert perfected the style for fiction in a way most suitable readers in our electronic age. I don’t disagree that Flaubert was the pivotal figure who inaugurated this style.

Throughout his book, Wood identifies at least three characteristics of free indirect style: visual collection, time compression, and urbanism. Each of these is also a characteristic of the telegraph as well. Let’s take each one in turn.

Visual Collection

Wood provides us with a perfect example of Flaubert’s new free indirect style in an excerpt from Sentimental Education. Flaubert’s description, says Wood, “seems to scan the streets indifferently, like a camera” (40). But Wood rightly recognizes that “Flaubert is asserting a temporal impossibility: that the eye . . . can witness, in one visual gulp as it were, sensations and occurrences that must be happening at different speeds and at different times” (43).

In other words, one cannot see all these things happening at the same time. Even if they are happening simultaneously, an observer can only look at one, then another, then the next, and so on. For the observer, the seeing is sequential, not simultaneous. But Flaubert’s free indirect style suggests simultaneity.

Wood affirms that writers in free indirect style intend to create the sense of simultaneity. “The writer zooms in and out at will, but these details, despite their difference in focus and intensity, are pushed at us, as if by the croupier’s stick, in one single heap” (50, italics mine).

This simultaneity is better suited for the ear. As I’ve explained before, vision dissects, hearing collects. The ear hears multiple sounds simultaneously. The eye can’t look at multiple objects at the same time though.

Nonetheless, the telegraph pushes everything at us “in one single heap” like an acoustic environment does. Everything is happening concurrently. Everything is happening now. Just like free indirect style, it’s a “temporal impossibility” to process the visuals simultaneously, but the telegraph expects that we should.

Like modern electronic media, the telegraph presents content in a format that better suits the ear. There’s a reason the radio succeeded the telegraph. The ear was the better medium for all that content.

But the book is the eye’s domain. So in novels, it makes sense to describe the visuals more than the sounds or smells. However, with the advent of the telegraph in the 1800s, simultaneity began to supplant sequence.

Flaubert, I suggest, sensed this shift away from the book toward to telegraph, away from the print environment toward an electronic one, away from sequence toward simultaneity—even if he wouldn’t have said it this way. Free indirect style accommodated this shift by wedding the two. It was a hybrid between sight and sound. It was the simultaneity of the ear in the sequence of the eye. It was content fit for the eBook.

Time Compression

Wood traces these “Flaubertian innovations” to Christopher Isherwood’s writing in the 1930s. “Posing as a camera who simply records . . . . Isherwood insists on slowing down the dynamic activity, and freezing habitual occurrence” (53). In other words, Isherwood compresses together events that happen at different times, and over the course of time. He also compresses together events and objects, so that paper advertisements–”bills”—and “children in tears” are “happening” simultaneously. But they’re also frozen in time, happening perpetually.

In fact, these bills are “made temporally noisy: they flash at us suddenly, but they belong to a different time signature than the children and youths” (54). Notice that Wood uses the acoustic term “noisy” for the description. Even though everything Isherwood is describing is primarily visual, Wood uses an acoustic adjective.

But as well, it is “temporally noisy.” The bills are put up and taken down, even while the street they’re on and the church nearby are much more fixed. In the description, they’re given a similar temporality, even though “they belong to different time signatures.” In some sense, a single moment is enshrined as the fixed nature of the place for all time.

Again, this fits the nature of the telegraph, where everything is happening now. Everything is present. Peter Fallon said that in the “immediate electric simultaneity,” we “make all time now.” Whatever is now is equally substantial—whether it’s a street or a crying child. This is true of the newspaper—the telegraph’s immediate representative. The newspaper collects and recounts events relating to transportation or to suffering, places them in parallel columns, and anchors them all to a dateline.

In this way, time, events, and objects are compressed and the moment is enshrined.

Urbanism

Visual collection and time compression can be done in a novel with any sort of setting—rural, suburban, or urban. But they may be best suited for the contemporary urban environment. People have lived in cities for a long time. But not until recently has the majority of the world lived there. And not until recently have cities become such diverse places. A city thrusts upon its inhabitants a mélange of details—random, foreign, artificial, variegated.

Wood links the development of free indirect style to this increasing urbanism. Newer novels, he points out, seek to capture the miscellaneous content of the city. For this purpose, novelists needed a character who could pass along selected bits to the reader in a similarly random fashion. Thus, Flaubert introduced “the loafer, usually a young man, who walks the streets with no great urgency, seeing, looking, reflecting” (48). Now, perhaps Flaubert could have described the setting himself, and Wood admits “this figure is essentially a stand-in for the author” (48), but for whatever reason, authors created characters to do this work instead.

Wood connects this character to the urban context. “The rise of this authorial scout is intimately connected to the rise of urbanism, to the fact that huge conglomerations of mankind throw at the writer—or the designated perceiver—large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail” (48). Later, Wood argues that this variety is exactly what makes Flaubertian realism so lifelike: “detail really does hit us, especially in big cities, in a tattoo of randomness” (56).

The modern city, of course, is largely a product of modern technologies, including the telegraph and its accompanying electronic environment. The telegraph helps to sustain variety by connecting immigrants to the old world via news sources. By maintaining a connection with their old worlds, they can continue to reflect those old worlds in the city. So the Indian restaurant owner keeps up on news from India and Bollywood and broadcasts Indian television in his restaurant. The east Asian manicurist does the same in her shop. People maintain their diversity this way, and so the city does too. All of this creates the “bewilderingly various amounts of detail” that is innate to the modern city.

But Wood doesn’t simply say that our surroundings are “a tattoo of randomness.” He goes further and says that the way that we see and remember them is random. This is the difference between object and perception. Even in a largely homogenous area, we see and remember a random collection of images. Has electronic culture shaped not only what there is to see but what we notice? There could be some validity to the argument, though to what degree I don’t know.

So is free indirect style an innovation that Flaubert introduced? I trust Wood’s analysis given his expertise. My own argument doesn’t preclude his. Rather, my argument suggests that Flaubert was a man of his times and of his surroundings. His time involved the newly minted telegraph and those surroundings included the electronic environment it ushered in.

Could Flaubert have happened before the telegraph? I doubt it. With the locomotive, distance was slowly beginning to compress, and with it, time. But until the telegraph’s warp speed of information, time and space were still relevant measures. The visual collection and time compression that Flaubert captured in free indirect style really wouldn’t have made sense to readers until they’d been calibrated to it by the telegraph’s simultaneity.

Wheaton Theology Conference, Conclusion

2010-06-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

Wright has his share of detractors. But he has at least 1,100 fans. He is a prolific writer and scholar—making his scholarship accessible to any earnest reader. He goes toe-to-toe with the uberliberal Jesus Seminar but faces criticism from the NeoReformed on the other side as well. He has spoken in the House of Lords, represented the Anglican Church in meetings with the Pope at the Vatican, but he tells stories like a proud father of some of his poorest parishes in County Durham, and of attending Maundy Thursday in a parish of 60 people. He answered serious questions with one word (“Grace”) and silenced a jocular crowd with sincerest gravity (“Nothing justifies schism”). He put together what many take apart (the Kingdom and the Cross), and distinguished between what many people conflate (Jesus and the Church). He footnoted the Sermon on the Mount to make a larger point; deftly referenced the Bible’s books, chapters, and verses, then outlined their arguments and context on the fly in order to support his arguments; and quoted poetry and hymnody at length from memory. N.T. Wright is painting a picture of what the Church is saved for, and not just what it saved from. The challenging questions he’s asked about the historical Jesus might drive some to despair of Christ’s lordship over all, but Wright has seen those questions through and come out on the other side with a robust vision of who Jesus is and what he means for the Church in the 21st century.

Media Ecology: What others are talking about.

2010-06-09T08:17:00.003-05:00

A number of noteworthy items on media ecology have shown up around the Internet in recent weeks. Here are a few that have caught my interest.

In 2007, Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This year he has released a book on the same topic—The Shallows—and wrote an article for the Washington Post this week. Adam Thierer has reservations but still recommends the book. Jonah Lehrer disagrees with Carr’s claims in the book. And Alan Jacobs wishes he could.

Connected to Carr’s new book, John Dyer at Don’t Eat the Fruit asked “Are Chapter and Verse Numbers Making Us Stupid?”

Fast Company says that the human eye can detect resolutions up 300 pixels per inch. Meanwhile, the new iPhone 4’s resolution equals 326 pixels per inch, making it easier on the eye. I wonder, Does this nullfiy McLuhan’s discussion of TV as a cool medium in which the brain connects the dots to establish closure and create the image. In other words, what does this resolution mean for our brains and how we think and process the visual data?

Goodbye Gamer—Hello Blog recounts a story I had not heard about Conan O'Brien after he got ousted by NBC. Then he compares O’Brien's use of Twitter to O’Brien’s native television language, providing some interesting insights.

PowerPoint also provides for some interesting analysis. J. Michel Metz discusses how presenters misuse PowerPoint—trying to force a hot medium (PowerPoint) in to a cool context (oral presentations). Meanwhile, the New York Times recently reported a story of how PowerPoint has started reshaping military communication by "bulletizing" complex problems and oversimplifying them. This is a classic case of how the medium tends to shape the message.

Finally, two videos from the media ecology world.

Wheaton Theology Conference: Bishop Wright’s Friday Night Keynote: “Jesus and the People of God”

2010-06-03T08:00:00.005-05:00

Both nights the Bishop gave a keynote address, first on Jesus, then on Paul. In Friday evening’s keynote, Wright had a chance to outline his work on the historical Jesus. Earlier in the day, he commented that the day’s dialogue was causing him to rethink what he might say in his address. I don’t know if he decided to pursue that course, but he did seem to address a number of the critiques in one way or another.

Repeatedly, Wright expressed dismay, even exasperation, at the ways in which his theology was misconstrued. At one point, during this keynote I believe, he said something like, “The struggle with theological discourse is that people expect you to say everything you believe on a given topic every time you say anything. If you leave something out, well, then they think you don’t believe it.” This of course is an impossible task for any theologian, including Wright. I suppose Barth and Calvin recognized similar predicaments (see Church Dogmatics and Institutes of the Christian Religion). Yet, what isn’t said can sometimes be as important as what is.

In any case, Wright said a few things Friday evening. He echoed Hays’ call to see Jesus’ work as cosmic and reorienting. Hays’ said “Jesus is Lord” is a fundamental affirmation necessary from the outset for a right historiography to be possible. Similarly, Wright exhorted us that “Jesus can’t just be my savior; he must be savior of all.” Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection reorient the whole world, not just my personal spirituality.

