theo|digital

Wow, has this been a trip. 15 days of final drafts, stuffing bags and sorting camping gear, reading reports, downloading audio books, filing paperwork, hurried goodbyes, hands on the steering wheel, catching up with old friends, fast food, endless Interstate, fast food, endless Interstate, fast food, making lists, shaking hands, phone calls, human resources department, project groups, troubleshooting, prayer hours, schedules, orientations, low-ropes courses, arms full, late meetings, raincoats, new people, new people, new people, cabins, Elk, photocopies, Safeway, tourists, Elk, staff cafeteria, losing my Nalgene, finding my Nalgene, coffee filters, quick decisions, new people…

and finally a Day Off.

Today I’m taking a Sabbath that’s been long in coming. And although there are still a few big early things to complete for LT, it seems like we’ve done the first few hurdles, and things are coming together. Which allows me to let my shoulders sink a little, and disconnect the to-do list from my head.

One of my personal fun tasks this summer hopefully is redesigning this blog and maybe even porting it to a new service (WordPress anyone?). We’ll see if this happens.

I will post a few things on LT, and hopefully a number of continues posts on theology and media ecology, since I plan to continue my thesis reading and writing (at a much slower pace, but enough to keep the brain warm for the Fall).

More soon.

I’m supposed to leave Chicago in five hours. Hopefully that’ll happen.

Well, although the seminary still has one more official week, I’ve got to be done today. A little intimidating, although I think I’m okay. I’ve been relentlessly chopping a the academic task list, and today means one more five page exit essay for Ethics. That typically wouldn’t be a big deal, but I don’t even have a faint idea yet of how I want to approach it, and I woke up late.

I’d love to think that the finish line is gonna be tonight at 5pm and I can celebrate, and while I do have plans to hit dinner with friends, I don’t get any celebration or respite—I’ve gotta clean and pack and plan to leave for Colorado LT, not to mention actually be on the job to get our student leaders assigned and good communication with the YMCA of the Rockies established. The task list seems pretty overwhelming that already.

So, God, walk me through one more day of being faithful today. I don’t need to write a genius paper or make crazy LT waves—just need to be faithful.

I love the Onion.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Classmates.com Employees Don’t Have Heart To Tell CEO About Facebook

SEATTLE—Employees at Classmates.com—an online service that enables users to find and communicate with people from their past for a monthly fee—have done everything in their power to keep the company’s CEO from finding out about the wildly popular social networking site Facebook. “He knows something is going on,” Classmates.com web coder Josh Krzysch said while combing his boss’s newspaper and removing any offending articles. “The other day he asked me why people aren’t interested in getting in touch with old friends anymore, and I told him that the Internet just isn’t very popular right now. What else was I supposed to say?” Employees claim that unless things somehow miraculously improve by next month, they plan to quietly pack up their desks and leave in the middle of the night.

–

People who have never developed a deep personal knowing of God will be limited in the depth of their personal knowing of themselves. Failing to know God, they will be unable to know themselves, as God is the only context in which their being makes sense. Similarly, people who are afraid to look deeply at themselves will of course be equally afraid to look deeply at God.

For such persons, ideas about God provide a substitute for direct experience of God

Knowing God and knowing self are therefore interdependent. Neither can proceed very far without the other. Paradoxically, we come to know God best not by looking at God exclusively, but by
looking at God
and then looking at ourselves
then looking at God
and then again looking at ourselves.

This is also the way we best come to know our selves. Both God and self are mostly fully known in relationship to each other.

– David G. Brenner in The Gift of Being Yourself

Professor Ginny Olson pointed this out to me today. Harris Interactive‘s recent poll on social media (pdf) (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) had an interesting question included that, for those that know my thoughts, points directly to the key insight of the next few years

(chart reproduced from Research Brief from the Center for Media Research, reporting on this same poll).

This is the right question but the wrong audience. Most did not see the connection or possibility. They are wrong. Facebook IS the “new Google,” and I’ve been putting myself out on a limb on that for a few years now.

It doesn’t have to literally be Facebook of course (although they have a good chance–Mark Zuckerberg really understanding social media and the younger generation). The key is “filtering communities” that help us sorta and prioritize information. The days of someone saying “I got 1,456,333 hits on Google for X” are numbered… this will sound like a silly idea to us soon. A massive pile of information is a given to digital natives. The key is what floats to the top and how it does it. (think Digg). Model this on natural trust relationships (like Facebook), and you’ve got a powerful information filter that shapes your world.

ps – notice that older people were slightly more likely to think Facebook threatens Google, even though they are less involved. Is this because they are not immersed and can observe the relative importance in chatter they’re hearing their grandkids?

Hard to believe it’s my birthday! I’m barely tracking dates. I’m trying to make a last push on my thesis before leaving town (making some decent progress, actually), and Colorado looms large–I leave here in two weeks! But for my birthday I’m gonna head with just a few friends over to the Chicago Brauhaus for some German sausage and beer and hopefully live polka, which sounds fun.

I’m grateful for my friends all over the place–thanks to those of you who have loved and supported me for a long time. Typically, I’d want to craft something more thoughtful on that, but I think today simple will have to do.

I’m starting to find a great deal of exciting stuff on the blog of Lance Strate, the president of the Media Ecology Association and a professor at Fordham University in New York.  His most recent post highlights the following fascinating video note by one of his students.

Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.