theo|digital

I’m posting chapters of my 2009 masters thesis on digital media ecology and scripture. See more here.

What did I learn in seminary?  One thing was this:  theology isn’t as important as it purports to be.  Oh, and that it  it is significantly more important than I thought.  Love those paradoxes.

Let’s try it like this.  I had previously seen theology as a summary of doctrines that were clear in scripture—Cliff Notes of the bible that made it easier to preach and zing high-minded one-liners across the table at Chilis (“it’s all for His glory, you know”).   Ignore the doctrinal points and you were denying scripture.  Exceptions included a few controversial issues that the other side was painfully and obviously wrong about.  But in a lot of ways, doctrinal formulations were as brick-solid as Scripture itself (even moreso, because they left out those pesky huh? verses).

Leaving seminary, my view is pretty different.  And the title of this chapter gives it away.  Theologies, plural.  Here’s what I mean.  God doesn’t change, but the questions we ask do.  Dramatically.  And our theologies are shaped by what we’re trying to know. What questions we’re trying to answer.  God remains.  We’re a tad more ephemeral.  In the broadest sense, I realized I was okay with theology changing over time.  In the past this sentence would have freaked me out.  God doesn’t change over time!  We don’t make God in our image!  But that was when I thought theology was the same thing as Jesus, the breathing image of the invisible God.  It’s not.

This gets even crankier when we start to look at the doctrine of scripture.  Leaning heavily on a recent collection of essays edited by Justin Holcomb, I tried to trace this.  (this book was a life-saver I found later in the game and helped me re-do this chapter).

Part of this is the thesis requirement to show literature review and backround, which I do over two chapters.  This is a broad (and full of holes) survey of the history of Christian thought on the doctrine of scripture.  And then it reviews some current evangelical writing in the area. Enjoy.  :)

• Chapter 2 Theologies of Scripture p18-38 (pdf, 1.4mb)

I’m posting chapters of my 2009 masters thesis on digital media ecology and scripture. See more here.

I began my thesis with a quote from 1854 by Henry David Thoreau. He complains that modern advances of his time aren’t always helping us.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from
serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end
which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New
York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to
Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
… We are eager to tunnel the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer
to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad
flapping American ear will be the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

150 years removed, it’s a little bit easier to smile about Thoreau’s pessimism. What a difference the telegraph made in the history of the world—playing a role in wars and culture and Christianity.  I chose this quote because it so easily illustrated one of the number one rules of exploring the culture and media:  it’s hard to see.  For even talented people, culture is the water we swim in, everywhere and remarkable transparent.

• Chapter 1: Scripture In a Digital Context (pdf, 1.2mb)

Anyone remember a year ago?  I’m not talking about something universally big—just my life here.   In September 2009, I was huffing and puffing through the last miles of a year-long masters thesis.  My days were endless library-as-containment-cell exercises—re-wording, finding sources, and fixing the grammar errors that seemed subject to obscure rules of physics ensuring their everlasting presence.

Anyway, October saw me submitting the 150-document  for the last time, November was the official defense, and then my mind raced on to my obligations for Great Commission Ministries, where I helped lead our national campus conference and then turned around and made a quick move to my role here in Orlando, FL, which had me back on the road 5-days later for my first training conference.

Somewhere in there, I started my new blog here, and I set up a special page to post my thesis here.  Except I didn’t have time to finish the formatting on the document in order to post it.  So things sat in limbo.  And sat.  And sat.

Big news in my world:  I think we’re over limbo.  Somehow I’ve scratched out some time in the schedule to stand up and make some moves.

And so starting this week, I get to post my thesis, right here.

(Cue personal celebration).

There may be few people that have an interest any more. And I go back and re-read things and go “oooh… that needed some more work” or “ugh… not sure I want the world reading that.”  But this was the work I was able to do at the time.  It helped my clarify years worth of questions and hopefully launch years more worth of answers about God’s digital world.  So it’s still worth re-visiting, I think.  At the very least,  this is a year-late victory lap that lets me move forward.

As I finish configuring the document for each chapter, I’ll post it here.  Hopefully I’ll start in the next few days.  Meanwhile, you can read why I realized I had to post it online in the first place.

Wired Magazine’s September 2010 issue is hitting the newsstands with an eye towards selling more mags. Their tenuous (and ironic) grip as the offline scoop on all things digital forces the monthly reach for bold headlines, and this one succeeds, red cover included .  Here are some points made (and why they need need additional work).

Infographic Shimographic. It’s actually pretty sweet to look at: editor Chris Anderson and team post a graphic that tracks internet protocols from 1990 to 2010, showing sharp decreases in the use of e-mail and the web being replaced by online video and peer-to-peer sharing. Jeremy Scott from RealSe challenges the data reliability, wondering how Wired’s data shows video usage reaching nearly 50% of total online usage, while Nielson’s July 2010 numbers show it at 3.9%.  (Wired’s data cites CAIDA, but no specific study).  No doubt some discrepancy is due to measured how it’s measured—e.g. a single YouTube download has gotta grab a lot more bandwidth than similar time web browsing.

What was open is now controlled? But I want to think about a key assertion by Chris Anderson {and Michael Wolff) that what began as the world wide-open-for-all web is now a vertical, top-down, Machiavellian experience, under cunning corporate ownership.  Their argument goes like this.

