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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

***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.

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.

Below is the full text of my second column published in print and online at Christian Week. Enjoy. Comments welcome.

Technology has convinced us we can’t sing

By Michael Krahn  |  ChristianWeek Columnist

We are commanded to sing! The word “sing” appears more than 100 times in Scripture, often as a command. Since God commands it, it is safe to say He gives the necessary abilities. The gift of song is universal.

I encounter more and more people who tell me they cannot sing. They do not lack the desire, but they have come to believe they lack the ability. This low self-image is one reason fewer people than ever are participating in congregational singing. But by what standard are they judging themselves?

To answer that question we need a short lesson in technology. Like Google, which started out as a company name but has now also become an action word, two other words have crossed the linguistic threshold to become verbs. With Photoshop, one can “improve” photos by removing skin imperfections or inches from waistlines. Using Autotune one can “improve” sound by removing imperfections in recorded audio. We google people; we photoshop images; we autotune sounds.

Why the lesson in audio and graphics technology?

I see a parallel between the lack of confidence in singing and the world of visual images in tabloid and fashion magazines. Photoshopped images create unrealistic body expectations. In the modern era of music autotuned recordings give us unrealistically perfect sounds.

The end goal of both processes is the same: the appearance of perfection. Whether we are trying to look as perfect as a picture we’ve seen or sound as perfect as a recording we’ve heard, we are destined to fail.

All of this has led to a crisis of confidence. Autotuned recordings have robbed average singers of confidence in the quality of their voices.

The problem is not that there are people with uncommonly attractive bodies or uncommonly strong voices; the problem is that we have bought into the idea that unless we possess perfection in body and voice we are in the minority and should keep ourselves both hidden and unheard. This idea is an affront to human dignity and to God, who created our bodies and our voices in all their glorious variety.

Inside the Church and out we are faced with a culture of idolatry. TV shows that encourage idolization do not help. In the age of American Idol, people expect to be judged. And judges abound.

Defy people’s expectations and refuse to accept their insistence that they can’t sing. Except in extremely rare cases, this is a lie they’ve been convinced to believe. If people struggle with singing, it’s probably because they’ve been deprived of opportunity and an encouraging place to try.

Within the gathering of a congregation there should be plenty of opportunity.

I led a hymn-sing a few weeks ago. There may have been a few people among the 100 or so who lacked perfect pitch. Did it matter? Not really. The people there understood the purpose of our coming together. It was not to impress anyone or to win a competition, and it was certainly not to sit in judgment on someone else’s abilities.

It was to remember God’s goodness and to praise Him with our voices. Stripped of pretense and unbound by the desire to judge and be judged, a beautiful sound rose in the room. We were singing in four parts, but we were singing as one.

Never pass up an opportunity to talk about the purpose of congregational singing, which is not for the few with microphones to dominate, but for the congregation to sing. This may seem obvious to you, and it will seem obvious to them once they’ve thought about it, but it will take persistent attention to break down the barrier.

In the video below you’re led through the labyrinth of online services that is Google. At first it seems like any other business profile, but about halfway through the music turns from business-profile-cheery to conspiracy-tinged-ominous…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfV6RzE30

Google… wants to now where you are… what you buy… what you’re reading…. Google wants to own the cables and the electricity to power them.

Google bigshot Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Oh my! How dare he suggest that? He must be off his rocker. Is he trying to start some brave new cult of transparency and integrity?

Drumroll Please…

But that’s not all… Are you ready to hear the great atrocity Google is positioning itself to commit? What nefarious surprise is this predatory beast waiting to spring upon us – the innocent, unsuspecting public? Here it is: “Google wants to know who you are, where you are, and what you like so it can target ads at you!”

Advertising. A-HA!

Shocked? Dismayed? Ready to run for shelter?

No? Me neither.

This, the narrator would have us believe, is the worst possible way that Google can violate its own “Don’t Be Evil” ethos.

What is laugh-out-loud funny about this argument is that the worst-case scenario for the Google apocalypse is “God help us all, they want to try to sell us things we like!”

Apparently we are a society of servile consumers, void of the ability to choose, with a capacity for fear-stricken compliance unmatched except in a beaten dog.

I can hardly imagine a worse fear: Please don’t show me an advertisement! Whatever you show me, I’ll have to buy! Please, please, please – STOP! I have no control!

“Completely spineless, robot-brained consumers…”

If you are such a completely spineless, robot-brained consumer, you shouldn’t even own a computer, let alone access the internet on it. It’s doubtful you should even be permitted to carry a wallet without supervision.

In the end we are told to be concerned about this Darth Vader evil of a company not because it is attempting to index every movement of humanity for some immoral purpose, but because it might find out enough about us to show us advertising about products we’ll probably like – and be too weak to resist.

Advertising is effective, no doubt, but are you comfortable being cast as a drone that, with involuntary compulsion, buys whatever is put before you?

The last time I checked, before advertising succeeds it requires a willing participant to remove his wallet from his pocket, find some form payment, and fork it over to a merchant.

Here’s a video that makes a better case for concern:

All salient points. He understands the medium. Take a look:

NT Wright on Blogging/Social Media from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.

Wright’s one big worry: isolationism. Sure it is human beings typing and human beings responding, but there is something about human communication that involves bodies and faces, and however good you are as a writer, you can’t engage in all those ways. We are in danger of dehumanizing our communication.

I like that he uses the terms “gnostic dream”and “cultural masturbation” to describe the sort of self-stimulation that seems so prevalent in in the (bad neologism alert) “blogosphere”.  There is nothing more bland in the blog world than the comments section a blog with an exceedingly narrow audience.

