To blog or not to blog? That is the question

Ah, of all the days to choose to [maybe] start blogging again. . .  Not that anyone is reading; I'm just writing.

This day is my day off. And this very moment I am meant to be finishing up a paper for class #9 out of 10 (not including my "Major Project") in my Doctor of Ministry course at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

The paper is about Technology and the Church. More specifically, it deals with the online world as both savior and seducer.

In my year-and-a-half hiatus from blogging, which had turned into slogging and then into fogging, I never looked to see if anyone was still coming here to contemplate with me. Frankly, I didn't care. And that's not altogether a bad thing, as I mention in my paper.

After chatting a little about how some friends of mine in the same church, but at either end of the political spectrum, let rip on Facebook for and against Governor Scott Walker, I write this:

On a personal level, I well understand the ease with which one can act differently online. I have a blog, The Contemplative Kiwi, from which I am currently taking an extended sabbatical. I found it so tempting to present a certain side of myself—a side that I wanted people to like and enjoy and think highly of. 

Selectivity and “putting forward your best self” is, to some extent, part of everyday life. After all, we brush our teeth in the morning, try to dress in colors that match and do our best to avoid breaking wind in public. But the internet, it seems at times, invites the creation of “another self” to market to the world and to even hide behind. 

For Christians, this should come as no great surprise; we’ve been hiding behind things since the Garden. In Genesis 2, Adam and Eve first hid behind fig leaves. Finding they were still exposed to the gaze of a holy God, Adam ducked behind Eve and deflected blame and attention to her rather than confront the reality of his true self in all of its ugly brokenness. Eve followed his lead and hid figuratively behind the serpent. 

We’re still in the Garden, only it’s an electronic one now. Psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude says it all in his superb book, Virtually You: The Dangerous  Powers of the E-Personality: “…while the internet is a force for good in many arenas, it also has the power to interfere with our home lives, our romantic relationships, our careers, our parenting abilities—and our very concept of who we are” (Aboujauode 2011, 10). 

“The way we see and evaluate ourselves is changing as a function of new personality traits born and nurtured in the virtual world. These include an exaggerated sense of our abilities, a superior attitude toward others, a new moral code that we adopt online, a proneness to impulsive behavior…” (Aboujauode 2011, 10-11).

The impact of the online world on Christians is sadly illustrated by a story Aboujauode tells about Linda Brinkley, a twice-divorced fifty-five year old mother of four from Arkansas who was interested in religious studies and had aspirations to become a missionary. Her avatar in the online game Second Life, however, was a “prostitute and half-naked hostess” at a virtual nightclub owned by avatar Dave Barmy who appeared young and svelte online, but was in real life the projection of  Dave Pollard, a 350 pound unemployed man from Cornwall, England. Pollard’s real world wife, who also played Second Life as someone far removed from reality, found her husband repeatedly cheating on her sexually in the game. After three years of this, she filed for divorce in the real world. Not to be deterred, her now ex-husband found marital bliss on Second Life with his topless waitress. That being such a success, they decided to also get married in their “first life” (Aboujauode 2011, 164-165). 

Most likely, Linda Brinkley from Arkansas will now be putting her missionary career on hold.

Given that cautionary tale, it's highly ironic that I find myself back in the blogosphere—to opine or whine or maybe dine on this veritable feast God has given us called life.

[Actually, I'm going on a few trips in the next months and just want to document them here because I have a tendency to lose my little hand-written journals. After all: "what happens online stays there forever."]

 

Don't Canonize Steve Jobs

Yeah, I've confessed to wishing I had some Apple products (all donations gladly accepted!). So it might sound like sour grapes (or apples) to point you to this very excellent article from Gawker.com titled, What Everyone is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs. It provides enough realism to temper our sadness, our adulation, and our near-deification of this remarkable, but deeply-flawed man. I think it's well worth a read, so here's an excerpt with the link afterwards:

It's the dream of any entrepreneur to effect change in one industry. Jobs transformed half a dozen of them forever, from personal computers to phones to animation to music to publishing to video games. He was a polymath, a skilled motivator, a decisive judge, a farsighted tastemaker, an excellent showman, and a gifted strategist. 

