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 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.

I’m chillin’ on a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. My post is featured this week at ChurchM.ag. Check it out >>.

**UPDATE:  ChurchM.ag was down for 24 hours, but is now back up.

—-
The downtown intersection of digital technology and Christian theology has been increasingly busy (one imagines sleek futuristic cars on tracks), and John Dyer’s new From The Garden to the City may be the smartest vehicle for clear thought that I’ve seen yet. (For some other recent models, you think of Tim Challies’ Next Story (pretty much a Volvo–all about safety), Shane Hipps Flickering Pixels (SUV–cool, but too easy to roll).

We’re jumping in to Chapter 1: Perspective, and the quickest way in is to check out four quick quotes:

“Alan Kay famously described technology ‘as anything that was invented after you were born’ “
This is why new soccer mom’s can fret about their kids texting all day, but don’t notice that they themselves used to chill on the Princess phone for hours, writes Dyer. Bingo. Older technologies fade into the environment and don’t seem so techy to us. We’re surrounded by examples.

Why is this obvious point so often missed?

Continue post at ChurchM.ag →

I’m blogging through James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Chapter 1: Drums That Talk (When a Code Is Not a Code)

Studying the history of communications technologies, you commonly read that the electric telegraph is a singularly important milestone; especially, it marks the first time that human communications could travel faster than a human. Some exceptions are typically noted (light signals in Paris, bonfires in ancient Greece), but these were limited in their influence until Morse Code appears in the 1840s America.

In his first chapter, James Gleick effectively demonstrates yet another example where Western history has made major misses. African talking drums, poetic and complex, transmitted messages over hundreds of miles without a physical messenger.  And this well before American soil was dubbed such.

Europeans were in Africa for centuries, but the “talking drums” weren’t well understood until a 24-year-old missionary named James Carrington settled on the Upper Congo in 1914.

One day he made an improptu trip to the small town of Yaongama and was surprised to find a teacher, medical assistant, and church members already assembled for his arrival.  They had heard the drums, the explained.

Carrington spends his life in Africa, and becomes an expert at the talking drums, publishing The Talking Drums of Africa in 1949.  His knowledge shows us why Westerns couldn’t comprehend the information. The drums, high and low, relied on the same tonal language attributes that most African languages and Chinese Mandarin do—and most Western languages do not.  In this case, high pitched drums meant high pitch in speech, and vice versa.

But the high and low drums couldn’t express consonants or vowels, only the tones. Just as English speakers can understand sentences like this,

if u cn rd ths
u cn gt a gd jb w hi pa!

African drum listeners could use the context to fill in the the missing information. This lead to creativity and error correction of the drummers, who would recite poems or longer stories to remove the ambuguity.

Drummers would not say, “Come back home,” but rather:

Make your feet come back the way they went,
make your legs come back the way they went,
plant your feet and your legs below,
in the village which belongs to us.

My newest I-Get-Giddy reading project is James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. The 2011 book is a hefty 526 pages (yeah, I should have got the Kindle Edition) and so instead of a review, I hope to blog through chapters at a time. This is probably a better approach in any case, seeing my recent history with balancing life and good reading has been pretty, well, unbalanced. But here’s to continuing to try.

Prologue

“In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

It’s not like information just appeared in the world of radio and computers, writes Glieck. It’s the fundamental building block of the universe. “If you want to understand life,” quoting Richard Dawkins, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels or oozes, think about information technology.”. Biology and physics and economics are all really IT.

But you’ve got to begin somewhere, and our Prologue starts in 1948, where Bell Labs researcher Claude Shannon writes a paper introducing the Bit—a unit for measuring information “as though there were such a thing, measurable and quantifiable,” writes Glieck. In fact, Shannon doesn’t use the newer word “information,” instead using the term “intelligence” as in “transmission of intelligence.” “Information” doesn’t yet have the digital-influence definition denoted today.  Another new word—transistor—is chosen in the same year by a vote of Bell scientists. It’s a hybrid of “varistor” and “transconductance”

And it’ll change the world.

But the first chapter will be about African talking drums. Sweet.

I’ve got a new book review up today over at Jesus Creed.

We’ve got another early blip in the inevitable flurry-to-come of theology meets digital technology. Christian blogger Tim Challies offers The Next Story: Life and Faith in the Digital Explosion, released April 2011 by Zondervan. Challies, a web designer in Ontario, runs on the Reformed side of the track, but generally speaks to a broad evangelical audience. His book feels penned to the same–pastors and thoughtful Christians should find it accessible, thoughtful, personal, and grounded.

