theo|digital

First, the rhetoric on this one has me mad.  One commentator calls the award “wicked and ignorant.”  She asserts that the award is a “great and prestigious award given by liberals to liberals. NCNA–no conservatives need apply. This is the way of the world, and so what? Life isn’t for prizes.”

Good thing this is an Op-Ed and not on the news page–it wouldn’t pass fact check.  Sure, it’s okay if she doesn’t like Al Gore’s prize.  And we wonder too why Reagan never got awarded one.  But she doesn’t mention that many of the candidates are relatively neutral in political affiliation (2006 – an economist  2004 – a zoologist ), but that recipients that are political in modern decades include iconic Republican Henry Kissinger and Conservative Party David Trimble (UK) in 1998.

More importantly:

Beyond the incivility and blithe assumptions of either corruption or idiocy (the ad hominem is always unbecoming), there is a intensely forest-for-the-trees like understanding that is missing from many of the critics.  Maybe we can understand what it is by watching the short interview of Committee Member Geir Lundestad explain the award:

Interview about the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize (8 minutes)

Lundested official’s official Nobel statement includes the following:

“he has produced a new global climate”
“changing the international climate IS a concrete achievement” (emphasis his)
“we have been trying to support these ideals for 118 years”

On the objection that Obama’s award is premature:

“we have gone over these arguments… they are very obvious.” … “there are the obvious counter-arguments” “but he presents this wonderful agenda and we feel we should support him.” ” We have been over these arguments many many times, obviously”

The reality is that discourse, covenant, promise, words with intent… *are* real action. Let’s please stop saying things like “just words.” Words are real action. We believe this daily in big and small things: every time we say a wedding vow or give a hug or sign a form to volunteer at a school. In systems of nations and families and trade networks, speech-acts have a multiplying real effect. The Nobel committee understands this.

What they might have missed is that there is a portion of the public that artificially separates “words” and “action.” They’re missing it.

The surprise at the award is entirely justified. It makes sense that some would be concerned. (Nicholas Kristof represents). Many (but not all) of the awards in the past seem to be given more as “lifetime achievement awards.” But as the committee has explained, this is was not Nobel’s intent for the prize. And I hope maybe their action (which, case in point: was ‘no more’ than words), helps us unite these ideas of communication and action in more thoughtful light.

I love Mad Men, so I couldn’t pass this by. (originally saw it on Paste)

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Also: hoola hoops.

THE BQE- A Film By Sufjan Stevens from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

Cheesy, but I think this is hilarious/great.

I’m starting to find a great deal of exciting stuff on the blog of Lance Strate, the president of the Media Ecology Association and a professor at Fordham University in New York.  His most recent post highlights the following fascinating video note by one of his students.

Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.

It’s confirmed, I’ve definitely got some beefs with Dr. Schuchardt. But his scriptural redux here is even more clever than the first. Laughed out loud.

If you like, go back and watch the entire video, and you’ll notice he quotes the very mentor I thought he was likely to be following—Neil Postman—who is the father of the school of media ecology that tends to focus on the negative effects of media.

His negativity I think colors the quality of his analysis. For instance, trying to speak against mediated communication, he draws three rules for ministry from Jesus:
1. You have to be there
2. You have to speak in as un-mediated a manner as possible
3. You have to do the work of the gospel

Regarding the New Testament: for starters, what of the centurion’s daughter—healed in the absence of presence being a model of faith! Or Paul’s epistles to the churches? Are we to think that his ministry impact was diluted by the scribes, scrolls, and messangers? Hopefully not—Christianity is actually based on a doctrine of mediation: revelation in Scripture.

Further, are we intended to look at the examples of mediation in a pre-modern, craft literate society and these are normative for today? In this case, cars are no longer appropriate for ministry, I’d think.

I suggest that it is rhetoric without substance to say that God has not spoken to someone via e-mail or a TV screen, therefore God does prefer digital media. With things like Facebook only about 4 years old, aren’t we jumping the gun a little (the printed book has had 500 years, the manuscript about 3,000). But this wouldn’t be my biggest concern. It would be that Dr. Schuchardt might consider an audible voice of God would be considered unmediated (God doesn’t have vocal chords: sound waves and air are most certainly God communicating through something else), but further that “direct” communication from God is privileged over mediated communication. This is true of some more extreme versions of Pentecostalism, but I don’t think fits standard, for instance, Protestant language which would see the Word and Sacraments as the primary realities of God’s communication and action. Both real, but both mediated by the stuff of humanity and creation.

Sorta funny redux of the verse. I just discovered Read Schuchardt today, who turns out to be a Media Ecology prof (phd NYU) here in Chicagoland at Wheaton. This a few of his other comments on this lecture weren’t bad, but I have a feeling that Schuchardt is a bit of a Christian kermudgen on media experience more a la Neil Postman than Marshall McLuhan, so I’m not sure we’d be best buddies. I’m a little more of an optimist.

This is funny to me at this point, and definitely almost counts a nerd joke in the stuff I’m studying.  Two things that might help it be better  1)  Marshall McLuhan, one of the founders of media ecology, died in 1980, and 2)  He released a book in 1967 The Medium is the Massage which was a play on his quote, “the medium is the message” that was laid out in a print photo collage that foreshadowed internet media…

The remix is by Jamie O’Neil, who seems to have some great forthcoming work on the remix as epistemology, which I think I’ll want to read for my thesis. This is one of the categories I haven’t thought as much on… trying to stay closer to “information” than “media” – though after convergence, I don’t know who I’m kidding, but I gotta stay sane somehow.

Can’t resist posting this. It’s on it’s way up, and it fits right into my thoughts on how new technologies are always first used as entertainment (and critics decry them near the end of that first phase). Plus it’s funny.