One thing he wasn't, though, was perfect. Indeed there were things Jobs did while at Apple that were deeply disturbing. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employees—the ones not bound by confidentiality agreements—have had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple. Jobs contributed to global problems, too. Apple's success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers, many of them children and all of them enduring long shifts and the specter of brutal penalties for mistakes. And, for all his talk of enabling individual expression, Jobs imposed paranoid rules that centralized control of who could say what on his devices and in his company.

The article (perhaps unintentionally) raises a very important question for all of us: What price are we willing to pay for success? What virtues or relationships or principles are we prepared to incinerate on the altar of achievement? Jobs was uniquely successful. He's been compared to Edison and Einstein and called the greatest innovator of the last century. But as this article demonstrates, the cost was exceptionally high.

Here's where you can read more:
 http://gawker.com/5847344/what-everyone-is-too-polite-to-say-about-steve-jobs

Steve Jobs' Death

Even though I'm not an Apple kind of guy (sadly, I just never seem to have the $), I have engaged in my share of ipad-envy and similar sins over the years.

And so, it was with sadness that I read about Jobs' [premature] death at age 56. I put "premature" in brackets because it seems self-evident that such a cool and gifted guy really has the right to be around a bit longer.

I mean, hasn't Steve Jobs made all of our lives better (if only by providing Microsoft's Windows and Google's Android a benchmark against which to improve)?

I know. That's rather a utilitarian and shallow perspective, even if I say so myself to myself.

But it's a great reminder of how easily we assign value to someone's life (and death) based on some ultimately meaningless criteria like giftedness or fame or wealth or royalty or relationship to ME. It's a distortion of the Christian Gospel which insists that every life is valuable and every death is a tragedy.

Which is a nice good sad segue to Justin Taylor's blog (where I stole the above pic) and his excellent post titled, "The Gospel According to Steve Jobs"
 http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2011/10/06/the-gospel-according-to-steve-jobs/ which, in turn, takes us to the original article in Christianity Today
 http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/article_print.html?id=90749
which was originally published in Culture Making, which I'm not going to provide a link to since this sentence is already way too long. Such is the stuff of blogging and borrowing and plagiarizing (hey, I steal, but always give credit; originality is nothing more than a poor memory).

Here's a little teaser--hopefully enough to get you to read it:

But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

Mark of the Beast Ain't What It Used to Be

A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday.
The micro-electronics technology, called an epidermal electronic system (EES), was developed by an international team of researchers from the United States, China and Singapore, and is described in the journal Science.
"It's a technology that blurs the distinction between electronics and biology," said co-author John Rogers, a professor in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"Our goal was to develop an electronic technology that could integrate with the skin in a way that is mechanically and physiologically invisible to the user."
The patch could be used instead of bulky electrodes to monitor brain, heart and muscle tissue activity and when placed on the throat it allowed users to operate a voice-activated video game with better than 90 percent accuracy.
"This type of device might provide utility for those who suffer from certain diseases of the larynx," said Rogers. "It could also form the basis of a sub-vocal communication capability, suitable for covert or other uses."
The wireless device is nearly weightless and requires so little power it can fuel itself with miniature solar collectors or by picking up stray or transmitted electromagnetic radiation, the study said.
Less than 50-microns thick -- slightly thinner than a human hair -- the devices are able to adhere to the skin without glue or sticky material.
"Forces called van der Waals interactions dominate the adhesion at the molecular level, so the electronic tattoos adhere to the skin without any glues and stay in place for hours," said the study.
Northwestern University engineer Yonggang Huang said the patch was "as soft as the human skin."
Rogers and Huang have been working together on the technology for the past six years. They have already designed flexible electronics for hemispherical camera sensors and are now focused on adding battery power and other energy options.
The devices might find future uses in patients with sleep apnea, babies who need neonatal care and for making electronic bandages to help skin heal from wounds and burns.

Source:  
http://www.breitbart.com/article.phpid=CNG.6e1e2ad90e2d94b12b6258b7e9c5b33d.611&show_article=1

Facebook Depression

Aha! I have just discovered the reason I was depressed a few weeks ago:

The American Academy of Pediatrics warns of a new problem called "Facebook Depression." It results from being bombarded with friend tallies, status updates, and photos of people happy, having the time of their lives, when you are not.

