theo|digital

I finally filed my taxes! This is early for me. My record latest? Sometime in July I think… . It’s a result of two things: 1) I’m plain awful at money and numbers and get flustered easily. In part because my pride kicks in and I think I *should* be able to do this more easily–I’m not dumb! But I’ve learned to be happy with the places I’m smart and just give up on everything else. 2) I’ve never once owed money: I just make way too little. Almost always I wind up getting nearly everything back. They really don’t care if you file late if it’s already gonna hurt you, not them.  I’m not saying this is good, mind you, I’m just sayin.

Anyway, did you know you use TurboTax online for free? Seriously. There are plenty of discounts out there, but they don’t strongly advertise this one. If you make under 30,000 a year or are in the military, you can typically do this. (I obviously fall under the first). It’s called the Tax Freedom Project, and it’s been around since I started doing taxes with Turbo Tax in 2000.


The sad thing is that they typically have no links at all from their main site to this option.  It’s sorta hidden like that.  I feel bad for poorer people who aren’t as Internet-persistent as I am.  This year I still had to sit on Google for 5 minutes trying to find it because I couldn’t quite remember the name.

Can’t resist posting this. It’s on it’s way up, and it fits right into my thoughts on how new technologies are always first used as entertainment (and critics decry them near the end of that first phase). Plus it’s funny.

Even though I love music and even do some reviewing when I get the chance, I haven’t ever really been pushed towards the music blog.  They can be sorta pretentious and difficult to engage with anyway.  Later, I’ll have to write on why the universal but awkward, “What bands do you like?” question is going to take a back seat in popular culture as it becomes less useful in an information society.

But for now, I just wanted to mention that U2 stopped by over on Clark St. a few days ago, not to play a show, but to answer questions from an in-person audience for a live internet stream to the U2 fan network.  They were at the Chicago Metro , and I wish I had been there, because it would have been awesome to hear them play “DJ”—each picking a couple favorite (not their own) songs and spinning them for listeners.  Their picks?

The Trib reported on their picks:

U2′s DJ picks:


Larry Mullen: Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” (“We wouldn’t be around without the Ramones”); Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies)” (“It gave me incredible hope … and made me extremely jealous”).


The Edge: Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl” (“the first Irish rock ‘n’ roll star”); the Waterboys’ “The Whole of the Moon” (“Three shows changed my life: The Clash in 1978, Bruce Springsteen, and the Waterboys”).


Adam Clayton: Airborne Toxic Event’s “Sometime Around Midnight” (“I don’t like listening to that old stuff”); the Klaxons’ “Golden Skans” (the bass lines “gave me inspiration and energy”).


Bono: Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” (“Rage is at the heart of every great rock ‘n’ roll band”); Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (“It’s about King David, the first blues man”).

Bono is awesome: Hallelujah is one of the best songs ever.   I also love that the Edge is unpretentious enough to love Brown Eyed Girl.  A more detailed description of a similar event in LA is fun.  The interviewer in both places (and others?) was the Scottish Shirley Manson , best known as the lead singer of Garbage.

Every year, Chicago celebrates St. Patrick’s Day in style.  This year I finally made it down to the river with friends to see the famous plumbers union dye the river green .  Check out my photos:

St. Patrick’s Day Chicago River

Clifford Christians , a national expert on media ethics and communications professor at the University of Illinois, is also a Christian who has thought deeply about spiritual implications of new media.

Writing a recent book forward, he explains that, regarding new media technologies, a fundamental debate remains unresolved. The issue is whether communication is most productively oriented:

1. To the epistemology of virtual reality (What does it mean that our relationships are disembodied?)
2. To the nature of the human (What is authentic humanness in virtual space?)
3. To social structures (Are political and social formations offline and online fundamentally different?)

Christians writes his forward in Understanding Evangelical Media: The Changing Face of Christian Communication.  The book also features a website with additional content .

I’ve been awol from my blog.  My excuse:  my laptop died.  :-(  It was almost four years old, which is like 60 in human years (formula – times 15!).  So it was starting to get there… but I was hoping she would hold out for a few months.  At least until Windows 7 became enough of an imminent thing that places would be giving out coupons for a free future upgrade when it arrived.

As of now:  I have a new… Dell.  Never thought I’d say that, and I’m worried I’m gonna lose some nerd cred.  But Dell seems to have improved some things… and I’ll post some sweet photos soon.

And be back to on the Theology of Facebook.  I’ve got lots of thoughts, and I’ve also finally got a chance to read Shane Hipps book (which is very well done – except for the few pages here and there particularly on “virtual community” where he just misses it–is even inconsistent with the rest of his book!  But in general his stuff is right on target.  I’m sure we’d be friends…)

Anyway, more coming.