Wright argued as well that the Gospels offer the reader insight into what Jesus was actually thinking. As I’ve studied the Synoptics, Jesus often seems inscrutable. His actions and reactions are hard to interpret. How much harder then to discern what he was thinking! Yet, Wright believes it’s possible, that the Evangelists reflect Jesus’ train of thought. Understanding what Jesus was thinking was one of Wright’s objectives as he sought out the historical Jesus, culminating in Jesus and the Victory of God.

Because he believed knowing Jesus’ thinking was possible, Wright asked some especially challenging questions: Who did Jesus believe he was? Did he struggle with questions about his vocation? Did he foresee every step of his ministry, or did he make decisions along the way? These aren’t questions I’ve ever asked about Jesus. I simply assumed that Jesus understood his divine mandate, had a clear course of action, and was following the script.

Wright believes that Jesus’ did not have ahead of time the script that led him to Calvary. This suggestion challenged my assumptions—ones I didn’t know I had. Of course, Jesus predicted his own death and resurrection (Matt 26:24; Mark 14:21; Luke 22:22), but until then what did he understand of it? When did he realize he would be crucified, and not stoned or shoved off a cliff? Earlier in his ministry, how did Jesus’ think of his mission? To think that Jesus had any questions at all radically challenges me. But those questions also give Jesus more humanity than I’d ever imagined. Do Wright’s questions diminish Jesus’ divinity? I think there is that fear. But I wonder if this fear is unfounded.

Wright also sought to expand the purpose and vision of the canonical Gospels. The Gospels are not only about Jesus, Wright argued; they are also about Jesus’ inauguration of the Kingdom of God. They are about “Israel’s God coming in his Kingdom,” that is, Jesus. Wright likened Jesus’ work here in the middle of history to Jesus’ first work of creation. Just as in Genesis God created the world through Christ the Word (John 1:2-3), so too God is recreating the world through Jesus resurrected—the second Adam. Through Jesus, God is “putting the whole world to rights,” inaugurating a new creation.

In much of evangelicalism today, talk of God’s Kingdom and talk of Jesus’ Cross inhabit separate spheres. Evangelicals—good dualists that we are—feel it necessary to emphasize one over and against the other—justice over salvation or salvation over justice. Wright, however, believes these two things are inseparable. They work together and are found together.

Finally, Wright believes that Jesus’ work in the world defines the Church’s mission today. He said, “We [the Church] are to be for the world what Jesus was for Israel. We must look at the Gospels and Acts to know what that means. Sometimes that means people die, sometime thousands get converted, or somewhere in between.”

Elsewhere:

Dr Michael Gorman provides a more in-depth review of Bishop Wright's Saturday evening lecture, "Paul and the People of God." He also has some thoughts here on Wright's Friday morning chapel and Friday evening plenary address.

Black Coffee Reflections posted his notes of Wright's Friday evening lecture.

Facebook Privacy: Exhibitionism or Electricity?

2010-06-01T08:34:00.004-05:00

(Reading Time: 5.5 minutes)
In an uncharacteristically dour post, Brett McCracken shared his thoughts on the ongoing hullabaloo surrounding Facebook's decreasing privacy. Last week, Facebook amended its settings to be clearer for users. Prior to that, the settings had called labyrinthine by some. Some saw it as a tactic to disguise Facebook's ever-ebbing privacy from its members. The amount of personal information publicly available to the Internet continued to increase, unsettling many. Additionally, last week, Facebook's CEO met with the U.S. Congress to further discuss privacy issues in the Internet age.

In his post, McCracken uses the event to discuss broader issues of privacy and exhibitionism on the Internet. But he focuses his criticism not on the Internet but upon Facebook users themselves. He essentially accuses them of being hypocrites for wanting privacy even while updating their statuses, uploading photos, and upping their thumbs about someone else's status or photo. He argues that the privacy issue is really just a "smokescreen" covering up "frightful inclinations" toward "unabashed exhibitionism"—which McCracken sees as the underlying and real issue. Those aren't scare quotes. That's what he writes.

McCracken chalks it up to an interior conflict that many users are having. In broad strokes, he assigns to large numbers of people this same internal struggle. He fleshes out his argument by recalling a 2008 documentary, "We Live in Public"—a sort of videotaped experiment about privacy. By complaining about privacy, he argues, users are obfuscating the real issue: the impulse to expose themselves and their lives. In other words, they want to keep their exhibitionist impulses hidden—private, if you will.

As I say, McCracken's curmudgeonly tone is a bit exceptional for his blog. But despite his cheerlessness, I agree that the problem here is a legitimate clash between privacy and exposure.

But is this really an internal conflict? Is this public outcry masking our own deeply private issues? Are large numbers of people really lying to themselves when they say it's a matter of privacy? Are we really all wanton exhibitionists at heart? McCracken seems to suggest so.

There may be some veracity to his analysis of the human psyche. However, I'd like to suggest an alternative way of considering the issue. It's not necessarily a contrary point of view, but I do think the issue is less interiorized than McCracken makes it out to be. It's not so much an inner conflict between two impulses. Instead, it's a conflict between two environments that surround us.

McCracken alludes to these environments near the end of his post. He writes, the documentary "correctly theorizes that the Internet is pushing culture in the direction of vast openness and away from old notions of privacy." In other words, there's a conflict between the Internet's impulse for openness on the one hand and culture's long-held values of privacy on the other. But this does not describe an interior conflict of personal impulses. No, we're witnessing colliding environments.

The Internet's "vast openness" represents one of these environments—the electronic. The "old notions of privacy" derive from the other environment—the print. Here's how.

Culture's "old notions of privacy" is the environment created by mass print culture. This environment has a 500-year history of shaping our values. Print is hyper visual, so in this environment, information caters to visual values. Because vision dissects, and because reading is a private and objectifying experience, the dominant values became separation, individualism, and distance—in other words, privacy. Further, because print mass produced, these values shaped the dominant "notions" of the public—that is, culture. In a fun paradox, we all together became a public of separate individuals. We were a new public with fierce privacy.

Cue electronic culture. Beginning with the telegraph, electronic values came into this mass public of hyper-private, uber-individual values. In the electronic environment, information caters to the ear instead of the eye. Therefore, because hearing collects, information is treated more communally and less privately—it's shared instead of horded. As a result, you see the emergence of what Seth Godin coined "tribes." You see a renewed fervor for church fellowship under the banner of "community." You see social networking sites like Facebook emerging as dominant ways to "stay connected" with your friends and family. All of these are about sharing information. Wikipedia harnesses this. Google wants to catalog it. The old hierarchies of information hording are "the Man." Thus, as Internet users put more information about themselves online, the acoustic nature of Internet has the propensity for "vast openness."

For the time being, it is indeed the "old notions of privacy" from print culture that are resisting electronic culture's propensities. Somewhere in us, we consciously want privacy and individualism. That's part of our identity and even our self-understanding. That's the result of a long history of print and visual values, with a whole culture that has been shaped by them. But now, as if suddenly, we're living in an electronic environment that is changing that. We as people are the intersection where these two environments are colliding. So in that sense it is an interiorized conflict. However, it's not a conflict of impulses but of environments. These environments collide within us. And we're jarred by the impact.

But electronic culture is the future. It's driven by business and industry of all kinds. It's even driven by print culture. It's virtually unavoidable, and it is already shaping us. It's shaping how we manage information and how we relate with others. These are the matters at the core of privacy: information and relationships. We're collecting and organizing the world's information together on the Internet. And we're growing used to finding the information we need there. Any information. Soon this will likely include personal information. There are companies that sell that "data." There are companies that buy it. Both personally and corporately there are pressures toward "vast openness." The electronic environment is shaping this and accommodating it. Soon, the "old notions of privacy" will likely be quaint and archaic. We'll find our identity in our tribes, communities, and social networks. It may be less about who we are and what we know than who we're with and what we share. Facebook is making that happen. It'll just take some getting used to.

Wheaton Theology Conference: Jeremy Begbie on Ecclesiology

2010-05-27T08:00:00.009-05:00

Jeremy Begbie presented another winsome paper discussing how N.T. Wright has become a major resource for the emerging church. (Apparently, Wright met with some of its leaders earlier in the week.) Begbie points out how strange these bedfellows are:

“Here is a movement led largely by those at the younger end of things, who are highly critical of top-down professional management, centralized organizational structure, tight hierarchical control, a heavy commitment to land and buildings, and so on. And yet here is an Anglican bishop, well past—well, let’s just say ‘past’—his youthful years, an ecclesiastical figurehead living in a castle, and no less at home in the House of Lords, working for an ancient institution—the Church of England—that owns vast expanses of land, seems pathologically bureaucratic, and moves with glacial slowness down antediluvian, ecclesiastical valleys.”

Begbie put it well, “On the face of it, this is odd.” To say the least.

More than critiquing Wright’s work, Begbie looked for commonalities between Wright’s theology and emerging ecclesiology. For one, Wright’s understanding of the people of God supports the missional perspective, which is currently driving emerging mission. Wright believes the Church is the community through which God is working to put the whole world to rights. The Church is “cosmically situated” for that renewal.

Second, Wright proposes an answer to a problem that hasn’t been addressed (or even raised), but I think the problem is undermining the North American church. That is, “What is the connection between personal salvation in Christ and the Church’s corporate work and practice?” This isn’t only a theological question; it’s a practical one because how the Church thinks of itself changes what the Church does. If a person is “once saved, always saved,” the Church is a tacked-on burden-by-peer-pressure.

Wright’s vision of the people of God begins to rectify this rift between salvation and the Church. He reconnects salvation to the Church by emphasizing what the individual is saved for and not just what s/he is saved from. Salvation incorporates the believer into a community with a united vision and purpose. It shifts the focus away from using church as a means for strengthening my personal relationship with Christ. (Reader, pay attention!)

This vision also admonishes some within the emerging movement as well. It critiques the movement’s suspicion of the church as an institution, which has led some to give up meeting in any formal way. For believers to be “in Christ” they cannot be separated from the body of Christ.

And in the end, Begbie’s best criticism was for the emerging church, not Wright. He pointed out what many know, that the emerging church is homogenous in multiple ways. As an antidote to this, Begbie believes, structures like denominational ties impose community upon diversity, bringing together people who aren’t like each other and may not like each other. These structures even force diverse groups together.

