“Do you own technology or does technology own you?”

I’m really looking forward to reading the new book (The Next Story) by my friend Tim Challies. Below is a trailer produced by his publisher for the book. It is available for pre-order through Amazon.com and Westminster.

Look for an interview with Tim here at The Ascent to Truth in the next month or so.

(watch)

Via John Dyer: The Table Project is one of many new socially oriented web platforms being released for churches… Take a look at the promo video and then let’s discuss. (watch)

I say – doomed. Noble, but doomed. That’s not to say that nobody will sign up, but within a relatively short period they’ll lose interest. Some will continue to use it but most will acknowledge the fact that nobody wants another social network they feel obligated to check in with every day, especially when they’d be checking in with the same people they’re already checking in with every day on Facebook.

It would be like talking to the same person on two phones, one on each ear. “Let’s talk about life in general in the left one, but churchy, intimate stuff on the right one, ok?” It’s like a “secular” song recut with Christian lyrics – we all know which song it is and we insert the original words over your substitutes and, eventually, we acknowledge that the original is better than your recut and we go back to listening to it. It’s like asking the person you meet you for coffee every week to meet with you twice every week because there’s a new Christian coffee shop in town.

In the same way, we all know that The Table Project is Facebook with a different face. We can also see that it might be better than Facebook in a some ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an existing song with Christianized lyrics (a good/bad example of that here).

Conclusions
I’d like to be wrong on this one because it does look like a noble idea. So I, like John Dyer, wish them the best, but I’ll wager two things:

(1) Nobody who is already on Facebook will abandon Facebook for this so it will consume more of their time, not less.

More time online means less time offline, which means a decrease in face-to-face interaction. The creators of The Table admit as much in a blog post on their site (read): “To be clear, we are not trying to compete with or replace Facebook. We act as a compliment to global networks such as Facebook.” In other words, “We want people to keep social networking elsewhere but also on our site.” How is that compatible with the goal of increasing local human connection?

(2) Very few people who are not currently engaged in social media will suddenly become engaged just because there is a Christian alternative.

The whole idea of The Table is to cause a transference of behavior from an existing network to another network. It needs to leverage people’s behavior on Facebook and to exploit their familiarity with it in order to engage them in the same behavior in a “safer” space. The problem is that if you’re not already assimilated into social media culture, The Table is every bit as foreign and foreboding as Facebook.

What do you think? Are my conclusions plausible or ridiculous?

I recently, finally, got an iPhone. After the first few days I am experiencing the same things I did when I got my first MacBook. I knew it was going to be good, but I didn’t know it was going to be THIS good.

What an amazing device. My experience with Apple products can be summed up in the following phrase: BELIEVE THE HYPE. I came to Apple products as a skeptic, and I am now a believer.

I know, I know… I sound like I should be wearing this t-shirt:

Not quite… I’m not religiously devoted to Apple products, but their quality and innovation do inspire admiration. So unless you are a gamer, you need a Mac.

On March 25-26 2011 I’ll be in Seattle at BibleTech 2011, a conference about – you guessed it – “Bible” and “Technology” (You are so s-m-r-t). I’ll be live-blogging for the 8Bit Network.

From the BibleTech website:

This two-day conference is designed for publishers, programmers, webmasters, educators, bloggers and anyone interested in using technology to improve Bible study.

BibleTech 2011 is an opportunity to meet others who share your interests and hear from industry leaders. If your passion is the Bible and technology, this conference is for you!

I’ll also be writing a special feature for Christian Week after the event and  (of course) I’m hoping to check out Mars Hill Church while I’m there.

A few months ago Tim Challies wrote about the accidental and very public release of search data by AOL. By looking at the chronologically organized search terms of a given user, it was easy to see what was going on in their lives. One user’s search began with “shipping pets” and progressed to “broken bones in cat” and then finally “mucous blood diarreah in cat”.

