theo|digital

A friend of mine recently pointed me to this YouTube hosted clip of news-anchor Ted Koppel in the 1980s.  Ted laments that the modern ability to archive news footage is creating mountains of information that are unsorted and overwhelming. “Perhaps the greatest need we have is for a body of people who will sift from that information—sort of winnow it down—so we have something in a form of order.”

It’s amazing to see Koppel’s foresight in the 80s on this. In my unpublished thesis, I’ve argued that “filtering” is the key to information space, and that this filtering will not be done by authoritative gateways (e.g. librarian and editors, as Koppel suggests), but by the “community” itself (e.g. Facebook).  Getting even crazier, I went on to compare the church to a “filtering community,” suggesting that the church itself could (will?) become the relational arbiter in a sea of data.

Identity will be defined by what we see.  What we can find.  What we deem as important compared to millions of other unimportant things.  Existence will be defined by visibility.  Does it appear through the filter?

A new meaning for the church charged with “you are a light of the world.”

So here’s the problem:  I’ve moved to Orlando, Florida.  I was a campus minister for eight years, I have a seminary degree, and now am a manager in a Christian missions agency that serves missional leaders throughout the US.  But I don’t have a local body of believers to call my own—to serve or lead or embody redemption with.  And the biggest barrier to me finding one?  Probably myself.   Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Surprise. I’m Leading a Small Group

Wow.  Well, a couple weeks ago I showed up at Summit Church to hear my new friend Alistair Sterne speak. The church is a large one: almost 3,000 people attending services.  And while it has awesome indie-professional worship music and a gifted communicator, it’s faux-perfect veneer brushes up roughly against my “ideal missional church” list (especially when I’m in a snooty mood).

Alistair did great speaking, but I was caught off guard by them announcing “group night.”  It’s a once-a-quarter thing they do that gives an opportunity to form an all new small group, right with the people standing there in the room.  I had been contemplating going to one of these, but had still been pretty unsure I wanted to commit to Summit. I decided to stay and at least see what it was like—mostly to hear them talk about their small group theology/system.

I walked out as a small group leader.

Yeah, that was a surprise. It’s just that the method they use is a little chaotic. They stake big signs around the room announcing Orlando locations, and people gather awkwardly to try to start conversations with strangers, attempting not only to get past the “name and what do you do?” stage, but straight into the “you want to be in a group?”  “you want to talk about life? “you want to talk about schedules (this one is particularly difficult: find 10 people who KNOW each other real well to agree on a ‘good night’ for something) “you want to elect a leader? (we’ve already forgotten names, but I’m sure we can get a leader… J)”

That said, I’m guessing what often happens is what happened to me: I know I can step up and help; that I can step into a group conversation and bring convergence.  I’ve been doing this for a long time (probably others in the room, too), and I’ve gotta think all those people feel pressed to step up or risk a weirdo group meltdown… so they do.

And so I did.

And honestly, I sound a little disconcerted, but not overly negative. The people I met who are looking for a group seemed genuine and interesting and I will look forward to getting to know them.  I will just have to be honest that while I like Summit Church… I really hadn’t decided to land there.  Can I really be excited about a church that has four services every Sunday and its own iPhone app?

Here’s how it will work: this really is only an 8 week commitment.  Summit asks a group to start out and “try things out” for 2 months, and then after that sorta lock-in.  This will give me a chance to pray and evaluate, just like everybody else in the group, and see if God has me here for the time being.

Why “compromise” on my church values? Well…  the reality is that me sitting at home, uncommitted and ungiving and unengaged, isn’t the way I want to live.

I’ve often counseled college students that its hard to reflect on life while standing still.  Waiting to see what career God will drive us towards, for instance, is difficult when we’re pulled off to the side of the road, just trying to Think our way there.  Typically, cars steer better when they’re moving; its better to merge into traffic while we discover where we’re going.  Maybe this is God is doing with me.  Getting me to hit the gas pedal, even if I don’t know the destination.

So I’m gonna help lead a group for a while. On the way, I’ll still be reflecting on the church selection process.  This is just a chance to start rolling again.