Wright’s response was a matter of emphasis more than any disagreement. He warned against conflating Jesus and the Church. The church is the body of Christ, but it is not Christ. Jesus’ work on the Cross and his resurrection work in the world is his work, not the Church’s. Believing otherwise, Wright argues, leads the church to unwarranted triumphalism or to equally unwarranted despair.

This is a great relief in my view. It relieves the Church from having to “change the world” or to “be Jesus with skin on.” Wright’s distinction between Jesus and the Church permeates his writing, but I don’t know whether it is an explicit subject of his writing. This would be a valuable contribution to understanding Wrightian theology: “What is Jesus’ relationship to the Church and what are the Church’s roles?”

Elsewhere:

Jim Vining offers a more structured, systematic outline of Begbie's paper.

TallSkinnyKiwi offers some scattered thoughts on it as well.

Brian Fulthorp at sunestauromai responds to Mike Wittmer's post and says that Wright emphasizes community redemption too much and individual salvation not enough.

Information in the Written Age (2000 BC–AD 1500)

2010-05-25T08:15:00.002-05:00

(Reading Time: 3.5 minutes)

"More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness." (Ong 77, Orality and Literacy)

So what was the Written era like? How did a burgeoning literate culture engage with the world differently than an oral culture. How did it gather and manage information?

The emergence of writing and literacy was slow because written content could not be reproduced on a large scale. Each "scripture" was reproduced by hand. So literacy's effects occurred gradually. Although the Written Age dawned around 3400 BC, the Greeks really brought it to the fore by adding vowels. Their culture proliferated by writing and demonstrates this revolutionary expansion.

So what was the nature of the Written Age at the height of its dominance? Let's return to the three questions guiding our exploration of each media age.

How is information gathered?

The ear-eye homeostasis recalibrates in the Written Age, with the eye encroaching on the ear's turf. The eye becomes a means of hearing. Sound becomes visible in alphabetic writing. In these sounds are ideas and information that only the ear had previously processed.

Still, during the Written Age, most written "text" was read aloud to a larger group. It was processed by the ears of the whole community. Because writing was a relatively cramped means of spreading a message, it was read aloud to a larger group and assimilated per the old oral methods and values.

This was a carry over from the Oral Age. It speaks to the residual dominance of oral culture and how slow the transition to writing and literacy was.

How is information managed?

Because some information was locked away inside written language, educated elites were required to unlock this information. With the slow transition, the locus of power slowly shifted from the community to the experts—that is, from where information was shared to where information was stored by a select minority. Communities relied on those who could unlock the vaults of information stored in hieroglyphs or, later, alphabets. The experts unlocked written texts by learning to read, thus becoming literate.

Because the oral cosmology regarded sounds (that is, words) as having power, it's easy to see why the authority of the written word—of scriptures—increased. Oral man already held that words as sounds were powerful, creative, ethereal forces in the world. This reverence for the word would have carried through to written representations of these sounds (what we call "words"). The written word—as symbol—would have been seen similarly as powerful and creative. But by contrast, the written word was not fleeting, it was stored. Thus, scriptures were a sort of "stored power."

Further, because word was synonymous with event, the written word was a "contained event." It was event bound up in a page. This was none other than a sort of history. Neil Postman echoes this reality. In his own book, he writes, "A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time. . . . The book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. . . . [H]istory . . . is not only a world but a living world. It is the present that is shadowy" (Amusing Ourselves to Death 136).

The written word was thus treated with reverence and awe and wonder. The writings were sacred in some sense. Thus, in writing, religious belief had a natural place to be. With the mysticism surrounding both word and god, the written word became the primary keeper for sacred knowledge. It was the birth of doctrine: Orthodoxy was defined by what was written. Religion was moved outside the community and into the inspired scriptures (Fallon).

Wheaton Theology Conference: Kevin VanHoozer on Justification and the Neo-Reformed

2010-05-20T08:00:00.010-05:00

Kevin VanHoozer sought to bridge the distance between John Piper and N.T. Wright on the matter of justification, saying that the bridge must continue to be built from both sides through dialogue. He concluded his lecture by outlining virtues that this sort of dialogue must have—among them, humility and love.

His was a winsome and humor-filled lecture. VanHoozer helped clarify the issues. Within the Hebrew lawcourt setting, the argument is over whether justification is a declaration of innocence or of covenant membership—that is, a criminal case or a civil case. Another way to say it is to call justification either “imputed righteousness” or “incorporated righteousness.” VanHoozer suggested that perhaps the lawcourt is an adoption court, where as I understand it, righteousness is imputed so that we become children. All this, really, is founded in conflicting definitions of “the righteousness of God.” Is it God’s own right standing, or is it his position as judge?

A friend who attended this conference with me suggested that the innocence v. covenant membership dispute may be a matter of individual v. corporate perspectives of the issue, which made some sense to me. Another possible way to look at it may be as debate over the process v. the outcome—that is, imputation is the process and covenant membership is the outcome. In all, the argument, to me, seems to be a matter of metaphors, but I’m certain I see only a small part of the picture, and a hazy one at that.

Wright has spent most of his career trying to understand the context of the historical Jesus. So it makes sense that, in his analysis and criticism of the Neo-Reformed, he would consider the context that Reformed theology developed out of. The Reformation, he believes, was addressing late medieval questions, which assumed certain beliefs about the cosmos. The Neo-Reformed, thus, are working in late medieval categories, which are insufficiently large for us today.

Elsewhere:

Dr Michael Gorman reviews Hoozer's, Begbie's, and Humphrey's papers in one fell swoop.

'Post-Apocalyptic' Theology quotes at length from the Reformation 21 blog's analysis of VanHoozer.

Mike Wittmer offers a two-paragraph summary of what he sees as the most valuable point that VanHoozer made.

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Information and Knowledge in Oral Culture

2010-05-19T08:04:00.006-05:00

(Reading Time: 5 minutes)

Electronic culture is a mashup of old media. In order to understand how this is the case, we need to understand the contents of the mashup. In the same way, to truly grasp hipster culture, understanding its sources is essential. Old media are contents of mashed electronic media. Thus understanding the nature of old media is the first step to understanding present media.

There are basically four eras in the history of media: oral, written, typographic, and electronic. These are broadly accepted as defining technological eras. Each has distinct features that I want to recount.

We could look at these eras from a thousands angles. I want to limit this by answering three questions about each media age. (1) How is information gathered? (2) How is information managed? (3) How does this shape epistemology? In other words, how does this shape the way people in their respective eras know and understand the world (specifically, with respect to words)?

After tracing each era, I will explain how the Electronic Age mashes up all that came before, recontextualizing it, and ultimately transforming it through fundamental shifts.

One more note: The eyes and ears are the primary senses for gathering and managing information. These senses figure prominently in the development of each era of media history. But they gather and manage information in vastly different ways. This is because sight is intrinsically divisive, while hearing is inherently collective. Vision dissects, and hearing collects (Ong, 71). These differences are fundamental in the distinctions between each era.

Okay, let's take a look at each era and its characteristics.

Oral Age (before 3400 BC)

How is information gathered?

In an oral culture, sight and hearing are unified. These two senses establish an equilibrium. Both eyes and ears gather information. These are the tools, and no further education is needed to do the gathering.

But even as information is gathered, it commingles with the imagination in creating reality. For example, understanding weather was not merely a matter of observation. Imagination was brought in like a consultant to offer an explanation for the weather—the explanation itself was an untested hypothesis. These explanations often involved gods or unseen powers (Fallon). And perhaps, in other cases, individuals did test their hypotheses, but the knowledge gleaned from them was not retained. That's because of the way that information is managed in an oral culture.

How is information managed?

Information is shared. Managing and maintaining information depends on sharing it. A community develops around the shared information. The community becomes the storehouse of the information. The politics of shared information are relatively simple because everyone depends on others for information, and all individuals have access to the same people, or information. There is an equilibrium of power, and information is not a source of power in any significant way.

Because information is shared, communal, and unrecorded, methods must be developed for remembering and recalling this information. What form do these methods take? Narrative. However, in this sort of narrative, plot and story arch don't factor in as much as they have in more recent times. Instead, the narrative has an episodic structure, as in epic poetry (Ong, 138-9). This could be likened in some ways to the episodic structure of modern TV series, many of which don't have a strong narrative arch; each episode can stand alone and even be rearranged chronologically.

How does this shape epistemology?

Word as event. Sounds, in an oral culture, inhabit the same sphere as other experiences, whether that's wind and rain, hunting animals, or building a fire. The sound world included rustling leaves, howling wolves, laughter, and words. In oral culture though, words aren't "words." They are sounds. And as sounds, words are events, as evanescent as any experience. The Hebrew word dabar means both "word" and "event" (Ong, 32).

Because words (that is, sounds) are events and experiences just like wind or sex, words are seen to have great power just like events and experiences. They are also creative and ethereal (Fallon). Thus, just like weather is attributed to gods, words have supernatural relevance. Incantations become important. As Peter Fallon said, words are used to "invoke as well as evoke."

The evanescence of word as event also means that everything is present. Of course, the past existed, but because there is no record of it, the past is subsumed in the present. It is always recounted in the present. To an oral culture everything is present. A recent National Geographic article remarks at the present-ness of the Hadza, one of the last nomadic tribes in western Africa. "They live a remarkably present-tense existence." This explains why.

Finally, all thought is presentational. "Presentational thought takes place without the intermediation of [written] words" (Fallon). Presentational thought requires no intentional education. A child acquires language without education and that is enough to grasp presentational thought. (Fallon juxtaposes "presentational thought" with "propositional thought" described later.) The link between word as (present) event and thought as presentational is probably not entirely coincidental.

Around 3400 BC, image-based writing—or ideographs—such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform began to appear. In this early writing stage, one image represented one object or concept. Words as we think of them didn't exist. It wasn't until around 2000 BC that anything like an alphabet appeared. (Chinese retains an ideographic writing system. This distinction between ideographic and alphabetic language may help explain the vast differences between East and West cultures, worldviews, and their development.)