Well, now you know that kitty’s story…

Other user searches revealed sadder stories. Among the many searches of one user, a timeline revealed the following terms (among many):

body fat calliper 2006-03-01 18:54:10
curb morning sickness 2006-03-05 08:53:23
he doesn’t want the baby 2006-03-11 03:52:01
online degrees theology 2006-03-11 04:05:24
online christian colleges 2006-03-11 04:13:33
physician search 2006-03-23 10:20:04
what is yoga 2006-03-29 12:17:31
hindu religion 2006-03-29 12:18:56
yoga and hindu 2006-03-29 12:32:05
is yoga alligned with christianity 2006-03-29 12:33:18
yoga and christianity 2006-03-29 12:33:42
abortion clinics charlotte nc 2006-04-17 11:00:02
can christians be forgiven for abortion 2006-04-17 21:14:19
abortion clinic charlotte 2006-04-18 15:14:03
symptoms of miscarriage 2006-04-18 16:14:07
abortion clinic chsrlotte nc 2006-04-18 21:45:39
engagement gifts 2006-04-20 16:57:04
engagement rings 2006-04-20 16:58:37
high risk abortions 2006-04-20 17:53:49
wedding gown styles 2006-04-26 19:37:34
recover after miscarriage 2006-05-22 18:17:53
marry your live-in 2006-05-27 07:25:45

Challies concludes with these insightful paragraphs:

“This AOL data raised an endless number of questions and concerns. Primarily, it brought awareness to the fact that search engines know you better than you might like.

We may like to think that our searches are just searches, harmless and pointless inquiries known only to us. But the fact is that search engines keep all of that data and they keep it forever.

This all raises two great questions in my mind. First, would I be prepared to have my searches revealed to the public? There are searches that may be private but not immoral—I may be looking for information on a medical condition, for example. That information might be embarrassing but I could remain unashamed before God.

But there may also be searches that are private precisely because they are immoral. In such case shame would be the proper reaction. The second question is whether I would be prepared to address my search history with God. What would I say to him if he were to ask me about the things I have gone looking for online. Could I tell him with confidence that what I have sought is an indication of a heart that is aligned with his purposes? Or would I have to confess that my searches point to a heart that is drawn to what is evil and perverse?”

How are you doing with those two questions?

1. Would I be prepared to have my searches revealed to the public?

2. Would I be prepared to address my search history with God?

From TED, inventor Pranav Mistry talks about the thrilling potential of SixthSense technology. Watch this incredible demonstration of the integration of information into everyday objects.

(watch)

Pranav Mistry: “I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world. And it will help us, actually, not be machines sitting in front of other machines.”

Getting information from the internet, someone said, is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. The flow of information is overwhelming and it’s more than anyone can possibly consume. Appropriate use of the internet then involves trying to get what you need from the torrent of information without getting completely soaked.

The mass of information can be equal blessing and curse. If you haven’t experienced this yet, you probably will since, as novelist William Gibson once said, “There’s a big cinder block stuck on the technology accelerator pedal, and we’re only gonna go faster and faster, never stopping.”

There are others who believe, like humorist Andy Rooney that, “Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.” I do not share this opinion.

I am, admittedly, a voracious user of the internet, and I work hard at getting the drink I need from the hydrant without being knocked over by the force of the pressure. I don’t always succeed…

I am a gatherer, a collector, of items both digital and physical. As the number of information sources increases, so does my desire to monitor them. I am constantly attempting to consume more than I can contain or process.

Futurist and philosopher John Naisbitt, in his book MindSet, proposes a solution to this scenario: when you begin to monitor something new, you must drop something else. To continue to monitor an ever-increasing pool of information is to create, in Naisbitt’s words, “a graveyard of information”– stuff we collect but never use.

My own information graveyard is pretty big. I have tried to apply Naisbitt’s principle to both my physical and digital life, ruthlessly discarding or selling off things I keep but never use. But in the digital realm there is less incentive to do this since storage costs almost nothing and takes up no more physical space when it’s 250 gigabytes of information than when it’s one.

The questions I keep asking myself are: What am I afraid I’m going to miss? What am I going to miss? What am I really going to miss?

Did you get into the Facebook numbers game a couple of weeks back? I know, I know, most of you HATE anything that contains the “Facebook” and “game” word combination. I usually do too, but something about this one intrigued me. I saw that some of the youth from my church were taking part so I checked it out to see what they were doing.

Here’s how it works. You post this as your status for everyone to see:

So you put that out there, then privately someone sends you three numbers, then you go back and update your status, using those three numbers to address the status update to them. Shortly after I posted that the first set of numbers arrived and I responded:

I wrote a bit about it the day I first saw it and I mentioned that I thought it had some potential for good; I had no idea how much potential it really had.

Opportunities
Random numbers followed personally addressed comments seems annoying to some; to others, it provides an opportunity to see what kinds of relationships they’ve cultivated with other people they’re connected to. At best, this little game allows someone to ask for a review of his or her influence on someone else. (At worst – like most things on Facebook, it becomes annoying silliness that clogs your news feed)

To me, the type of potential feedback this might provide sounds something like what Paul calls a “letter of recommendation” in 2 Corinthians 3:

…do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

This, as I saw it, was an opportunity to measure in a small way my faithfulness to God’s mission by observing the people I’ve had the opportunity to influence. This was a two-way operation, so I made myself available for feedback and asked for feedback from others.

