theo|digital

(Okay, hiatus on writing and reading while I survived December and holidays is over.  Back to the blog.)

I’ve been all over on books, but I’ve finally picked back up NT Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God, and like usual, always quickly wonder why I ever put Wright down. His writing is simultaneously fun and data-rich—I wind up pencil marking on nearly every page. That’s not typical for me. So many other writers I grasp their point in the first page of the chapter, and from then on it’s just repetition. Wright repeats themes, but always with nuance that makes not want to miss a paragraph.

Anyway, here he’s talking about the “authority of scripture” as a phrase that gets thrown around a lot but needs more critical examination.

In Christian theology, such phrases regularly act as “portable stories”—that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us.

(A good example is the phrase “the atonement.” This phrase is rare in the Bible itself; instead, we find things like, “The Messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures”; “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” and so on. But if we are to discuss the atonement, it is easier to do so with a single phrase, assumed to “contain” all these sentences, then by repeating one or more of them each time).

Shorthands, in other words, are useful in the same way suitcases are.  They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in a new location.

Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron.

Check this out. Sometimes data streams aren’t just about better efficiency vs. information overload. Here’s one that combines information and beauty. By artist Ken Murphy, it’s entitled

A History of the Sky
a dynamic time-lapse visualization of the sky for the entire year

Read more about the technical setup here.

Sorta captivating huh? But I love the data—the instant visual access to, say, how many cloudy mornings San Francisco typically has, or what portion of the year has fewer hours of daylight.

Artists must have a leading role in visualization design if we are to start adapting and surviving in an information-overload culture. The constant complaints we hear about how difficult it is to buy plane tickets or track status feeds or undig from the bottom of the Inbox are in-part due to our early, amateur attempts to present the information.  This is a glimmer of hope.

This is near the end of 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 11: Virtualization

Today’s Internet-enabled smartphone is perhaps the most humanlike tool ever created.

I agree with John Dyer’s quote.

It’s because each part of it extends a natural human function. Dyer points out several. Print and text extends our capacity for abstract and rational thought (old school: books). Images are visual and emotive (old school: the photograph). So that’s thought and emotion. Short messages extend our information (old school: telegraph). Voice and video interaction extends our human-to-human relational communication (old school: telephone).

The mobile phone combines them all. Thought, feeling, informing, relationship.

Human.

And I think like John does, that technology will increasingly be able to represent all the human senses and functions together, becoming more and more clear and representative. Think of it simply as the high definition… the more the resolution increases, the more it looks like you’re actually there.

And of course, John wrote this before we started seeing iPhone’s Siri, which is a whole new item along the same lines of discussion.

This is the final chapter of book review for ChurchM.ag. Read the post here.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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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.

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 4: Definition

The history of technology is a wide landscape and John Dyer gives us a perfect fly over.  He writes that Aristotle is one of the first to use the word technologia, but he means it as systematic study (logia) of grammar, speech and writing (techne as a craft or art).  Tekton in Greek were essentially craftsman (Jesus’ father Joseph was this! “Carpenter” is too narrow a translation).

The word eventually becomes the skill, study, tools, and things made with the tools.  And things start off slow until 1650. Dyer divides it like:

He’s got a lot more in there, but I want to address Dyer’s definition of technology, which he writes is:

“the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”

I love the emphasis on the humanness (as opposed to “other than”) of technology, and the theological lens of Creation.  But I’m uncomfortable by the language of “practical purposes” here.  Dyer is using this to distinguish these tools from, say, art (a distinguishing factor I’d need to quibble with… but that’s not too important).

My issue is that the definition is particularly forced when it comes to communications technologies… and I Dyer provides an example at the end of his chapter of calling home using cell phones as “practical” and “transforming creation” that seems a bit stretched to fit this tool-oriented definition.

His solution, I think, is to see that humans don’t only work, but that they also classify and play and commune in ways that create identity categories distinct from tool using. The way we communicate with each other in family and society is establishes meaning in a way that is independent from our making. By McLuhan’s definitions of technology as extensions, our communicative thoughts and intents are amplified and extended into an environment that is difficult to describe as “practical” but easily identifiable as “human.”

From oral language to chirography to print to mass literacy to the telegraph, radio, TV, and the internet, I think the thread of history of communications technologies may stand on their own… uniquely human and theological but not practical in this sense.

John, did I get you wrong on this?  What do you think?

(Also: more at ChurchM.ag)

Facebook took an interesting step Thursday against the cultural flow of the social graph as we know it. It has to do with our perception of time.

The printed book has always subtly preferred the past. Books, once published, become relatively unchanging bouys in the river of time. And the most important ones stay right there where they were dropped, which is why we were always taught in school that the year and author are the two most important things to cite when writing our research paper.

However, digital information culture as we’ve known it so far doesn’t work like this. Its time-orientation is toward the present: what is happening NOW. (Aside: It doesn’t flow quite as fast as “live TV”–it’s more viscous time syrup, with memes taking 24 hours to move to talking status, etc. More on this [pdf]). Searches give you a snapshot of what currently exists on the web, not what existed a five years ago. Aside from WayBackMachine, the web resists the “holding action” that defines print media.

This is why the 15th ed of the Chicago Manual of Style said that when you cite web pages in a research paper, you can stop putting “accessed on” in the citation. It’s meaningless, they said. It’s not likely that you can return to the website at that date. You can only access it as it is today.

So Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg introduced a new landmark feature for profiles called Timeline (watch the F8 keynote address). It tracks not only the years since you’ve been on Facebook, but lets you go fill in the gaps of your life, adding kid photos and important life events.

In some ways this adds an oddly historical view to an ahistorical world. For contrast, they’ve moved the live feed to the right of the screen: the perfect image of what is Now, with updates dropping off the cliff moments later.

But this is a digital take on a print orientation. I haven’t seen the actual timeline, but it seems that you can add data all across the timeline at once–say, all the 3-mile runs I’ve taken in the last years. But if I change my mind, in 1-click, I can remove them all as well. Not just the ones in the future, but the ones in the past as well.

This is not the old naive historiography that sees past events as unchanging anchors to be uncovered, nor is it post-modern history that seeks to reveal the forgotten past voices crushed by power. It moves past both of these, to view of history as data layers to be added or removed at will. We modify history not because we seek alternate views or are coming closer to the truth, but simply because we must. In an infinite world of information, there are infinite ways to tell the story, and only some of the layers can float to the top.

How will digital natives write history? Mark Zuckerberg just helped shape that.

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 3: Reflection
Here, John Dyer lays one of the most important building blocks we need to think of technology and theology.

He starts with the Story, looking at God’s original creation and intent. Adam and Eve and how they were to cultivate the garden. As much as fish were made to swim, humans were made to cultivate. This encompasses both “keeping” but also “creating.”

What do we cultivate? Culture. Culture is “things, images, rituals, and language (Stanley Grenz) that mediate meaning, identity, and values (Barry Jones).

And where does culture start? In the garden.

Theologians know what this means. Commonly we ask the question of things in our world: is this from Creation (and therefore good!) or from the Fall (and therefore a result of sin and broken creation). Dyer is certain: culture-building starts in the Creation. Among other things, we see it in language.

And language is a culture-making tool we use to organize the world. A technology that acts as a lens for understanding and classification and even action (e.g. John Austin’s speech act theory).

Want to read more?  Read the featured post at ChurchM.ag.

ps – Each chapter I read of this one is nearly perfect in its analysis, and I’m increasingly impressed. If you haven’t already, pick it up and read along with me. John Dyer is doing good work here that we need to hear.