Wheaton Theology Conference: Walsh and Keesmat on Money and Power as Jesus’ Context

2010-05-13T08:00:00.001-05:00

Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmat presented a combined lecture (audio/video), in a dialogue format, that challenged another lacuna in Wright’s work on the historical Jesus. While Wright situates Jesus as a prophet critiquing first-century Jewish nationalistic zeal, Walsh and Keesmat see a glaring omission. They argued that Jesus also offered prophetic critique for Jews’ lack of justice and treatment of the poor. In terms of money, sex, and power, Wright only focused on power—political power. But Walsh and Keesmat believe there is much to be said in the context of money and justice too. They believe this is especially relevant for Westerners today, given the recent financial crisis, where “the rich forgave the debts of the rich in ways that they wouldn’t forgive the debts of the poor.”

They spoke about the Jewish practice of Jubilee, but primarily staked their argument on a reinterpretation of Luke 19:11-27. This was a compelling reinterpretation, which shifted the story from one about the Kingdom to one about a first-century event. After all, it doesn’t begin with “the Kingdom of God is like . . .” (but see 19:11). The nobleman, they argue, doesn’t represent God, but instead represents Herod Archelaus (a story which Josephus recounts).

To support their interpretation, they argued that a 10-fold return on investment (Lk 19:16) would not have been seen positively by Jewish hearers. To them it would have alluded to corruption, much like the tax collectors’. Our own context has transformed the meaning of this story. Walsh and Keesmat believe this interpretation helps explain the violent conclusion of the story.

They contrasted “crucifixion economics” (i.e., most modern business practices) with “resurrection economics,” but said that subverting “crucifixion economics” with “resurrection economics” would likely involve painful choices, including “get[ting] the hell out of the financial market.”

Wright challenged this interpretation, saying that it shifts the story from being a parable to being a moral story. Apparently this moves it outside of Jesus’ normal practice. But Walsh and Keesmat took issue with this, arguing that it could still be defined as a parable.

The Mashup

2010-05-11T08:23:00.004-05:00

(Reading Time: 4.5 minutes)

In his latest book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields is a plagiarist. He knits together 618 texts, his own and others', everyone from Montaigne to an ad written by some copywriter. These bits form the substance of his 26 chapters, lettered A to Z. He had intended to do so without attribution, but that made his publisher nervous. So he bowed to their legal department, endnoted them all, and encourages the reader to take sharp scissors to those last few pages in the book.

Back in the 80's, musicians did something similar, but they called it "sampling." More recently, audio technicians have taken it a step further with "mashups." This is where they take two songs (or more) with similar (or identical) chord progressions and combine them into a single song. The result is a duet with Beyonce and Kurt Cobain on the same stage ("Smells like Teen Booty"). It's a disorientation.

This mashup isn't limited to music and literature though. Hipsters have taken all that and created a lifestyle around it, applying it to clothing, décor, activities, and more. A Hipster would show up on a fixed-wheel bike to a 20's throwback speakeasy wearing vintage 80s striped stockings, and a 40's-era fedora. It's like wearing a collage. One of the best examples I've seen of this disorientation is the film "Rachel Getting Married." In it, the groom sings a Neil Diamond song for his vows.

The modus operandi of mashup culture is reappropriating old culture, not creating, but recreating. All these old iconic cultural artifacts are retrieved and placed in a new context. This is art. Shields writes/quotes "Collage . . . was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century." (§44)

This may seem shallow to many. Using artifacts of popular culture in order to create meaning seems superficial, even worthless. Shields (or someone) sees it otherwise: "Every triviality is imbued with significance." (§344) A reviewer of Reality Hunger seems to agree that recontextualizing cultural products like this "makes the meaning more—not less—potent for its resilience."

I don't describe mashup culture with complete disdain though. I recognize its reality in my own life. In the past few months, I've attended a rodeo complete with buckle and cowboy hat, a German Christmas market, eaten at a Costa Rican restaurant, and seen a play based on a G. K. Chesterton novel. I drive a Japanese car, listen to Kanye West and Hector Berlioz, and attend theology conferences. These are all parts of my world—indeed, even my identity. The alert reader, certainly, will have recalled the name of this blog.

The reader will perhaps sense some personal resonance with the culture I've been describing or at least find such a culture intriguing or enlightening, even sensible on some level. There is good reason for this I think.

In part, I think mashup culture can be explained by the advent of electronic media. Indeed, electronic culture is a mashup itself. Thus, because electronic culture has so broadly and deeply involved people in the modern West, its nature as a mashup itself has made its users in its own image. "We become what we behold" (McLuhan). "We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us" (McLuhan). Mashup culture is the product of the electronic environment that we've created. (As Peter Fallon said, "A shovel changes my relationship to the ground. If I have a shovel, I'm much more likely to dig holes.")

I don't expect the mashup trend to remain relegated to the arena of pop culture. In fact, it's already translated into other areas of life, including ethics. In that context, mashup culture is referred to by another term, "pluralism." It is a worldview that many Christians object to. They strenuously argue against this disorientation, but religious and ethical pluralism is the symptom, alongside mashup culture, of deeper shifts in the way we think about the world.

These symptoms are less philosophical and more structural, more systemic. They are symptoms of how we think about the world, or more nearly, the means by which we learn and think about the world. It's not a matter of what we think about, although that's relevant, as much as it is a matter of how we collect what we think about, and the media through which we discuss it. It is, overall, the environment we've created in which to talk about the world we know.

This environment, I believe, is broadly shaped by the technologies we use to know our world. In the early 20th century, the U.S. referred to itself as "the melting pot." This is just another synonym for "mashup." Multiple technologies enabled melting pot culture to emerge: steamships, steel and concrete architecture, telegraphy. They helped people travel to America, live in close proximity, and hear news from outside cultures.

Today, the Internet has simply pushed cultural mashups to critical mass. Presently that is electronic media. But electronic media itself is a mashup. The medium has shaped us, the message. We are the message. We are the mashup.

Wheaton Theology: Marianne Meye Thompson on the Absence of John’s Gospel

2010-05-06T08:04:00.005-05:00

When the Anglican moderator introduced the next presenter, he told a story of the Bishop, who was facing a panel of interviewers for a new job. “We noticed in your writings that references to the Gospel of John are largely absent. We’re wondering if you could explain this lacuna. To this, the Bishop replied, ‘I think of John’s Gospel in much the same way I think about my wife. I love her, but I don’t understand her.’”

Marianne Meye Thompson addressed this glaring gap in Wright’s historical Jesus scholarship. The Synoptic Gospels are central characters in Jesus and the Victory of God (aka “JVG”), but John has only a bit part. (This seems to carry over, then, into Surprised by Hope where John’s Gospel might add shape to the nature of heaven and the resurrection of the dead.)

In his defense, Wright pointed out that his decision to leave out John’s Gospel was a practical one. For one, the book would’ve been 1500 pages, instead of 700. But more significantly, “Dom Crossan, in a bit of scholarly bullying, said that the first thing he would do when he received JVG would be to flip to the Scripture index to see how much I used John. If I used John too much, he would know that I wasn’t doing serious scholarship on the historical Jesus.” Perhaps this perspective seems inscrutable, but Wright situated his books, at least partially, in his conversations with the Jesus Seminar. He made these points in Wheaton’s basketball gym, so he said, “Sometimes you have to go play a team on their court with their fans if you’re going to prove that your team is actually better and can still win.” In the same way, Wright was engaging the Jesus Seminar and other liberal Jesus historians on their own turf. And it seems that he is winning in front of their own fans.

Elsewhere:

Full Hands . . . Full Heart offers another summary of the two-day conference in her brief post.

TableTalk, a Reformed magazine, devoted a whole issue to Bishop Wright's views of justification.

Technology's tendencies.

2010-05-04T13:16:00.003-05:00

(Reading Time: 5 minutes)

In the past four posts I've sought to uncover some of technology's tendencies. Technology is not neutral. Nor does it only provide benefits. Fallon said, "Shovels change the way I relate to the ground."

In this post I want to summarize the observations from those posts. So if you haven't been reading for the past month, your procrastination has paid off. Below I've outlined the insights from each post. I've also added in italics some further insights and explained or extrapolated a bit more.

Technologies extend human capacities disproportionately, expanding one or a few while leaving the rest unchanged. We constantly recalibrate to this disorientation, making it the new equilibrium, the new normal. As we drive our cars, this means that our reflexes become our greatest deficit, even though, outside a car context, they are more than sufficient in their split-second timing. Now, in a world of high-speed electronics, all human capacities are at a virtual standstill—even reflexes. They are hitchhikers thumbing a ride on the information superhighway.

These disproportions happen because . . .

Technologies redistribute strengths and weaknesses, just like a cane transfers strength away from the legs to the arms, or a car makes reflexes our greatest deficit. In this distribution, old weaknesses become new strengths, and old strengths become new weaknesses. Strangely though, those old weaknesses don't perform their original tasks, but new ones. An arm becomes a leg instead of serving as a stronger arm. Eyes become better ears instead of better eyes, and in fact usually become worse eyes for the wear. (So we accommodate them with glasses.)

But technologies don't only magnify strengths. They also magnify weaknesses, which are much harder to recognize early on. This is because technologies are invented to magnify strengths, without reference to weakness. So the strengths they magnify are more readily apparent. These are "intended consequences." Weaknesses, on the other hand are "unintended consequences."

Sometimes we sheath a weakness with a strength, like a hand inside a glove. Consider prize fighters. Boxing gloves protect them from hurting their hands, which is the intended consequence of boxing gloves. Because they accomplish this purpose, fighters hit their opponents much harder. The unintended consequence is that there are more head injuries. In other words, technologies have benefits, but they also have costs. Weaknesses or costs are all the more hidden today because high-technology is dealing with mental capacities, not physical ones. New technologies are electronic more than mechanic.

Technologies change our values. Cars demand reaction, not reflection. Technologies—both mechanical and electronic—engrain new habits, physically, mentally, spiritually, especially to the degree that we are immersed in them. As they reorient strength and weakness, different things become important, if only out of necessity. Left unchecked, these values can spread into other areas of our lives without our realizing it or intending it.

This is not restricted to cars. As I quoted earlier, "Shovels change the way we relate to the ground." With shovels, we begin to move and shape ground rather than adapting to it. We begin to enforce our wills upon it, changing it rather than cooperating with it. It's the difference between European highways which adopt the contours of their topography and American highways where every mountain and hill is made low. Think of all the rivers and streams you cross when commuting to work. The fact that you can't recall them is evidence of how technologies change our values. They change what's relevant.

