theo|digital

I’m chillin’ on a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A post from me every week, plus more at host site: ChurchM.ag. Check it out..

Chapter 8: Mediums

Yeah, we know the plural of “medium” is “media.” But since the common usage still evokes Wolf Blizter anchoring a CNN marathon about a slow-speed car chase, John Dyer switchs it up, and has us talk about “mediums–those packages of communication that change the way we perceive and understand the messages.

In this chapter, Dyer hits three topics that anyone who has followed me for any amount of time is pretty familiar with:

• Cultural ritual, effort, and pace of mediums help define them
• Digital immigrant vs. digital native
• Printing press and photography as game-changers

One great illustration I’ll plan to steal (thanks John!) helps us picture the digital native/immigrant divide:

Imagine for example that Americans suddenly decided to replace shaking hands with bowing as the way to greet one another. For most adults, bowing would feel strange, different, and unnatural. It might take years for bowing to take hold and feel familiar, and even then some people just wouldn’t like the change. However if we taught our kids to bow from birth, it would never feel unnnatural to them. The wouldn’t have experienced “handshake culture,” so they would only encounter handshaking in history books or quaint small towns.
The result would be two groups of people: those raised with handshakes for whom bowing feels strange, and those raised with bowing for home bowing is completely natural.

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I’m very much enjoying Eugene Peterson’s 2011 memior, The Pastor.
Long quote from Chapter 13:

I entered seminary with little, if any, interest in theology. In my experience theology was too contaminated with polemics and apologetics to take any pleasure in it. It always left me with a sour taste. The grand and soaring realities of God and the Holy Spirit, scripture and Creation, salvation and a holy life always seemed to get ground down into contentious, mean-spirited arguments: predestination and free will, grace and works, Calvinism and Arminianism, liberal and conservative, supra- and infra-lapsarianism. At my university I had avoided all this by taking refuge in a philosophy major that gave me room and companions for cultivating wonder and exploring meaning. When I arrived in seminary, I continued to keep my distance from theology by plunging into the biblical languages and the English Bible.

And then I met Karl Barth.

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I’m chillin’ on a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A post from me every week, plus more at host site: ChurchM.ag. Check it out..

Chapter 7: Redemption

Does God use technology? Yep. From the narrative of Scripture, Dyer points out three examples:

Noah’s Ark. God’s tech design. And one that shielded some of humanity from the destructive effects of sin. But the effects were only for a time: the DNA of sin got through.

Tower of Babel. Opposite example. God works against the city-building and unified language.

Law of Moses. In a world of spoken (oral) culture, God uses writing (in stone) to affix his law.

Can we think of other examples?
And does this lead us to agree with this:

“Perhaps God is telling us that he values not just humanity, but also the creations of humanity”

Go read more at ChurchMag –>

301 Critique (more for the nerds)
Dyer spends a lot of time here on communications technologies and language (love it), and makes three particularly important distinctions in human communication: orality, chriography (written), and images. When speaking of the law of Moses he follows Neil Postman saying that God wrote the 10 commandments in stone, and that this has theological meaning: that the fixity and permanence of writing was essential characteristic for God’s law. This leads Postman to critique image-based communication as inferior, citing the “graven image” clause of the 10 commandments.

I’ve got some objections.

First is the historical assumptions. This is pretty old history, so there’s no consensus, but scripture doesn’t commit us to what we call the “10 commandments” actually scratched on stone, doesn’t say what kind of writing it is (Dyer implies alphabetic, but Egypt was partially ideographic then logographic-phoenetic), and when and who the Pentatuech was written by (Moses is the traditional author, but multiple statements in the Pentateuch seem to be a much later recording of what he did/said). I don’t really need to argue the historical view of scripture (and I’m hardly an expert), but the assumptions on writing that Postman made for this time always seemed problematic because of the foundations that weren’t certain and not insisted on scripturally.

But further is Neil Postman’s strong statements that the printed word is the primary and preferred medium through which God reveals himself. Dyer smooths over this a bit, but Postman really doesn’t like images, nor does he like orality. McLuhan used to call Postman a “Print-Oriented Bastard.” But while images of God the Father weren’t to be carved, salvation history winds up leading us to the image and voice of Jesus his Son, not stone tablets–”the image of the invisible God.”

