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Technology

“Educating the 21st Century Pastor: The Intersection of Theology and Technology” – Jonathan Smith

Mar 28th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
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Jonathan Smith is the Dean of Distance Education at Knox Theological Seminary.

This session was the highlight of the conference for me. Why? Well, because finally someone was getting into Marshall McLuhan and I could tell he had a good understanding of McLuhan’s thinking (link).

He also understood the digital native/digital immigrant paradigm. The next generation of students will be full digital natives and will have an even greater expectation of connectivity as part of their education. They will expect access to classes from phones and other devices. Discussions, lectures, and study notes will all be online.

Smith also spent time on McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects (link) and then applied this process of evaluation to the technologies he was endorsing. This involves asking the following questions of any new medium or technology we are considering:

1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

This was an excellent session that laid out the fundamentals of media and technology study and then applied them to many of the ideas that were presented at BibleTech.

“The Challenge of Sign Languages” Neil Rees

Mar 28th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
2 comments

Neil Rees of the British & Foreign Bible Society delivered and interesting session about deafness, sign language and Bible translation.

Anyone who has a level of hearing loss is considered deaf and this represents about 2% of any population. This 2% is further categorized into those who are “post-lingually deaf” (those who become deaf after having learned to speak) and “pre-lingually deaf” (those who were already deaf before they learned to speak).

Because our writing system is largely based on speaking and since our alphabet is primarily phonetic, people who are pre-lingually deaf have difficulty learning to read as well. Books, subtitles and lip-reading are really only good for the post-lingually deaf.

There are two types of languages in the world: spoken languages and sign languages (SLs). Sign languages too have their own lexicon, grammar and dialects. Just as there is no universal spoken language, there is no universal sign language. So, for example, there are differences between American and British sign language and in Ireland it is divided into male and female forms.

Ethnologue.com estimates that there are about 400-500 different forms of sign language in the world yet there is only one complete sign language Bible.

Modern technologies are expanding the possibilities for more sign language Bible translations. These include video streaming, avatar systems, cartoons, and animation systems.

Mr. Rees implored the room of developers and other technologists to consider the deaf when developing new Bible translation and study tools.

“What Does the Bible Say about Technology?” Matthew C. Clarke

Mar 28th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
4 comments

I’m in Seattle at a conference called BibleTech. The next several posts will be summaries of some of the sessions I attended

Matthew Clarke is an Australian with a passion for both technology and scripture. His session gave us an overview of references to technology in scripture.

He began by defining technology as tools and techniques and extensions of human abilities. Working with that definition we can find many references in scripture to weapons and wheels and parchment, and of course the many forms of technology that would have been necessary to build the tower of Babel.

We are probably more dependent on technology than at any other point in history, and this can cause us to rely more on technology than on God. Clarke reminded us that God’s purposes can be achieved without the use of technology. God can simply speak things into being. Technology can lead us to assume that we have no need for God and then it becomes idolatry.

Clarke reminded us that “Being a technologist is a holy calling… Modern technologists need to recognize that the abilities we use to serve God were given by God in the first place.”

This was a helpful to have early in the schedule of a Bible and technology conference and gave us a good theological base for the later sessions.

The Table Project – Yet Another (Doomed) Social Network

Feb 7th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
6 comments

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?

BibleTech 2011

Jan 28th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
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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.

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SixthSense Technology

Jan 26th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
1 comment

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.”

A Torrent of Information

Jan 26th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
4 comments

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…

Graveyards of Information

Jan 25th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
8 comments

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?

Technology as a Form of Wealth

Jan 4th, 2011
by Michael Krahn.
6 comments

Doug Wilson in a post called “Calvinism, Eschatology, and the New Media“:

Jesus is the Lord of history, and this is why we don’t need to be afraid of Twitter. Or Facebook. Or teenagers typing with their thumbs. Jesus is the Lord of history, which is why we don’t need to worry about Google making us stupid.

***

We also need to remember that the eschatological future promised by the prophet Isaiah, and the future that was shaped by industrial revolution, and will continue to be shaped by the digital revolution, are the same future. I don’t believe in an invisible spiritual future, shaped by the Holy Spirit, full of sweetness and light, and an actual historical future shaped by the Devil, Halliburton, the Illuminati, and Murphy’s law. The world, this world, is presently going where Jesus is taking it.

***

And so here is my central thesis: technology in all its forms is a type of wealth. The Bible contains no warnings about technology as such, but is crammed with warnings about the bias of wealth. Which way does wealth set us up? The Bible says that the wealthy are tempted to hubris, self-sufficiency, lack of concern for the poor, oppression, and the rest of that sorry lot. Wealth is a good thing, but it brings temptations. A lot of wealth is a lot of a good thing, but it brings with it a lot of temptations.

***

A good example of an erudite worrier would be Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death. But for every book like that, given the propensity of Calvinists to worry needlessly, I would recommend that you read three like Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies, and Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Why should Calvinists worry? In the collision between the sovereignty of Jesus in history, and the influence of sin in history, sin is the certain loser.

Now some will object that the books I have cited are not by believers. And I will point out in reply that things have gotten really bad when unbelievers can see what Jesus is doing more accurately than believers can. When unbelievers by common grace are reading history right side up, why should we reject that in favor of believers who are reading their Bible upside down?

***

The constant and ever present temptation in the Church is the gnostic temptation of locating sin in the stuff, sin in the matter, sin in the wealth, sin in the technology . . . instead of locating it where it belongs, in the heart of man.

Read the rest here.

“WikiRebels” – The Wikileaks Documentary

Dec 17th, 2010
by Michael Krahn.
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***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.

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