Ridley Scott’s fascinating new digital-native project is today, Saturday June 24th. It’s another great example of what Marshall McLuhan called “the collapse of the author and reader.” Funny thing is, McLuhan was thinking of the photo-copy machine, which he thought of as a “self-publishing” platform, making everyone a content creator, not just consumer. Not sure if he could have imagined YouTube, or this:

Saturday: we are live tweeting the missional commons discussion in Ft. Wayne Indiana where a few of us have gathered to dialogue.

Well, I’m soft-launching my new blog here on Christmas Eve (of all times), although it’s not really new.  We know that I’ve been blogging for years over at http://chrisridgeway.blogspot.com.  It’s had several names (blog names always feel somewhat dispensable), including “To Have Mine Match” and most recently “Jesus Under Plastic.”  This time, it felt right to move to a whole new platform—so I’ve got my own WordPress 2.9 install all spiffed up now and my own new domain:   www.theodigital.com.

My domain www.chrisridgeway.net will direct here soon, and I still plan to keep personal news and family and friends with me.  But  because I’ve spent the last 1.5 years focused on the intersection of digital media ecology and theology, I didn’t want to stop when the degree did.  This name gives me a space to think and do theology as a digital native, and simultaneously try to do that in the missional conversation.

There’s still a lot of stuff not right on here (Feedburner isn’t working properly, tags aren’t correctly implemented, I have some introduction pages that I need to write, and I’m not too excited about the webcam pic on the left).  But this is good enough for now.

Also, Merry Christmas.  :)

I’m still building my new site.  If somehow you’ve landed here, feel free to check me out at http://chrisridgeway.blogspot.com.  See ya soon.

TECHNOLOGY / INTERNET

This has been happening for a while, but NY Times has a good story on how the Wikipedia effect of knowledge is hitting Google Maps.

Note the quote from TeleAtlas officials: “Most of our customers expect a level of due diligence and quality that is way more than what a community is going to put together,” said Patrick McDevitt, vice president of global engineering at Tele Atlas.

The problem for McDevitt is, the authoritative gatekeeping structure of knowledge aggregation is increasingly losing its illusion of perfect accuracy. NY Times is right: often pay-for data is missing major and minor changes, like the Burger King near my apartment that has been closed for a year but still shows up when I’m looking for a Whopper. Why is a modestly-paid van-cartegrapher that drives by your neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon more definite than the tiny efforts of your entire neighborhood? If we answer “he’s a professional”–it’s true, but isn’t it thin ground? Does a salary mean better accuracy? It probably guards against intentional pranking, but I doubt it adds a passion for detail. Extrinsic motivation (salaried map person) typically doesn’t beat intrinsic motivation (neighbor who wants their neighborhood marked right!).

The role of the “expert” either dies or is modified greatly in digital culture.

Guess that’s why Google is slowly dropping the paid data model, opting instead for local, amateur groups and reading their own street signs on Google Street View!  Guess that’s the next best thing to being there.  :)

ps – I really do hope to a have a new blog soon.  Information culture and theology still being the main lines of thought, with everything else tossed in.  Whatcha think:  aim for the holidays?  Christmas or January might be the way to go.

Anyone meet Benson Hines when he was at University of Illinois?

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

A Google research team made a startling announcement late last night.

But close though we may have come to a theory of the brain, the body – computer hardware – wasn’t capable of handling the extraordinary processing demands that any reasonably “intelligent” brain would place on its circuitry until Moore’s Law really kicked in a few years back and the modern ultra-dense machinery of atomic scale-sized gates and their light-based interconnections finally reached the scale of brain neurons – and then surpassed it, when, in early 2007, a tight-knit, vaguely feared quantum computing group here at Google extended computers with quantum bits of Einstein-Bose condensate, polynomially speeding up our machines’ data-processing ability.

Now we were finally ready to begin the painstaking work of building the first evolving intelligent system. We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity (as we decided to refer to our Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity early on) as a collection of interconnected evolving agents. Second – and this really cost us an arm and leg in hardware and core time – we let the system build its own heuristics, deploy them as agents and evolve them by running a set of evolutionary cascades within probabilistic Bayesian domains. Go read…