Results
On the giving end, I was able to encourage, build up, and speak into the lives of 30 or so people. On the receiving end, I got some much-needed encouragement during a tough week.

One friend said:

“You have made me question many of the things I once thought I was convinced about concerning my faith and have steered me in a direction that allows me to see things from a perspective I never really wanted to but that has helped shape me for the better.

Your friendship has challenged me and helped me to see my need to consider views that run contrary to mine. I’m grateful that God has allowed this unlikely friendship to exist.”

It’s good to know where you stand with someone. Especially as men, it is often seems difficult to say these sorts of things face to face. Saying it on Facebook is not a cowardly way out. The opposite – saying something negative in public space – is cowardly because it deters face-to-face meeting. Used positively, this “game” increases the potential for more in-person conversation and makes greater depth of conversation and relationship a likely outcome.

Another friend said:

You have challenged me to seriously think about the things that I believe. You have a very sharp mind, and knowing you has sharpened mine. When I often beat myself about my slow start to education, I think about you, and how I don’t think you’re old at all, and it makes me feel better. :)

Also, I don’t hate Catholics anymore because of you.

Saying something like the above is, you have to admit, not something you usually blurt out in the middle of a conversation. Maybe we should more often but usually we don’t. It can be awkward both to give such a comment and to receive one.

Conclusion
At the end of it all it was a fruitful exercise in encouragement. There’s something about people needing a good word and you making yourself available to give them one that is appealing. Through these interactions I learned what kind of impression I’m leaving as I go about my teaching, preaching and general conversations.

Thirty people or so took me up on the offer and I returned the request to a few of them too. And I don’t count a minute of it as time wasted. Go and give it a try! I’m willing to go another few rounds if you are.

My profile is here . Friend me, message me, and lets get to building each other up.

***Warning: This documentary contains some graphic war footage***

This is a fairly sympathetic portrait overall, but informative and thought provoking nonetheless. I’m not much of a news junkie but the Wikileaks story has been impossible to ignore for the last while. Tell me what you think in the comments section.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C-vmlh48xY

Other opinions:

Ezra Levant:
Wikileaks journalism: not wiki, not leaks, not journalism

Doug Wilson:
Rounding Into the Straight

Tim Challies:
A Wikileaks Society

Christopher Hitchens:
The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda.

“Apple Knowledge Navigator”, a 1987 concept video produced by Apple:

It’s the iPad with interactive intelligence. We’re not quite there yet but close.

Maybe you don’t need more encouragement to be neurotic about the English language… but here it is anyway: (watch)

Seriously, marketing department… this was the best you could do?!?! I’m sure you could have come up with a better “jeandea”.

Previous FAILs
Child Safety FAIL
Website Name FAIL

Saw this in the lobby of an apartment of some friends:

Other FAILs:

Website Name FAIL

Watching geeks converse, watching/listening to anyone who knows more than I do about something I’m interested in fascinates me.

Last week I posted something from Wired Magazine about how the internet is rewiring our brains. In this Wired Magazine article, tech writers Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink discuss how the internet may also be benefiting society by creating opportunities to spend the cognitive surplus – in other words, a surplus of time to think – which has been on the increase since post-war times.

Shirky: People have had lots of free time for as long as there’s been the industrialized world. But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television.

How much time? Well, someone born in 1960 has watched (on average) about 50,000 hours of television, which amounts to more than five and a half solid years.

With that as context, Pink marvels that, “A few days ago, I was talking with someone about Wikipedia. And the guy shook his head dismissively and said about the people who contribute to it: ‘Where do they get the time?’”

Old biases come into play. Television and telephone are legitimate ways to spend time; the internet and social media are not. We forget that TV and telephone were once also new mediums that were frowned upon by those who didn’t grow up in their shadows.

Shirky gives some insight about how television has shaped our culture:

Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about.

Just how much time has been spent on open-source endeavors like Wikipedia? “We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example,” says Shirky, “using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor.” 100 million hours. It seems like a lot doesn’t it? It seems like enough to justify questions like “Where do people find the time?” and “Don’t people have better things to do?”

