Technology 2

The other event that has acted as a catalyst for a round of thinking on technology might perhaps be of more world-historical import than spilling a Nalgene bottle full of water onto my laptop: the revolutions sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. I will not pretend to be fully conversant in what is actually taking place in all of these countries. The nature of my life right now makes me more in the throes of the writings of Sir Thomas More and Karl Marx than the numerous publications covering the uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, and other countries (although from reading a good deal of Marx in the past month, this current spate of revolutions seems highly reminiscent in its scattered and uncertain nature as a similar foment of revolution that swept across Europe in 1848 and precipitated a good deal of writing from the pen of the young German political economist).

The purpose of this post is to suggest a way of thinking about these revolutions in terms of technology. I applaud the outpouring of democracy in these nations and pray for guidance for our nation’s and other’s leaders in best handling this crisis so as to most prevent bloodshed and ensure liberty for the oppressed of this world. (Though Thomas Jefferson’s famous statement, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” might certainly prove applicable here.) Freedom of religion, assembly, and conscience, as well as the right to elect leaders and eject from power incompetent, malicious, or impotent politicians is such a bedrock for so much of the good that this nation has produced that I wish the same opportunities for every other person to thrive within a culture of such freedoms.

But, on to technology. The social networking sites Facebook and Twitter have received many accolades for their role in facilitating the rebellions; for giving the young revolutionaries a platform with which to plan, coordinate, and encourage one another in the face of terrific opposition. Undoubtedly, much of this praise is due. These websites were actively utilized by the protesters and aided their abilities to act unilaterally and effectively. But I fear that, perhaps, we are giving these tools too much credit. Revolutions, after all, did occur before the days of Facebook and Twitter.

In an article last fall in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell addressed this very issue in response to 2009’s so-called Twitter revolution in Iran (Mr. Gladwell’s article has taken on added prescience with the democratic movements afloat today). Gladwell’s basic argument, the entire article is worth reading, is that what matters most to successful and lasting revolution (which indeed begs the question of whether the recent events in the Arab world will prove to be such) is not the tools at the revolutionaries’ disposal, but the manner in which they work together, the length to which they are willing to go in their commitment to the cause, and the close-ties protesters have with other protesters. In other words, a series of Tweets will not prompt someone to go out and die for a cause. Twitter and Facebook were undoubtedly used as means towards the end of the revolutionary groups, just as the printing press has been used for a few centuries before. We ought not to deny that these social networking sites have been both affective and effective in the current revolutions, but we do need to try and maintain perspective as to what exactly these networks are accomplishing on their own--which is absolutely nothing.

People, real human individuals, are what give these networks their power, and, likewise, real human individuals powered the revolution in Egypt and are powering the continuing revolutions elsewhere. If there are heroes of these revolutions, it is not amoral, apolitical, value-neutral websites, but individuals who faced real dangers and real physical harm to stand for a cause they saw to be worth sacrificing for.

In the last post I mentioned that social networking sites are in and of themselves neither good nor evil, but can be used for either good or evil ends. The fact that Facebook was used in Egypt for something more consequential than telling everyone what you had for dinner tonight (homemade pizza, if anyone is interested) or sharing this new super sweet youtube video that you will forget about in a week is cause for celebration. But let’s not forget the human element, here. Facebook, as a subjective entity, has no moral choice about what happens or doesn’t happen through its world. The individual does. And the individuals in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world are at this time using this tool, and others, to wage war against oppression and tyranny.

May God bless them, whether they tweet the experience or not.

Technology

I have a fraught relationship with technology. Part of me appreciates it for its utility--the massive amounts of information it places at our fingertips, the resources for communication available through it, the ease with which it allows us to navigate previously difficult and/or time-consuming life functions. Conversely, part of me hates the alternatives of each of these aforementioned benefits: the deluge of information makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, I have seen relationships ruined by couples reigniting old flames through social networking tools, and it has furthered my generation’s psychological tendency to only value the easily attained and instantly gratified pleasures of this life.

Two completely unrelated events, both in terms of magnitude and importance, have spurred me to think a lot about technology recently. The first event is the subject of this post. The second will come next.

The first of these events was spilling water on my laptop a few weeks ago (if it needed explanation this is the event of lesser import). My beloved HP was ruined and we are a computerless family. We borrow one from our pastor now, but for two whole weeks (how long this seems without technology) we had no computer, no television. And it was awesome. There was no compulsive checking of e-mail and facebook, no lure of old seasons of 30 Rock on Netflix, no internet-based sudoku websites (seriously, addictive). I read more, wrote stuff out by hand (even letters to friends), and enjoyed more conversations with people. I got bored. Do you realize how hard won the achievement of boredom is these days? You never have to be bored anymore. I have a Netflix queue with over 30 movies waiting to be watched at my leisure. Pitchfork.com is filled with new “it” bands for me to listen to. Youtube has videos of monkeys… monkeys! Boredom is so rare and so oppressive to the modern twentysomething that we have no idea how to react when it comes. You know what I did? I went and talked to people, face to face. I thought of and prayed for people I hadn’t thought about for months.  Occasionally, I even sat around bored and decided I needed a hobby other than reading (welcome back to my life, running and basketball). It was incredibly liberating.