1. “You’ve spent the day on the internet, but not on the web,” asserting the strong growth of browerless push technology mobile apps, streaming video rentals, etc.   (for nerds “port 80 accounts for a less than 25% of traffic, they say).
2. While the web was inherently open, these other platforms are “semi-closed” leaning heavily on experience and content control.
3. Even the web is controlled, the top 10 sites (Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc) account for 75% of traffic in 2010
4. Key point: This dominance is the natural flow of new technologies “invention → propogation →adoption → control.”  And they jump into media history to make it:

Take railroads. Uniform and open gauge standards helped the industry boom and created an explosion of competitors — in 1920, there were 186 major railroads in the US. But eventually the strongest of them rolled up the others, and today there are just seven — a regulated oligopoly. Or telephones. The invention of the switchboard was another open standard that allowed networks to interconnect. After telephone patents held by AT&T’s parent company expired in 1894, more than 6,000 independent phone companies sprouted up. But by 1939, AT&T controlled nearly all of the US’s long-distance lines and some four-fifths of its telephones

But is this comparison valid?  First, I’ve gotta say, that any foray into communications technology history is a blast—something seen too rarely in analysis of how the internet is changing us.  But this one might make a jump that won’t work.  The problem was the nature of the technologies themselves: both railroad (a communications technology in relation to the postal service and telegraph propagation) and the telephone required compatible and universal infrastructures to be useful. What economists call a “technological monopoly” simply acknowledges that you can’t very well stack miles of iron railroad in parallel structure, nor can you violate basic rules of physics (two trains on the same track at the same time = nope).  This is an inherent characteristic of railroad and still is today—it’s why Amtrak trains are always stuck behind freight-trains.

The first 30 years of the telephone was similar:  the switchboard technology was only an open standard because of Theodore Vail’s patent moves helped solve a mess of twisted wires, and failing phone connectivity in the 1880s and 90s.–what was one of the earlier BlueRay vs. HDDVD kinda fights.  Central monopolistic control was actually a necessary ingredient of propagation in both cases.  However, unlike railroad, the phone technological monopoly would be eventually be overcome:  in the 1980s. The trouble before that?  Infrastructure. Even when the US government forced AT&T to split in 1949, the local bells still had no competition in their assigned areas.  Unless you were gonna run two identical wires to the same home, competition wasn’t gonna work well. The technology itself wouldn’t allow it.

Okay, that was too much on history, but the point is that the internet doesn’t suffer the same technological limitations as the railroad and telephone (well, it won’t if we can solve the net neutrality issue, which is a result of the cable providers under the same physical restrictions).  Neither, by the way, did mass-printed material, which is why “pamphlets” and tracts prove so amazingly crucial to the American democractic experiment, from Thomas Jefferson to the American Tract Society.

So I don’t believe the industrial pattern is a fair comparison here, but Anderson’s key data still seems stubbornly there. 75% of traffic goes to only 10 sites?  Why?

Information fatigue. Though Wired argues that internet is past its adolescence, I’d think it’s still much younger. We may have had AOL and other toy-like adoptions of internet technologies for 20+ years, but the flood of information culture has only hit many of us in the last 10

And humans are freaking out.  How are we to handle the fire-hose of knowledge and real-time data that we live in?  Individual bits of information have turned into a flow… just like a traffic jam eventually looks less like individual cars racing by and more like a steel river. In an ocean of information, we need something to help us make sense of it.  Digital natives are already learning two key skills to sort the digital world:  pattern recognition and personal networks.

The top 10 sites become a sort of paternalistic relationship with their viewers. If I can choose between 250,000 apps or 200 million web servers, the choices become one large non-choice. I need to find someone to help me.  In this sense, the “portal” which we all declared dead a few years ago, still exists. We need an entry point–a place that feels secure, limits the flow, and tells us what is important and what isn’t.

Fame. And fame is how we choose it. With such crazy ability to customize, you’d think that our portals would be as unique as our local communities, interests, families, beliefs: in short, mirroring the things that actually shape what we see as “important.”  But this hasn’t yet materialized because the key data one would need to accurately encode our information sorting needs has yet to be leveraged.  I’ve thought for years that Facebook has this data way more than Google, which is why I’ve said repeatedly that “Facebook is the new Google.”  It’s because Facebook has had the potential to leverage that natural essential human ingredient—relationship—and help us decide what is important. How to not be overwhelmed in the ocean of data.

Alas, Facebook hasn’t quite gotten here (taken some missteps recently), and this solution remains up for grabs.  For now, we choose our digital Parent based in-part on fame:  what we’ve heard of.  Branding and marketing still have a huge role here. Genius-idea internet startups die every day for lack of participation and ability to gain visibility (i.e. SEO a key Google placement).

Back to control and the web being dead. I doubt I’ve connected all the dots here, but this is too long not to wrap-up.  Is the web—and specifically its “open” nature—dead?  Not even close.  We’re still coping with a definition of a paradigm shift, and have no idea yet on how to manage the vast amounts of data we live in.  But Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have tenuous grips on the information flow just like we do.  Sure, the urbanization of the web is likely to remain. But the Interstate system and back-water towns are still around, and given the infinite size of the landscape, communities of information will cluster and grow and thrive.  If just to keep their heads above water.

A key part of us understanding digital culture is starting with the “sea of information” we float in.  As humans made less than God, how do we survive in a world that sometimes seems to require omniscience?

I’m hardly solving that here, but clearly it involves words like filtering, sorting, visibility, and presence.

Meanwhile, Google is making another attempt at helping us survive in the information overload.