Challies frames the book in his own experience living with glowing screens both day and night. “Is it possible that these technologies are changing me?” he wonders. To discern, he invites us to consider our own use of technology and add two additional facets: critical investigation and biblical theology. The triad of experience, theory, and theology carries through the book, even structuring the application points in his helpful chapter summaries and reflection questions.

The Right Questions
Just a brief glance over the table of contents tells me that Challies has spent some time working in my favorite world of media ecology. If the Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman references weren’t an early clue, his chapter categories are consistent with anyone thinking carefully about the digital world we find ourselves in: Mediation/Identity, Distraction, Informationalism, Truth/Authority, Visibility and Privacy. Pastors should jot down the list; Challies is addressing the right questions and we need more to follow his lead.

Continue Reading at Jesus Creed…

I’m posting chapters from my masters thesis in theology and media ecology.  See more here

I dream of seminaries as DJ schools, culturally engaged centers of remixing.

Steve Taylor (Out of Bounds Church)

This chapter was inspired in part by Imogen Heap:

The key thing about Imogen Heap, aside from her strong artistry, is the way she crafts her records as nearly a digital native. She uses twitter not as a marketing tool, but as a feedback loop and content creation center: inviting fans to contribute audio samples to what will be a complete album.

“Remix” is the province of the digital native, who effortlessly grabs slices of material and reverses, repeats, or modifies it to create a new meaning, with both the old and the new shining through.  (check out media professor Jamie O’Neil for great thoughts on this). Junior high boys do this all the time: just go hang on YouTube.

If this was true, the next question for me was:  how will this work with scripture?  Already the the text is newly juxtaposed everywhere from Logos Bible Software to Facebook.  Does this change our perception of the nature and authority of scripture?

I think it will.

• Chapter 7 Scripture Remixed–Re-creation and Identity p110-125 (pdf, 781k)

I’m posting chapters of my masters thesis.  See more here.

For 170 years we have been obsessed with machinery that would gives access, and give it fast, to a Niagara of information. Obviously, the Internet does that and we must give all due praise for its efficiency. But it does not help us, neither does television or any other 19th or 20th century medium (perhaps except the telephone), to solve the problem of what is significant information.
~  Neil Postman

Having to squeeze my thesis into a linear, black & white, double-spaced chunk of paper was ironic, considering I was writing about digital media. Even so, I did my best. I even started this chapter with a YouTube video:

This one (or previous versions of it) has been super popular. No doubt some of the stats are tilted for effect. But it shows how strong the tie between relationship and information is. In fact, this latest version picks up what I’ve asserted for five years now: Facebook will be more important than Google, because it has the power to sort or filter information based on our relationships: which is a natural human function. Think word of mouth.

In this chapter, I envision the church as the natural community that can practice discernment in the filtering of information, and specifically imagine the use of scripture in the community.

• Chapter 6 Scripture and the Church as Filtering Communities p91-109 (pdf, 986k)

I’m posting chapters of my masters thesis as I finish packing them to PDF. See more here.

The research hasn‘t caught up yet, but a simple Google search on “teens text each other in the same room” pulls up thousands of conversations by parents who don‘t understand their digital native kids.

One dad of a sixteen year old girl writes, “During dinner, I noticed that the girls had their mobile phones out and were text messaging. However, what I did not realize at first is that they were text messaging each other…while sitting at the same table!”  Another parent responds, “I hate that! I have no idea why kids text when they are sitting next to each other.”

Digital immigrants are mystified. Why do kids act as if they are not close to each other? Their confusion is justified—they do not live with a reconfigured perception of distance. For the digital native, physical proximity has become irrelevant for relationship. The technologies of instant messaging (IM) via personal computer, or SMS messages via handheld cell/smart phones allow the same experience of textual dialog whether one is down the street or across the country—or ten feet apart.

–

This chapter may be one of the more difficult to follow: I blaze through two questions that had bothered me:  When is scripture? and Where is scripture?  Though not framed quite that way, these have been important questions in the history of Christian thought on the doctrine of scripture. I show that in the environment of the digital native, both questions are collapsed upon themselves:  scripture is both past and present and it is everywhere.

• Chapter 5 The Global Village-Scripture in Time and Space p79-90 (pdf, 1mb)