Too much for now. Still a great chapter.

I’m chillin’ on a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A post from me every week, plus more at host site: ChurchM.ag. Check it out..

Chapter 6: Approach

101 Basics:

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,”

goes the quote. I first recall it from hand-painted billboards posted at the edges of state highways in rural Illinois. John Dyer uses this as an example of instrumentalism, the idea that technology remains neutral, and that people imbue it with good or bad. He disagrees. So do I.

“Technology makes us…”

is the other side, more technically known as technological determinism. This is the view that technology is the leading force in societal change, and what people are believing when they wish away new technologies that are supposedly causing problems (TV is making us fat!).

Which is right?  (Dyer says:  middle way).

Read the rest of the blog tour at ChurchMag –>

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(A.KA. evidence I’m a nerd based on the way I use my Saturday afternoons).

So, the online tasks manager I’ve been using was a little one called Action Complete. Recently, it switched to a pay-only model, and while I liked a number of features, there are enough annoyances to send me back to the Research Room. Which, truth be told, is probably my favorite place anyway.

Some stuff I wanted:

• Online/cloud. Want the data stored safely not on my computer. Magic sync.
• Android App. That’s what I got right now.
• iPad App. I’m using a GCM iPad, and anticipate upgrading myself.
• Beautiful User Interface. Can’t be ugly. Should have intuitive drag-and-drop. Should not be using Web Form controls that look like 1996 (Ahem, RTM). I should be able to create nice visual layouts and colors when I want them.
• Has to fit this mental model I’ve been using of Actions, Waits, Projects, and Ideas, a modified form of Getting Things Done (GTD) that Action Complete got me sorta hooked on.
• I’ve given up on sycing with Exchange/Outlook. So over Outlook tasks.
• I don’t mind paying an annual fee

 View the PDF Chart (best option)

• Action Complete.  My current app. Has been functional for me. Some picky things make me want to change.
• Remember the Milk.  One of the most well-known on the web, but the interface isn’t nice. Feels old.
• ToodleDo. Most customizable I’ve seen. Better interface than RTM, but not much.
• GQueues. Effective interface design, really nice drag and drop, but no real mobile apps
• Springpad. Beautiful design; some Onenote/Evernote-like features like pegboard, web clippings, and Facebook integration.
• Nobze. Laughably overpriced, pretty nice interface, but not substantially better.
• Astrid. Focused on Facebook or sharing, but too limited in features for me. Android only.

I’m chillin’ on a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A post from me every week, plus more at host site: ChurchM.ag. Check it out..

Chapter 5: Rebellion

How do Christians talk about sin and technology?
Many are pretty simplistic.  “All technology is evil (or at least really bad for you)” is a common pastoral mantra (though it rarely includes older technologies, usually just smart phones and internet porn).  “All technology is good” (and can help us grow, connect and love better) is less common, but equally simplistic.

But an important theological place to start is Scripture, and where technology appears in the Story.  This is what From the Garden does in its fifth chapter, wading carefully through Adam & Eve, Cain and Abel (Gen 3 and Gen 4).

Dyer makes some clever observations.  For instance, after Adam and Eve sin, they race to make clothes from leaves: technology!  So it IS bad.  But then God comes along and in his compassion makes them BETTER clothes from animal skins.

“he gives out the world’s first free technology upgrade”

Ha! The point is that God participates with us in “making”—or better, we participate with God.

Cities:  good or bad? Then Dyer begins wrestling with how we build things that make us possibly less dependent on God:  the City, for instance.  After murder, Cain wanders off and builds a city.

“The city is humankind’s first idol”

writes Dyer. Our banding together something that makes us separate and less-dependent on our Creator.

Yet this feels like only half of the story.  Dyer gives a Babel-like vision here (inspired by Jacques Ellul), but says little about a Revelation or Zionistic vision of the City and Feast that flow in the narrative as strong images of God’s peace and final rule.

It’s a tough question, huh?

There’s another huge point I want to hit from this chapter, but there’s too much here, so it’ll be another post.  For now, there’s more chapter summary at ChurchM.ag today.