Different technologies modify our bodies and values in different ways. Television can work us into a frenzy of concern but leave us powerless to act meaningfully. Cars can empower us to act but distance us from those triggers for compassion. In this way, technologies restrict us in specialized ways, but these restrictions create a silo effect where sensation and reaction are divorced from one another. This results in a divided self—one desiring to act but incapable of it, or one capable of action but having no desire to. We become an emotional basket-case or a heartless tyrant. We agitate until we are calloused by the repeated stimulation, or we are numbed by the distancing insulation. In any case, we cannot feel.

This post recalls to mind the story of Peter and John, the disciples of Jesus, going up to the Temple to pray. They pass by a crippled beggar, who calls out to them asking for money. Now if Peter and John had been driving a Honda Accord or a Hyundai Genesis, they likely would've kept driving. Peter had a heavy foot. But instead, they are on foot. They are face-to-face with this beggar.

"Look at us!" Peter gets the beggar's attention. And this beggar's is not a face on television. Peter has no number to dial or website to visit. Peter can affect this man's condition immediately. In other words, Peter can create visible change by helping this man.

This is unlike the magazine advertisement I mentioned featuring children with facial deformities. Even if I do something, the ad will remain. I see no real change, even if change actually occurs.

For Peter, this man was not a face in a magazine. Peter responds because compassion and action occur in the same medium.

Technologies divorce the media in which compassion and action occur. They also divorce the object and the subject, the giver and the receiver. This is not to say that without these technologies, we would be better people. What I'm saying is that these technologies allow us to be the bad people we really are.

Wheaton Theology Conference: Richard Hays on Wright’s Methodology

2010-04-29T08:00:00.001-05:00

Richard Hays opened the conference and set the tone for charitable criticism in a paper punctuated with good humor (audio/video). His paper served partly as a rebuttal to N.T. Wright’s stinging critique of Hays’ previous book. The book and the critique exposed a clear field of disagreement between Hays and Wright, something that caught Hays off-guard after 20–30 years of what I gathered to be affable, collegial exchange. I liked that Hays waited a year or two to formulate his rebuttal. It reflects a patience and lack of indigestion. I appreciate that (some) scholarship retains this sort of long view of sustained dialogue and premeditated critique, even stretching out over the course of years—that in a world of daily blogging, trending topics, and gut-reaction comments sections.

For Hays, the demarcation between him and Wright was their attitudes toward Karl Barth’s theology. Wright is “deeply suspicious of Barth’s postliberal theology.” But this division is more one of methodology than of conclusions. While Wright disagrees with Barth’s hermeneutical methods, Hays seemed to suggest that Wright comes back into alignment with Barth in his conclusions about who Jesus is. (In my mind, this reinforces Jesus’ singular identity and its resistance to distortion by those who delve honestly and deeply into his Person.) Wright did not speak directly about Barth; but later in the conference, with a bit of tongue-in-cheek, another speaker connected Wright’s thought to T. F. Torrance, a student of Barth’s.

Hays further critiqued Wright’s methodology, saying that Wright looked for a Jesus behind the text. He did not look at the Synoptic Gospels but instead looked through them. Instead of seeing them as pictures of Jesus, Wright sees them as windows to see Jesus. This, Hays argued, flattened the literary texture of each book’s concerns and aims. Wright disavowed this critique, arguing instead that he was recovering the Gospels as they would have been understood in their original Jewish context. Wright argued that they’ve been shrouded by creedal traditions, which have screened out Jesus’ socio-political context. Thus, the Western church has been reading its own context into the canonical Gospels, overlaying our own invented Jesus on them, and thus missing important details and shifting our interpretation out of gear.

In his conclusion, Hays argued that faith must coincide with history for a clear understanding of Jesus, as the Gospel of John works to do. Because Jesus is Lord over the whole world, Hays argued, world history and Jesus himself can only be understood when Jesus is affirmed as Lord. Recognizing this reality from the outset positions one to do right historiography (of any kind, he seemed to say). Hays seemed to suggest that Wright started without any such affirmation, although he still reached that conclusion after all. (So even if Jesus is not the Alpha, he turns out to be the Omega.)

Elsewhere:

J. R. Daniel Kirk (NT Prof, Fuller) has interacted with Hays' analysis on his blog. There's also some good discussion in the comments, including comments from at least one presenter and from other academics.

Dr. Michael J. Gorman has posted on Hays' paper and more on his blog. He also interacts in the comments at Kirk's blog above.

Vera Icona also has a post and includes Hays' masterful dialogue between Wright and Barth.

William B. Evans offers a Reformed perspective on the whole conference for the Reformation 21 blog. In his opinion, "Wright does not always handle criticism gracefully" but "really does love the Lord and genuinely strives to be biblical."

Phil Johnson at PyroManiacs and Michael F. Bird at Euangelion take issue with Brett McCracken's CT guest editorial.

Walking with a limp.

2010-04-27T10:01:00.002-05:00

(Reading Time: 4.5 minutes)

My grandfather had a bad back. It’s something I’ve inherited, and I mark it an honor despite the pain and weakness. In the last decade of his life, his back grew so disjointed that he relied heavily on a cane to walk. And when he faced long distances or experienced a flare-up, he needed a wheelchair. Once, this included a trek to a mountain lake in Colorado. Our family isn’t one to leave people behind. We transport the party—even using a wheelchair on a gravel path if necessary.

His cane eventually became second nature. We perceive it as disability and weakness. You could spot it from a good distance, along with his limp. But my grandfather’s handshake would have surprised you. His bear hugs were sudden—eye-popping and deflating in a manner of speaking. Perhaps it was as much a matter of clutching you for balance as it was an embrace. Nonetheless, he had surprising strength. His wheelchair once went backward down some stairs. He was in it. But he caught himself on the handrail with that same strong grip.

So often the disabilities are apparent, while the strengths are hidden. The weaknesses can be identified at 50 yards, but the strengths are unknown outside a handshake or an embrace. The strengths, sometimes, can’t be seen at all.

Like a cane, technologies make up for our weaknesses. In my grandfather's case, a weak leg. The cane extended the strength in his arms, making one into another leg. But in doing so, it actually strengthened his arms too. And simultaneously, it probably weakened what muscle his leg did still have. Technologies work in a similar way, extending a strength to accommodate for a weakness, but probably amplifying those strengths and weaknesses at the same time.

In other words, technologies don't only magnify strengths, but they also magnify weaknesses. New technologies are rarely discussed in terms of what weaknesses they might incur. Because most technologies involve money, mentioning weakness is bad for business. But the more probable reason is that we don't yet know what their weaknesses will be. The weaknesses created or exaggerated by technologies aren't usually apparent at first. It's not usually as straightforward as a cane. Weakness happens over time.

The way technologies draw attention to strength and downplay weakness sounds familiar. It sounds like something I do. That's how I maintain my public image.

Yet, just a few paragraphs back I said it's often our weaknesses that are most apparent and our strengths that are hidden. Now I’m contradicting myself and I wonder which it is.

Or perhaps weaknesses are apparent in the natural man, while strengths are apparent in the technological man. So does technology run counter to nature in this sense? Do men cloak themselves in their technologies while underneath they are still weak men? Does weakness cloaked in strength really make a man stronger? Doesn't it only give him the power to make bigger mistakes?

The reason technological deficits are so hard to identify anymore is that most of our technologies extend mental capacities instead of physical ones. The electronic age isn't about shovels or guns or airplanes. It's about ideas and influence and intelligence. Technologies of the electronic age extend our neurons and synapses. They magnify some capacities and make them stronger. But they also shuffle strength away from other capacities, diminishing their strength. It's not only the electronic age that's done this, but the electronic age will be more thorough in it. It happened much earlier too, most notably when sounds became letters and we started using our eyes as ears.

As we sheath ourselves in technologies, continually shifting the proportions between eyes and ears, arms and legs—as an old strength becomes a new weakness and an old weakness is armed with new power—Jacob the patriarch comes to mind. When he met God and struggled with him and won, God didn't clothe Jacob in power and strength. He gave him a limp. Jacob could no longer run. He probably needed a cane to lean on.

And it was bad timing. Jacob would, that day, face his brother, Esau, whom he had betrayed. If ever there was a day to be ready to run, it was that day. He approached fearfully. But there was no recourse. Jacob might have been limping to his own execution.

For that day, God saw fit that Jacob should be weak. Maybe because weakness is humbling. Or maybe because weakness demanded that Jacob trust in God for the outcome. Maybe in weakness, God's power is seen more clearly. Or maybe God intended that Jacob be a sitting duck, that Esau be vindicated, and that Jacob's betrayal finally be brought to justice.

Jacob didn't know.

And like Jacob, we don't know what value there might be in our weaknesses—the weaknesses we cloak with technology. Technology has the lure of eliminating weakness. Fortunate for us, with all our armor, God can still disconnect the power.

Wheaton Theology Conference, Preliminary Notes

2010-04-22T08:00:00.003-05:00

I was fortunate to be among the 1,100 attendees to the Wheaton Theology Conference again this year, “Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright.” Or, as one of my friends called it, “TheoCon 10.” Nine theologians from Britain, Canada, and the US engaged critically and charitably with NT Wright’s corpus of thought.

I didn’t realize how prolific Wright is. Numerous jokes about this were recounted throughout the conference. Here’s one:

“Someone once called Wright’s office, whose secretary answered the phone. After being informed that Bishop Wright was away writing a book, the caller said, ‘Okay, I’ll hold.’”

And another:

“A theologian [Richard Hays perhaps, or Jeremy Begbie] was visiting Oxford and had gone to the bookstore. However, the theologian noticed that Bishop Tom had no new book out that week. Concerned, the theologian phoned Wright’s office: ‘Is the Bishop in poor health?’”

Friday focused on Wright’s scholarship of the historical Jesus. Thus, much of the day’s discussion centered on Jesus and the Victory of God. Saturday shifted to discussion of Wright’s Pauline theology and especially his work on justification. Paul and justification account for Wright’s more recent writings. In all, I think three books would summarize Wright’s theology for someone wanting to get acquainted with the Bishop: The Challenge of Jesus (IVP, 1999), Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008), and Justification (IVP, 2009). Perhaps one might also include a fourth book: Paul (Fortress Press, 2005).

This conference provided for me a broad introduction to Wright’s theology. I also valued the critical engagement that the presenters offered. It tempered my enthusiasm just enough to recognize that Wright’s theology should not be swallowed uncritically. While the theologians generally agreed with Wright on the whole, they pointed out clear “lacunae” (that word was used more than once) in his works, gaps that would better round out his historical Jesus and his Third Quest (i.e., New Perspective).