In my last post on Shane Hipps, I meant to ask a couple more questions:

1. Hipps mentioned that a Second Life is in some way an extension of televangelism, and says “How you incarnate the gospel ina dis-incarnate setting? I don’t know how to do it.” People will know that I have a strong sense of agreement with part of what is being said here… I typically say “A relational gospel is best communicated relationally.”

My question for Hipps: doesn’t the ability for interactivity dramatically distinguish Second Life from TV or radio that rely on a one-way broadcast mode of communication? In this sense, TV is more like Power Point?

2. Hipps says that the idea of a “shared imagination of the future” is easy to find online, because you’ll automatically seek out those who think like you do. A real community has to do more real work to forge this, it seems like he’d say.

My question for Hipps: isn’t this a feature of affinity-based groups of any kind? For instance, junior high youth group? Mom’s with toddlers groups? Chess clubs? The local Democratic party office? People have chosen to associate with people that think similarly to themselves for much longer than online communities have existed. Sure, the School House Rock Fan Club can now have members in both Chicago and Australia. But aren’t these like-minded groups are just extensions of human behavior since specialization (accelerated by industrialization and mass literacy)?

Note instead groups that hold together disparate opinions or mirror real life communities, like the Shaw neighborhood of Washington DC where my sister and brother-in-law (http://justindc.vox.com/) and their church connect with a highly diverse neighborhood that struggles forward together. What do these add to our conversation?

Shane Hipps , Mennnonite pastor, recently commented on how “dangerous” it is to refer to “virtual community” as real community (watch the video in my last post ).  He had four points real Christian community that I think are helpful starting points for discussion, but perhaps not as dismissible as they appear.

Hipps’ four factors for meaningful community:

1. Shared history (identity and belonging)
2. Permanence (necessary for the shared history)
3. Proximity
4. Shared imagination of the future

Hipps says that virtual community captures the fourth more easily than “true” community, but “utterly leaves out” the other three.  But would Marshall McLuhan , Hipps key thought mentor, agree?

Extensions of humanity.  Basic to McLuhan’s thought is the idea the technologies extend natural human functions.  For instance, humans have legs which let them move from one place to another.  The technology of the wheel extended and enhanced that function… suddenly we can do a human thing on a larger scale.  Right?  An axe extends an arm, telephone extends voice, etc.

From this starting point, thought about technologies like an IM chat or Facebook should see certain uniquely human functions like conversation and relationship extended and expanded, not replaced.  (Walter Ong reminds us that invention of the alphabet did not replace the spoken word, the printed book hardly replaced teaching…  new technologies in communication augment, not replace)

Gotta look at the whole system.  A technology can’t be evaluated on its own, but in relationship to the system of human perceptions.  Specifically, the ratio of human senses is altered by extending technologies.  And it’s not the obvious one.  For instance the effect of radio was to alter… the visual sense.  The effect of the photo is auditory.

Before we can make theological judgments on a technology, we need to think more widely.  Rare is the person that lives only “online” (dark room, glowing screen, empty take-out boxes, no verbal interaction in weeks, etc).  Instead, what is the effect of our online interactions on our physical interactions (and vice versa).

Is proximity physical?  Hipps assumes that proximity is physical and that online interaction breaks the proximity.  But McLuhan assumes that while industrialization created explosion, homogeneity, and isolation (think the suburbs), electronic technology has an imploding, contracting energy effect.  ”Everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electronic involvement in one another’s lives…” he writes (Understanding Media, p54).  Further, he tantalizingly forces us to examine our definition of proximity:

It begins to become evident that “touch” is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and “keeping in touch” or “getting in touch” is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement and taste and smell.

Theologically I’m with Hipps on the importance of the Incarnation, and I think this has implications on physicality.  This is a whole ‘nother post… but I’d suggest that “presence” is significantly more than physical (something we call upon every time we speak on sacramental theology), and that online technologies are not inherently gnostic.

Amputation and Numbness.  McLuhan reminds us that a primary effect of new technologies extending human communication function is a sense of over-stimulus and then “numbness.”  We become both hyper-aware of the technology (like in 1998 when we all were talking about going to “do our e-mail”), but also oblivious to its sense-altering effects (an exception McLuhan notes is some artists, who write histories of the future).  But an important feature of this is that we can’t immediately see the effect of new technologies… in fact, we don’t tend to see them until the next technology arrives, allowing us to look back.

From this perspective, it almost seems silly (pardon the strength) to speak emphatically about media effects on community.  Especially items like “shared history” and “permanence” can’t really be categories on technologies that have existed less than 10 years.  Google has only been a wide-spread part of our lives since 2001.  The Blogger platform I’m publishing only gathering popularity since 2004.  And Facebook?  While I was on in the “early days” when it was limited to a huge large universities, it has only become ubiquitous in the last 1.5 years.

(allow me to offer apologies again that while I’m responding to Shane Hipps video clip, I have yet to have examined his published book , which may have significantly more interaction with some of the above I’m mentioned…  I’m sure a conversation with him would be fascinating and fruitful).