Wright’s General Rule of Blogging:
For every hour you spend on a blog, you ought to spend at least that amount of time with real, touchable, hug-able human beings.

Amen.

After reading this post by John Dyer (Pornography Is Not Just About Lust: The Emotional Power of Images) I wanted to restate from an earlier post how we handle the issue at our house.

It’s difficult to estimate the ill effects online pornography has had on the spiritual well-being of millions of men and a growing number of women.

While pornography was once primarily available only behind the counter of select stores, it is now accessible anywhere and any time via an internet connection. At the same time, the cost to obtain it has dwindled to almost nothing.

In the online world the temptation is constant. In pre-internet terms, the temptation is roughly equivalent to being locked in a private room with millions of pornographic magazines. Resistance is not futile, but constant exposure to the temptation will eventually yield a failure to resist.

No wise person would intentionally put themselves into such a situation, but if you have an unmonitored or unfiltered internet connection in your home this is essentially what you are exposing yourself to, which is why no one should be ashamed to have a content monitor or filter installed on their internet access point.

SET IT UP NOW!

In our home we use free filtering called “K9 Web Protection“. With this software you can either set it to monitor all traffic or  restrict access to all websites except those that you approve. Here’s how we set it up:

1. We set it to “Monitor all traffic” which means it keeps a log of every site anyone on the computer visits

2. We make it password protected and only Anne Marie knows the password

That’s it!

Setting it up this way means that she can see every site I’ve visited which has an excellent deterrent effect when a questionable link or picture presents itself for clicking. You will find yourself asking at least these two questions: Do I want my wife to know that I looked this? Do I want her to see what I’m about to look at?

Guys: have the talk with your wife or a close friend. Today can be a fresh start.

Ladies: offer to set this up with your husband without asking questions about previous history. 

Visit http://www1.k9webprotection.com/ to download the free software.

With proper reflection I believe that we can see what the next story will be, much like McLuhan saw what the next story would be.  A personal example – and boy do I wish I had acted on this! Early on in the MP3 revolution I sat for a few hours and thought and wrote about some implications I was foreseeing.

Long story short, this was during the age when CD sales were boss as far as determining what was at the top of the music culture mindset. I saw that in the future recording artists would no longer be able to rely on CD sales as the main source of revenue and that recorded music would have little to no value other than as a promotional item to get people out to see the live show.

Principals:
1. Don’t try to strictly control and regulate what can be digitized BECAUSE what can be digitized can be copied and shared.  Use that as a given in your strategy and marketing

2. Capitalize on what cannot be digitized. In this case, the live experience of a concert

At the end of my analysis my recommendation was: invest in concert promotion and live experience companies. I saw it start to happen and when I kicked myself is when Madonna signed a contract – not with a “record company” at the center, but with a live event company at the center. Music sales are no longer the main source of revenue for bands that thrive. I should have taken my own advice.

Alright, that kind of turned into a long (and self-congratulatory) example but it illustrates my point: thoughtful reflection can lead us to accurate and trustworthy insights – to see what The Next Story might be.

(BTW – Bob Lesetz is a very clear – although sometimes belligerent – thinker on these issues and from my reading of him is McLuhan-esque in his ability to see what’s ahead in the music industry.)

McLuhan also said that “Humans are the sex organs of the machine world”. Meaning? Technologies do not self-replicate – a computer does not cozy up to a cell phone and produce a little iPhone (or similar pocket-sized computer).  The actions/desires of human being determine the course on new technology.

To the non-believer with purely capitalist motives, this means creating/inventing technology that will excite the consumerist passions of the masses. Profit trumps morals, so if you can turn a buck by piping porn into a cell phone then, hey, why not? If you can get people paying to simultaneously watch a movie, talk on their cell phones, IM their friends and Tweet about it – GO FOR IT! What do I care about the psychic effect of so much triviality and distraction?

To the believer it means understanding the principles of media and acting accordingly – not with the motive of profit (at least not without consideration of other factors) but with the motive of bringing glory to God

 In the scope of things, Neil Postman is the layman’s version, or an interpreter of Marshall McLuhan. He is more than that of course – he’s a applicator and a developer too, but I don’t think the average person would connect with McLuhan and therein lies the value of Postman. I originally found Postman because his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” was mentioned and footnoted in so many of the books I was reading. As I began to read more media books I saw the common reference to McLuhan in them and that’s how I discovered him.

Rather than looking to others who were making observations about media, McLuhan’s looked to people like the French philosopher and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and English painter and author Wyndham Lewis for insights into technology. He did so, I believe, because he believed that, as Wyndham Lewis said:

“The artist is involved in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present.”

Considering the accuracy of the observations and predictions he made based on this belief, maybe we would be wise to seek the same sources in our own era.

I’m not sure who else could be considered on McLuhan’s level as a master in the sense of seeing and saying what had previously gone unseen and unsaid. Jacques Ellul perhaps?

It is still widely believed by the avant guard of media arts (students and profs mostly) that McLuhan’s work has barely begun to be appreciated and recognized for what it is. Some use the word “prophet”; in many cases I think that’s appropriate. I guess if you believe as I do that McLuhan was way ahead of his time in thinking and analysis, then you might want to spend some time pleading this case.

This is too strong a metaphor, but you could see McLuhan as source material (scripture) and most others as analysis of source material (commentary)…. and you could make an interesting parallel to how many books we read that are not the Bible compared to how little actual Bible we read… but that’s a bit off-topic.

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.