Numerous other blogs have summarized their observations on the Conference. And they are engaging with it at multiple levels.

As culture: The Search compared and contrasted WTC with Together 4 the Gospel which occurred earlier in the week. He noted the theme of unity and the WASPy lack of diversity at both conferences.

As humor: Reading Isaiah recorded a few humorous moments of the conference.

As execution: Dr. Michael J. Gorman summarized the conference as big, stimulating, well organized and executed, doxological, and comprehensive. It lived up to its dialogical aims and presented the Bishop at his "rhetorical best."

As pastoral: Jim Vining summarized Wright's chapel message to Wheaton College, on the book of Ephesians.

As media: Wheaton has posted the audio and video of all the lectures, panel discussions, and keynotes from the Conference! I think it would only take you about 12 hours. What are you waiting for?

I will summarize a number of the lectures every Thursday for the next few weeks. I will also link to others blogs about those lectures from elsewhere around the Web.

Compassion and Action Divorce, citing Irreconcilable Technologies

2010-04-20T07:56:00.003-05:00

(Reading Time: 5 minutes)

Have you ever felt simply overwhelmed by the needs in the world that you're exposed to? Maybe you’ve watched some documentary about horrific suffering in a country halfway around the world and felt helpless to change it. Or maybe you’ve wondered if you’re too insensitive to care.

In one of the few magazines I still read, an ad regularly appears featuring small children with terrible facial deformities, cleft palates, mangled mouths, twisted noses. I can hardly stand the gruesome pictures. I hurry past that ad every time.

Do I lack compassion? Is there anything I could do for them? Even if I donated money, the ad wouldn't go away because the problem wouldn't disappear.

Last week, I was driving home after work. Ahead, two teenage boys were skateboarding down the middle of the road. On the sidewalk to my right, two other smaller boys were walking. As I slowed, one skateboarder veered off to my left, the other one plunged toward the sidewalk, and toward the boys. As I passed, I heard a loud thwap. I looked. The skateboarder had used his forward momentum to collide with one of the boys on the sidewalk, and he now had him in a headlock, yanking him right and left.

I braked instinctively, but there was another car behind me. I couldn't stop abruptly. At the stop sign, I turned and looked back, trying to make sense of the scene. No one was getting involved. I wondered if it was playful, but that collision had sounded too loud, that thrashing seemed too violent. I turned the corner and they disappeared behind a building.

Do I lack compassion? Is there anything I could have done? It wouldn't be the first time I passed someone in distress.

I've argued that if you want to know a person's character, let them drive you somewhere. You'll hear how they respond to drivers who cut them off, see how they angle for lane position, or perhaps drive cautiously. If you pay attention, you'll see the inner person. Or at least, there's a better chance they won't have their guard up.

Why am I saying this? Well, the insulation we feel in the car allows us to snub other drivers without having to face them. It allows drivers to respond verbally to others' inconsiderate driving. Conversely, good-natured people will be unfazed by these gestures, and they will express few themselves.

In media ecology terms, cars are extensions of our bodies, but they could also be seen as expressions of our personalities. Magazines have likened various car models and colors to various personalities, but I'm suggesting that our inner person manifests itself in the way we drive our cars. When we're face to face with someone, we suppress these urges, but the isolation of the car relieves that outside pressure. That's when the inner person begins to show.

So, when I drove by the attack in progress, or when I drive by stranded drivers, it probably reveals my own self-centeredness, or fear. I have a schedule to keep. Or I imagine that perhaps it's a set up, and they're looking for trouble. I should just mind my own business.

Okay, back to the documentaries about suffering and my habit to keep driving. Television and cars are doing different things in those scenarios. Those documentaries attempt to "raise awareness," but more honestly, they attempt to bring about compassionate action. They're looking to increase compassion.

Cars, meanwhile, actually distance me from suffering, allowing me to discard people by defacing them. I'm isolated within my car for one, but I'm also able to create distance with just a little tap on the gas. Thus, there's no time for compassion to rise at all. Compassion lies dormant. If it rises at all, responding a much higher threshold because I have to turn around. Instead, I can just drive until something else distracts me and the compassion dissipates. Why do homeless people stand at intersections and not along the highways? Intersections increase compassion and lower the threshold required for response.

A medium like television exposes viewers to horrific injustices around the world. It deepens our compassion, deepens our sensitivity. This altruism is how the Press advocates for its existence. It "raises awareness." But at the same time, television keeps us insulated and uninvolved, essentially unable to act. Of course, we can act if we choose to. We might call a number, go to a website, donate money, or even get on a plane, but we would not use the medium of television to do it. The medium that incurs compassion is not the same medium by which I would respond. Compassion and action are divorced, separated into different media. And like the recurring magazine ad, my action doesn’t effect visible change for me. The TV continues to tell me something is wrong.

Meanwhile, cars increase our power to act. But they divorce the action from compassion, or at least require a threshold of compassion so high that the two are virtually divorced. It's just like wearing gloves. Sensitivity is decreased, but power can be increased.

This is the strange paradox technology creates between power and compassion. Our technologies empower us, but they also distance us from feeling compassion. Or they heighten our sensitivity, but they do not empower us to act. They arouse us but leave us impotent, or they empower us but leave us numb.

Technology's ruts.

2010-04-13T08:15:00.003-05:00

(Reading time: 2.5 minutes)

A few years ago, I acquired a motorcycle. I didn't know how to ride it, so I took the necessary classes, got my license, and bought a helmet. The classes were minimal, so my street experience was essentially nil. I needed more time on the bike before I hit the road (or rather, I sought to avoid hitting the road).

My dad advised me, "Learn the controls—the clutch, the gear shift, the accelerator, the brakes. Run through them over and over until using them feels natural and you know where everything is instinctively." What my dad was telling me was that I needed to make the motorcycle part of me. I needed to interiorize the controls.

So I drove the bike back and forth in the parking lot, accelerating, braking. I was extending my reflexes as I rode the motorcycle around, putting grooves in the pavement. My reflexes extended to my fingertips, but they needed to extend beyond that to the throttle and the brakes. If I was going to have any chance of being safe on the road, the motorcycle had to be second nature.

Because technologies are faster than our bodies, we are forced become one with them. At their speeds, we depend solely on our intuition and react reflexively, impulsively. In those environments, we can only respond to the smallest amount of information, to the briefest analysis. There simply isn’t time to list our options or to reflect. We must react.

With as much time as we spend driving, does this pattern of reflexive thinking become a default in other parts of our lives? Do we react instead of reflect? Do we intuit instead of seeking the counsel of many? You certainly can't drive by committee, but do we seek wise counsel at all, ever? Are quick reflexes more valued than long wisdom? In cars, our reflexes might save us from disaster. But in life, following the same pattern might well plunge us off the bridge.

Cars demand reaction. Life demands reflection. Our technologies change our habits. These habits work like ruts into our lives. It’s important to recognize how these habits could erode relationships, with others or with God. And when necessary, we need to find ways to subvert those habits if they become barriers to becoming like Christ.

This doesn't mean we need to stop driving cars. Though with other technologies, drastic measures might be called for. Instead it means that for every habit that technology impresses upon us, we need to practice another habit that will plow up the soil in our hearts where the grass has died (Jeremiah 4:3). Discerning these habits can take a while, but ignoring them can cost much more. And if we're unwilling to do the work of subverting technology's ruts, we may find ourselves on a bridge without a rail.

Distorted bodies.

2010-04-06T08:50:00.002-05:00

(Reading Time: 3 minutes)

Remember RoboCop? Encasing the human body in a robotic sheath has been dreamed of in various ways for a long time. Magnifying the length of our stride, the strength of our biceps, and the surface tension of our skin has been reimagined over and over. Most recently, the robots in Avatar and IronMan have done it again. These robots take their cues from the human body in design. What we see is a man magnified a hundredfold in his capabilities. He can go farther, higher, deeper, and faster than ever before.

RoboCop took it a step further though. The story was, he was a cop who’d been shot and killed in the line of duty. But they immortalized him by salvaging his brain and part of his body (well, at least his jaw and mouth). In sci-fi speak, the term is "cyborg."

More to reality than RoboCop is something like the car. It is a modern machine controlled from within. The wheels extend the feet. The car body extends our own, a sort of skin beyond our skin. Inside, we have temperature control, much like our bodies have. Additionally, cars extend our arms by their capacity to hold and carry people and objects in the seats and trunk. In the end, cars expand the capacity to transport, protect, and carry more than our bodies ever could, and faster than our bodies ever could. We become men and women with powerful arms, legs, feet, hands, and skin—much like we’ve dreamed of doing with robots.

Yet, as we magnify parts of our body through our cars, our bodies are thrown out of proportion. Our eyes are not magnified to the same degree that our feet or our hands are. Technologies have never holistically magnified all human capacities equally. Instead, they magnified a select capacity, leaving the rest unchanged. Our bodies become distorted.

Unlike RoboCop’s capacities for vision and reaction, cars do not magnify human sight or reflexes. In fact, our reflexes resist being magnified. (At least for the time being.) As a result the ratio of our speed-to-reaction-time changes. Our reflexes were once the fastest of our capacities. Now our reflexes are among our greatest deficiencies in a car. They haven’t maintained proportion to our arms or legs.

This was likely an unforeseen consequence of the car. Technology has magnified our capacities, but it’s also magnified our mistakes. Transportation safety boards around the world have increased margins for error with things like medians and abutments, wider lanes and shoulders, grooved pavement and brighter signage. All these things serve to accommodate our poor reflexes.

In other words, we can only cover for our slow reflexes with a complement of additional technologies, but we can’t actually magnify our reflexes to any significant degree. Reflexes become our greatest deficit in proportion to the magnifications our technologies have achieved. Our split-second reaction time just isn’t fast enough.

Thus, with the automobile, we’ve magnified select capacities. We’ve altered the proportions of our bodies, and in so doing, created weaknesses out of what were once our greatest strengths. That’s how technologies work. They don’t magnify everything proportionally. They extend one or two capacities and leave us looking like Popeye.

C.S. Lewis, on cars and newspapers.

2010-03-23T14:15:00.001-05:00

On Cars:

"I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measure distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed “infinite riches” in what would have been to motorists “a little room.” The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there."

Surprised by Joy, 156-7

On Newspapers:

". . . I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand."