It seems like it until you consider that Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year. 200. Billion. Hours. That means that all the time that people have contributed towards Wikipedia is less than one-tenth of 1% of the total worldwide cognitive surplus.

The moral of the story? There are a few, and you should definitely take the time to read Shirky and Pink’s conversation in it’s entirety here, but the next time someone asks you if you saw the latest episode of some banal TV-show-du-jour, a suitable reply might be, “Who has the time? I was busy spending MY cognitive surplus productively.”

WIRED magazine recently published an outstanding article by Nicholas Carr regarding how our use of the internet is rewiring our brains.

“The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.”

Read the rest of it here.

What kind of men?!?!?! Shat terd men!

If this organization wants to do a presentation at your church make sure you add an extra bathroom…

Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return to the site the following month.

Judging Twitter retention by how many people “visit the site” is like judging Dominoes Pizza by how many people dine-in.

It’s true that like blogging and any other social media, a lot of people try it and the many quickly give up. And with the explosive growth recently you have to expect a good number of window shoppers.

But Twitter is unique in how open it is, allowing users to interact from unlimited points of access without ever having to go to Twitter.com.

So judging retention by how many people are regularly visiting a site works for Facebook and MySpace (because you have to go there to do anything), it’s kind of apples-to-oranges to apply the same criteria to Twitter.

Follow me on Twitter here.

Marshall McLuhan began his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, with the following:

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.”

For nearly a half-century now, students of media have been contemplating the repercussions of McLuhan’s statement.

In Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith, Shane Hipps attempts to apply McLuhan’s thinking to the realm of faith.  Hipps seems doubly qualified to tackle the content – a former ad exec for Porsche, Hipps turned his back on the lucrative career, entered seminary, and became a Mennonite Pastor.

Hipps writes with excellent pacing, clear prose, and a good bit of humor. Unfortunately, in this book at least, his focus is lacking at times and nonexistent at others. Entire chapters (although they are short) are devoted to issues that have no relation to the topic of the book at all. The first ten chapters, in fact, are a fascinating application of McLuhan’s ideas. After that, however, more chapters than not add nothing to the stated purpose of the book: awareness of the effects of technology on our faith.

In chapter 11 Hipps turns his focus to social media – in his terms “virtual community” – which he claims “inoculates people against the desire to be physically present with others in real social networks”.  It’s at this point that Hipps loses me. He attacks everything from blogs to instant messaging to Facebook and relegates them to the status of cotton candy.

While his concerns are well heeded, in some portions of the book Hipps fails at being a student of modern media and instead becomes a reactionary critic against it.

He describes the digital shorthand of today’s teens as “an invisibility cloak to adult eyes” and “a deliberate teen encryption method,” claiming that, “those who learn it become like medieval scribes, hoarding scrolls containing sacred information.” I can barely resist responding with “LOL.”

“Slang,” McLuhan says in the introduction to Understanding Media, “offers an immediate index to changing perception… The student of media will not only value slang as a guide to changing perception, but he will also study media as bringing about new perceptual habits.”

The main idea of the chapter is that internet technology reverses the order of familial authority by granting young people “startling and unprecedented freedom…the digital space is a land without supervision.” This is proven, but his analysis and prescriptions are flawed. To parents struggling to balance digital boundaries with their simultaneous desire avoid their kids being left out or left behind, Hipps reminds them that “digital space is the most anemic form of social interaction available,” before saying, “maybe being left out of this is a good thing.”

While I take no issue with boundaries and parental authority, if parents are actually capable of keeping their kids entirely free of the damaging effects of social media, surely then a more nuanced and moderate approach is also possible. Similar prescriptions were no doubt giving with the advent of other now common technologies; the automobile for example enabled young adults (and their passengers) to easily travel further from parental supervision than previously possible, where they could get into who-knows-what kind of trouble.

While I sympathize with Hipps’ concerns over the separating effects of technology, I cannot take the view that these technologies should be shunned. I cannot endorse the view – nor do I find if verifiable from personal experience – that these technologies intrinsically “inoculate(s) people against the desire to be physically present with others in real social networks”.

Digital community can be an enhancement and a supplement to flesh-and-blood community. Hipps has taken the tack of using the habits of the immoderate and abusive to prove that the thing abused is to blame – the same strategy that in previous generations failed at eliminating the moderate consumption of alcohol among Christians.

Sin is still at the root of all abuse and addiction, and faith in Christ and reliance on the Holy Spirit is still the only solution.  Creating an awareness of this fact is what will steer both adults and young adults into appropriate and moderate use of their digital resources.