Here's the link to the full article:
http://www.kgw.com/lifestyle/health/Facebook-depression-122631789.html

Actually, I don't think that was the reason. In fact, I know it wasn't. But I am still looking for ways to disengage from technology or, at least, be a whole lot more aware of how it is affecting me.

Tim Challies' book, The Next Story: Life & Faith After the Digital Explosion, is the culprit. Or, should I say, hero. True, I read most of the book on my android phone, and then my Kindle, which I got for my birthday (50% better contrast, 21% smaller, and 17% lighter -- that's the Kindle, not me).

I'm now 22% through Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. Slight change of style and topic. But I'm find myself still thinking about Challies' book. It's that kind of book.

While there is a range of possible responses--from enthusiastic embrace to strict separation--the response of the thinking Christian should be disciplined discernment. In this approach, a Christian looks carefully at the new realities, weighs and evaluates them, and educates himself, thinking deeply about the potential consequences and effects of using a particular technology. Through it all, even as he is using a particular technology, he disciplines himself to be discerning, to embace what can be embraced and to reject what needs to be rejected. He moves beyond the broad strokes of utter rejection and complete acceptance. Instead he relies on the Holy Spirit, who speaks his wisdom through the Bible, to learn how he can live with virtue in this new digital world.
                                                       
                                                       - Tim Challies, The Next Story (Zondervan, 2011), 17.

Technology & Idolatry

I love to read. Many books inform my thinking; occasionally one transforms my thinking. Tim Challies' latest book, The Next Story, is in the 2nd category. I'm not done with it yet, and won't be for a while as it deserves a second reading. Here's a sample:

There are always spiritual realities linked to our use of technology. We know that there is often a link between our use of technology and idolatry, that our idols are often good things that want to become ultimate things in our lives. Communication with others is just this sort of thing, a very good thing that can so easily become an ultimate thing--an idol in our hearts.

How can we tell if something has become an idol in our lives? One possible sign of idolatry is when we devote an inordinate amount of time and attention to something, when we feel less than complete without it. It may be something that we look at right before we go to sleep and the first thing we give our attention to when we wake up. It may be the kind of thing that keeps us awake, even in the middle of the night.

A 2010 study by Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research sampled the habits of 1,605 young adults. The researchers found that one-third of women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four check Facebook when they first wake up, before they even head to the bathroom; 21% check it in the middle of the night; 39% of them declare that they are addicted to Facebook.

- Tim Challies: The Next Story (2010), 70.

Free at christianaudio.com
http://christianaudio.com/the-next-story-tim-challies

Back in the Land of the Living

It's amazing what some R&R will do. Some sleep-ins, a good novel or two, or even three. Some good conversations with God. And family.

I am pleased to report that my general malaise is over. For now. Ah, life. What a gift from God. A forty-nine-year-old-gift in my case, as of yesterday, or the day before if you factor in my antipodean birthplace.

One of my staff members, in all sincerity, congratulated me on being half a century. I would have punched him out if he wasn't bigger than me and didn't have Prussian origins.

Another staff member gave me a box of my favorite kind of licorice, 'Good & Plenty,' which takes on an entirely different meaning as one approaches old age and consumes licorice in the kind of addictive quantities I do.

Another staff member gave me a helium balloon with a clip, which I clipped to my ear, and then my shirt pocket when that became too painful.

Ah, the simple pleasures of life.

I've been reflecting on them a fair bit the last week or so, and not just because I helped officiate at the funeral of a 92-year-old saint who left this life for the next.

I've been reading a superb book by Tim Challies titled The Next Story: Life & Faith After the Digital Explosion. Ironically, I'm reading the whole book on my Android phone; it was a lot cheaper than getting it in print.

Challies, a Canadian who lives just close enough to the border to be considered an "honorary American" by those suspicious of anything not home-grown, is himself deeply enmeshed in the digital world. But in this book he steps outside it to examine that world (our world) through the lens of Scripture and theology.

His cautions and caveats have certainly grabbed my attention. Maybe I'll share some quotes along the way.