Surprised by Joy, 159

Video Venues: Appealing to Churches

2010-03-16T08:17:00.002-05:00

(Reading Time: 5 ½ minutes)

In the past decade the multi-site method has transformed church growth practices. Multi-site is evangelistically driven, expanding the “seeker-centric” purpose adopted by most church leaders. Multi-site is also an attempt to resolve problems created by technology, specifically capacity issues in both the auditorium and the parking lot—both challenges created by commuter culture (i.e., the car).

Multi-site has a number of variations. A popular one is referred to as the “video venue.” The central feature of video venues is, of course, video. This is generally a live feed from another church campus. Sometimes it’s prerecorded, but usually within the same day.

Using video has certain advantages, but it’s also going to change church practice. Video has its benefits and its costs. The benefits are usually emphasized when discussing new technology. But counting the costs before setting out (Luke 14:28) can help guide our decisions. I’m not talking about money. These costs do not necessarily mean we shouldn’t use video, but we should know what we’re agreeing to. Here are some of them.

The central feature of the video venue is, of course, the visual. This feature is what’s driving multi-site. Audio recording has been possible for much longer, so why didn’t multisite start there? It lacked the visual. Even if the message is more important than the medium, the fact is that the visual is the appeal.

In light of this visual emphasis, a preacher who stands at his podium reading prepared notes will not thrive inside the video environment. Of course, he wouldn’t have thrived on a stage either. In some sense the video is an extension of the stage, just as television and movies extend dramatic theater. Thus, much of what we say about video, we might also say about a stage-centered church.

Before amplification, the stage expected broad gestures and big voices. Not so with video venues. Video probably tends toward more subtlety: facial expressions and vocal inflections. These dissonant requirements may frustrate preachers who record their stage messages, but they may never understand why. As for those watching video screens, subtlety requires having the intuition to grasp these expressions and inflections. In other words, video expects its viewers to have intuitive understanding. Does the church expect this too?

Another result of the visual emphasis is that keeping the sermon visually interesting is vital. This can mean using props or splicing videos or a thousand other creative options. It may mean going on location to record sermons portions. The video venue relieves the preacher of stage context, restrictions, and confinement. It frees the preacher to move about the world. Forget the stage. The audience can be transported anywhere now, so why work to keep their attention using artificial limitations?

The real question is, “How long will the audience bear the same visual backdrop?” Even stage-centered churches now create stage sets for each series, but stages do not prioritize the visual to this degree. Because the stage is a fixed space, it can change only so much. It is restricted by its physical dimensions and its singular location. With the heightened visual expectation and the freedom from spatial limits, the video “relieves” the preacher to do more than he can on stage. Of course, this will require more time. And it will require more decisions since the options cannot be exhausted.

From facial expressions to far-flung landscapes, the video venue will begin to change the proportions of the sermon. A preacher seeking to meet to his audience’s needs will experience intense pressure to create visual appeal. Without a clear set of values in this regard or intentional subversion of these expectations, the extremes will become the norms to keep the audience’s attention and attendance.

The value of visual appeal, if left unchecked, will become the top priority. Without anticipating it, this will blindside church leaders after it’s too late. It will do so subtly, but not suddenly. The change will be gradual. As a result, the veracity of the message will be of secondary importance. Instead, its authority will rise and fall with the quality of the visual. It will be difficult to curtail the increasing importance of visual appeal.

With visual appeal taking a primary place in validating the message, Jesus’ words to Thomas come to mind. “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.” Are Jesus’ words valid to the video venue?

Paul says that “faith comes by hearing,” (Rom 10:17), so what happens when sight displaces sound as the primary context for evaluating those matters?

When Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear should listen and understand,” (Luke 13:43) was he contextualizing to an aural/oral culture? To us in the visual age, would he instead have said “he who has eyes”? But then why did he say what he said to Thomas?

What are we to make of the common belief that Jesus was not a sight to behold (Isa 53:2) when we churches create environments where authority may rise and fall based on visual appeal?

If we are to be imitators of God (Eph 5:1), and he does not judge based on appearance (1 Sam 16:7; cf. Isa 11:3), then is the video venue creating an environment that makes it more difficult to obey that directive? Of course, visual appeal is not introducing a foreign impulse into the hearts of people. It’s exacerbating what’s already there, pressing hard into a weakness we already know. Technology has a way of magnifying our weaknesses.

All of this will not happen today nor tomorrow. It will be a challenge the church faces in a decade or two, but they may not even understand its causes then. The effects of new technology tend to blend into the background over time. Jim Tomberlin, a multisite expert, predicts that "By the end of this decade every midsize town and major city in America will have a multi-site church." It's past the tipping point. What unintended consequences will video venues have?

Church leaders will likely shrug at this post. They’ll face these consequences when they arrive, or they will be someone else’s problems by then. I don’t doubt that leaders have plenty of other more pressing concerns. But if they’re considering multisite, these are some questions worth asking and some dynamics worth pondering.

Action as symbol.

2010-03-09T08:21:00.003-06:00

(Reading Time: >5 mins.)

My grandmother is strong-minded. She has opinions about a lot of things and will certainly tell you them. (I realize, now, she sounds like someone else I know. I’m certain that you, gracious reader, had already seen the resemblance.) Among her opinions are those about TV preachers. She calls one of them “that twirp in Houston.” She’s a deeply faithful woman who spent more than a decade of her life in central Africa—a place that still wets her eyes and tightens her voice after 40 years. So I do not discount her conclusion, but I am a bit less resolute. I laughed at her description. I’ve seen his show.

I visited my grandmother last fall. While I was there she pulled out this small, hermetically sealed packet. Inside was a translucent, papery substance about the size of a dime. It almost looked like two layers of skin split apart, but it was crumbly. There was another packet inside the first with a purplish powder. My grandmother said she’d been watching T.D. Jakes. He’d offered television viewers these communion packets, so she decided to call and get one, to see what it was all about. This is what came. It was sterile in this clear, crunchy, sealed plastic.

I don’t doubt though that God’s grace might be so humble.

Sunday at church, during the offering, the video screens featured footage from last week’s baptism service. Over 40 people were baptized. It humbled me again. It reminded me not to judge my megachurch too resolutely. God’s grace is humble enough to slip in the back of the auditorium amid the lights and sound and on-stage charisma. It is I who is often too proud.

I was moved as I watched these baptisms. My spirit was humbled, lifted up in praise.

And I liked Jesus more for it too. I liked Jesus because he established baptism as a practice for the church. And the Eucharist the same way. Both of these are embodied symbols, full of physical involvement.

I liked Jesus because throughout the centuries these two sacraments would remain unchanged. He knew that for us to embrace baptism and communion would require action, involvement, undiluted by anything intermediate. He knew they could not be changed without being altered at the same time. They remain unchanged despite our cultural trends and our tech-friendly world. They resist alteration, and thus maintain their integrity, involving us with Christ, his death and resurrection.

But if somehow baptism and communion could become virtual transactions, I think their meaning would be lost. I think that’s why Jesus embodied them in a way that couldn’t be extracted and virtualized.

Even with Jakes’ sad communion packets, television viewers would eat and be involved. It could not be done online with a few clicks, even if it could be done at a distance. It could not be participated in any mediated way. It was not virtual, but actual, even if the packets were sealed and delivered with the help of high technologies.

I guess this sort of involvement is what I’ve been trying to argue for with my writings here about electronic tithing. There’s something lost when we replace the physical involvement with electronic transactions—something meaningful.

No, dropping cash in the church coffers (i.e., tithing) doesn’t have the same status as baptism or communion. But I wonder if electronic giving doesn’t also lose the meaning of giving. It’s changed. Has it been altered too?

Fortunately, our choice of methods is not a matter of right or wrong. Even if it was, God’s grace is big enough for our well-meaning sins. Still, I think it’s important to consider the unintended consequences our choices create. If we are careless, we may one day find ourselves without recourse, at turning points where drastic measures must be taken to recover something vital. God’s grace will meet us there as well.

One morning, week before last, I awoke at 4 a.m. This matter of passing the plate was on my mind. I was replaying the event over and over—receiving the plate from the person on my left and then turning to give it to the person of my right. I was imagining the act embodied.

Lying there in bed, I saw it anew—as an embodied symbol, this action of receiving and giving. It wasn’t just about “passing” the plate. Instead, it symbolized the united activity of the body of Christ, one giving to another who in turn gives to another. We receive from one, then turn and give to one. We experience grace as it flows, not to us but through us. But something else happens too, as we take part in this serving. The plate is filled. A little is added each time. As each of us gives a small amount, our efforts are multiplied, the whole grows. Even the people had enough faith to pass the loaves and fishes on to the next person.

Still, there’s more. As these plates are passed, they move from those most honored, who have seats near the stage, to those of least honor, who arrived late, who were cautious curious, or who feared they wouldn’t be welcomed. The lowest places are lifted up. Those farthest away are given much. It’s the inversion created by grace. It’s grace so humble that it might come by mail in a sealed packet from a TV preacher.

"I'm just kidding," Places like Detroit, and Movies like Avatar

2010-03-02T08:12:00.004-06:00

In the spirit created by the telegraph, here are a number of unrelated items. If you'd like, suggest a unifying thread.

Lance Strate had some interesting things to say about the popular claim that 93% of communication is "nonverbal."

I appreciate the discussion of "I'm just kidding" as metacommunication. The fact that we use words to communicate on multiple levels intrigues me. Earnestness and irony are part of this proximity to open communication.

In the last paragraph of this excerpt, he mentions paragraphing, which is something I wrote about recently.

The Mehrabian myth about nonverbal communication only makes sense when you include an understanding of metacommunication. To use a verbal example, if I call you a jerk, that's communication, that's content. If I then say, I'm just kidding, that's a verbal form of metacommunication, telling you something about how to interpret the content, and also about how we relate to each other (on a friendly basis). If I just said I'm just kidding, though, without the content, it would have no meaning, it only works when it modifies a content-level message. This is the point that the video makes when it shows you the cartoon guy talking without hearing his words.

But we should also recall that animals communicate entirely through nonverbal communication. If a strange dog growls at you and bares his teeth, there are no words, but I think you get the message. Babies also communicate in this way. When a baby cries, we know that he or she wants something, and then we proceed to see if it's milk, or a diaper change, or just some company.

This all relates, in media ecology terms, to McLuhan's saying that the medium is the message. Animals and babies communicate through the medium of nonverbal communication, and so do we as adults. The medium of language is also the content of speech, and writing (McLuhan noted that the content of a medium includes another medium), the medium of spoken language is the content of our bodies (produced by the human body), and in this sense our words are powerfully influenced by the nonverbal.

The technologizing of the word means that other nonverbal factors play a part as well, such as the choice of writing system, use of spaces between words, line breaks, paragraphing, punctuation marks, capitalization, handwriting, typeface and font, type of writing surface, other physical characteristics of the print medium, and other display, transmission, and storage characteristics of the electronic medium. This aspect of the nonverbal goes far beyond the issue of snazzy PowerPoints, or dramatic delivery.

Elsewhere, I read Andy Crouch's Culture Making. He describes the city "the place where culture reaches critical mass" (116). As such, one could argue that cities are the most visible expression of our humanity. (Detroit? Yikes.)

Lance Strate talks about cities as "container technologies." Thus, they are environments. He goes onto to liken computers to cities. I wrote more about that back in January.

Over at Ask the Mediatrician, Dr Michael Rich talks about how our brains process 3D images, as in the recent case of Avatar. Apparently 3D is more involving than two dimensions--no surprise there.

Or, if you don't care about any of that, then you can watch this.

Why made-for-TV movies bomb.

2010-02-23T08:00:00.000-06:00

(Reading Time: 5 minutes)

In a recent Newsweek, the magazine conducted a roundtable discussion of select Oscar contenders. Among them was Woody Harrelson and Morgan Freeman. I remember Harrelson from his breakout role in Cheers. In the long-running TV show, he played a bartender by the same name.

At one point, Newsweek turned to Harrelson and asked him about the residue of TV fame: “Woody, your first big role was playing a character named Woody on Cheers. Were you frustrated that people couldn’t separate the real you and the onscreen you?”

Before Harrelson could answer, Freeman chimed in: “Television is notorious for that.” This coming from a veteran movie star.

Freeman’s observation is one that McLuhan predicted. McLuhan cited TV stars who’d experienced the same thing and argued that the phenomenon was a consequence of TV’s pixilated nature. By contrast, movie stars do not experience this same confusion. Just look at TMZ or any grocery store tabloid. TV stars are rarely harassed by the paparazzi. It’s usually only movie stars.

Of this, McLuhan writes, movie buffs “wanted to see their favorites [i.e., actors] as they were in real life, not as they were in their film roles. The fans of the cool TV medium wanted to see their star in role, whereas the movie fans want the real thing.”

In other words, for movies we want to meet the actors, but for TV we want to meet the characters. I want to meet Tom Hanks himself, not Forrest Gump, but I’d rather meet Jim Halpert than John Krasinski. Why is this?

McLuhan argues that it’s because of the differences between TV and movies. TV is a cool, involving medium. Movies are a hot, distancing medium. Why? TV involves you by requiring you to connect the pixels in your brain to complete the picture (the same way you do with a constellation or a connect-the-dots picture). It’s a gestalt principle. Movies, on the other hand, are seamless images shot on film. And as such, they are a closed system, requiring no completion. Movies shun the viewer’s involvement in this way. McLuhan points out, “whereas a glossy photo the size of the TV screen would show a dozen faces in adequate detail, a dozen faces on the TV screen are only a blur.”

When I read Freeman’s comment to my girlfriend, the reason seemed perfectly clear to her. “TV stars are characters in of ongoing stories. The episodes continue week to week.” In our minds, they live their character lives between episodes. By contrast, movies are closed systems, complete stories. They are not episodic, with lives happening between episodes. Viewers do not typically supply material for the lives of movie characters. It’s all provided, it’s a complete story. There’s no “episodic gap” where we as viewers can get involved and insert our own stories about the characters’ lives between episodes we watch.

She seemed to be on to something. There seemed be a parallel. Each episode is like a TV pixel. The viewer does the work of filling in the space between each pixel, between each episode. They fill in the gap, connect the dots, complete the story. The TV medium shapes the form that TV shows ultimately take. Episodic television imitates the nature of the TV as a medium.

Of course, there are all sorts of hybrids with things like DVDs or The Simpsons Movie. But think about the bonus features that come on a DVD, or even just the menu screen: It’s interactive. Deleted scenes give the viewer an opportunity to insert them into the movie’s storyline by creating a gap and filling it in. Film commentary or behind-the-scenes footage and interviews do similar things, and involve the viewer that way. This helps movies make the jump to the small screen.

But what about movie trilogies like Indiana Jones or a series like James Bond? Of course, these were probably influenced by TV culture. But isn’t it interesting that one of the recent James Bond films picks up the story less than 20 minutes after the previous film? Movies don’t like gaps. It’s not innate to the medium. Instead, they want to fill the viewer in on what’s happened since the last film. Movies want to be seamless.

On the other end, a TV show like Lost has propelled itself to cult status by harnessing TV’s bias toward involvement. People are so involved that they gather in groups between episodes to fill in context and connect the dots. Just like the TV medium, viewers are closing the story itself. No doubt, detective plots like Law and Order are perfect for TV. They involve the reader in completing the image and also the story. Certain types of stories are best told on TV, and others are best told in movies.

This is why made-for-TV movies are generally terrible. They’re closed systems on an open platform. TV wants to involve the viewer, but movies want to keep the viewer at bay. Viewers are confused by the conflicting messages of made-for-tv movies. The medium is sending that message.

In both movies and TV, viewers like closure and continuity. But their expectations are shaped by the nature of the media. Movies provide it in a single sitting because the medium expects it. TV involves the viewer (and makes him a co-creator) in closing and continuing the storyline because the medium expects it. Movies and TV have developed their environments to meet these expectations. It’s why we don’t go to the movies to watch episodes of a movie. It’s why our couches are arranged to allow TV to contribute to the conversation.

Now if it would stop dominating the conversation and listen for a second. Maybe between pixels.

Passing the plate: Why it can't be electronic.

2010-02-16T08:23:00.001-06:00

(Reading Time: 5.5 minutes)

A number of weeks back, John Dyer blogged about electronic tithing, asking some important questions each of us needs to consider before we dive in. It’s something I’ve evaluated periodically, but his post got me thinking about it again. For my part, I’ve been sending an automatic payment to my church for the past 2+ years now. When I started doing this, my desire was to give faithfully. Before that, I would give only sporadically and forget regularly. Tithing electronically, I decided, solved this problem.

Now, I suppose that when we give our tithes, there’s a right heart to give with and a wrong one. For me, every week at church, when we pray for the offering and then pass the plates down each row, I am reminded of my tithing. This, in my mind, was a sufficient sense of giving, of sacrifice. I assume God’s desires certain emotions and attitudes to accompany my giving. I suppose they should be something akin to humility—recognizing my dependence on God, or his worthiness of my offering. Or perhaps it would be cheerfulness—appreciating God’s provision (or the 90% I get to keep for myself).

Of course, us sinners, we instead often feel a sense of pride when we put money in the plate. For me, though, as I’ve tithed electronically, I’d say my attitude would best be described as a sense of vindication. I have this imaginary conversation with the person who sees me pass the plate without ever putting anything in it. It’s subtle, not strong. It’s fleeting too. In my head, I’m saying something like, “Don’t judge me. I tithe for every paycheck. Yeah, you don’t see it, but I do it. It’s done in secret. You know, I’m probably more faithful than you are, so don’t judge me.” I know. I know. This is pride. It just feels more nuanced, a special form of it. Vindicated.

I guess you’re my priest today. This is my confessional.

Electronic tithing is a 21st-century issue for the Church and for the believer. I don’t think it’s one we can be dogmatic about either. How you give is more important than how you give. What I mean is, when it comes to tithing, the spirit is more important than the method. I don’t think you’d disagree.

But this weekend, I began to wonder if I’m wrong about that, and if maybe the method does matter. Here’s why.

At church this weekend, when the offering plate came by, while I sat mumbling to myself and feeling vindicated, another question occurred to me: “What if everyone tithed electronically?” This didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. It dawned on me. If we did, there would be no need to pray for the offering or pass the plate. It would certainly save us time. That’s hard to pass up when efficiency is such a hot commodity. And I’ve heard pastors encourage it because it promotes faithfulness. That’s sounds like an anointing of electronic tithing to me if I’ve ever heard one. But I think that the church would also atrophy a little bit if we stopped passing the plate.

Call me old fashioned for wanting to keep the collection plate going around. Maybe I am. But imagine this with me. What would happen? Preaching about tithing would seem quite unnecessary. Why would the pastor ever need to talk about tithing? Even if the church was in dire straits, it would feel irrelevant to churchgoers because there would be no visible practice in giving, no ongoing reminder. If it wasn’t part of the church’s experience gathered together, we’d lose sight of it. Perhaps not at first, but eventually. Hearing the pastor pray for the offering or preach about tithing would seem disconnected from the church’s life together. Once it’s disconnected from our experience, it grows irrelevant.

Besides this growing irrelevance, I wonder too whether we’d stop being shaped by our participation in it. In other words, I think there’s something to the physicality of passing the plate. In the same way that an athlete’s muscles and mind are honed when s/he competes, we are changed when we participate in the action. We become actively engaged when we pass the plate. We become participants. In the North American church, where churchgoers are increasingly passive audience members, passing the plate subverts the trend.

If this small act seems insignificant in the life of the church and the shaping of the Body, consider the Israelites. In the Bible, bringing an offering was a significant act for God’s people. It was prescribed by God. Obviously God saw great significance in the physical act of giving an offering. He devoted a whole book to how it should be done. We should not overlook this. Unfortunately, the only time we talk about the book of Leviticus is when we joke about having given up reading through the Bible because of it. Surely we would be fools to believe that God wasted his breath when he inspired the writer of Leviticus.

The consequences of this trend toward electronic giving has not been fully thought through. If we eventually only tithe electronically, we will be divorced from the act of tithing even more than we already are. We will have pulled up our own roots, which connected us to God’s people from ancient times. We will have castrated tithing’s power to shape us into the people of God. If a church is more concerned with meeting its budget than shaping its people, then by all means they can knock themselves out electronically.

Passing the plate is a visual reminder to the church every week. It reminds us that everything we have is God’s. It’s also a physical reminder. In embodying it, we become participants and engage in a bodily obedience to God. That sounds familiar to me. Jesus too embodied himself, made the invisible God into someone tangible; and in obedience to God he endured the Cross scorning its shame for the joy set before him. He didn’t choose to make a digital, invisible transaction. We echo this embodied sacrifice when we drop cash in the coffers. And I’m thinking twice about my own decision not to.