I have struggled, since getting a computer back, at maintaining these better alternatives. It is much more difficult to make the decision to not watch a video on Netflix when you have a computer already logged in to Netflix than it is when you don’t have a computer. But here is what I have to be careful about, and I feel that many other  anti-technology (Luddites is the historical/snobbish term for this) advocates need to be careful about this as well: the tendency to assign agency to amoral technological artifacts. Or, in other words, blaming technology for being undisciplined in the way we spend our time as if the technology has some sort of mastery over an individual by virtue of its existence. Facebook is neither inherently good nor inherently evil--it is what we use it for. If we use it to stay in touch with far off friends and family and post pictures of our family vacations and we check it rarely and without compulsion, facebook is fine, good even. But, if we use it to chat with ex-girlfriends or boyfriends when we are married or we can’t resist the temptation to login to the point that it prevents us from accomplishing diligently the tasks set before us and we spend all day scanning its pages looking up the inconsequential minutiae of other’s lives, then facebook is a bad thing. We are the ones who give it whatever power it has. There are other websites which are inherently bad, but we do injustice to claim that all websites are that way.

The key then for me is not simply cutting myself off from technology in some sort of monastic asceticism, but confronting my own desire to be entertained cheaply (technology fulfills this basic desire very well) rather than doing the harder work of studying, engaging in conversation, or exercising, etc. If you are an essentialist, like I am, you believe that every person is born with a basic human nature that we are basically stuck with and it has consisted of basically the same sorts of tendencies, proclivities, dispositions, attitudes, excesses, in a word, problems, since the dawn of man and will continue relatively unabated until the end of this whole thing. Therefore, as Uncle Ellis told Ed Tom Bell, “What you got ain’t nothin’ new.” People have always sought indolence over hard work; ease over difficulty; entertainment over intense mental concentration. What is different about our era is that we have more leisure time on average than any society has ever had before, and we have more egalitarian access to cheap entertainment.

A student in my Renaissance course was talking about how easy it was for Erasmus of Rotterdam to be as prolific in his writing and reading as he was because, and I quote, “he didn’t have anything better to do, like watch TV.” My professor asked the student to qualify the word “better” in his comment. After a moment’s reflection, the student returned, “Ok, easier.” In our house church meeting a few weeks ago we were talking about a passage where Jesus leaves the disciples and prays throughout the entire night. Jokingly, but halfway serious as well, a girl said that it was easy for Jesus, not only because he was God in the flesh, but because he had nothing else better/easier to do.

To me this is crazy (though I believe it a good deal of the time). Imagining it was any easier to pray through the night without youtube denies the basic pull of human nature. Likewise, imagining intense study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew was any easier in the days of dimly lit studies and handwritten treatises is insane. If the tools with which to learn were any accurate barometer, we would be far more learned today than our ancestors ever managed to be. I have the Greek New Testament a click away right now, and another click would get me a translation into English vernacular. It is always hard to be disciplined, it always goes against human nature to choose work and diligence and difficulty over the easy road. Let us not be glib, we simultaneously live in a unique age and an age just like all others.

Sidenote: I have all too often seen the people who abstain from facebook or some other web phenomenon claiming some measure of self-righteousness for their bold forbearance, as if refraining from an innocuous website is a measure of righteousness. They make a personal decision, based on individual preference or conviction, and then when others do not make the same move, they pretend to be better than them for acting on a personal conviction. This is a dangerous thing. I had a friend one time who decided it was always wrong to go even a single mile per hour over the speed limit. I, and others, were otherwise convicted and he would get irate when we got places faster than him. If you make a personal decision, based on personal conviction not spelled out explicitly by Scripture, do not absolutize this decision. Do not set yourself up above others for doing something that is not in any way praiseworthy.

Ideally, I will pursue things that override my desire for cheap entertainment and ease. People do this all of the time. Even today. Their lives have an ambition, though. A goal. They have a plan and they want to see that plan accomplished. It is hard to sacrifice the fleeting pleasures of entertainment for the lasting fulfillment of hard work, discipline, and a devoted life. But to imagine satisfaction comes any other way is a denial of the idea that we were perhaps created to be something more than consumers whose one ambition is to be entertained. But the choice is our own, we are not bound by technology unless we fetter ourselves.

A Danger in Theological Writing, part two

This is the second post in a brief series where I quote smart men and what they have had to say about theology by way of warning. For the first post, see here.

Here is William Tyndale, the great one-time Catholic priest, Protestant reformer, translator of the Bible into English (the King James Version is about 75% Tyndale), theologian, exile, and eventual martyr on a danger particular to those of the reformed persuasion on the danger of proof-texting Scripture and rushing ahead to a particular passage while ignoring what comes before it (this quote is excerpted from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning):

Tyndale’s interest in circumstance is reflected still more closely in his conviction that the reader must be sensitive to the natural order of a text, even one that does not tell a story, and must not jumble the beginning and the end. God’s word cannot be cut and spliced; to do so, indeed, can be dangerous, as Tyndale, following Luther, explains in the Prologue to Romans. The “unquiet, busy, and high-climbing” spirit that rushes to chapters 9-11 of Paul’s epistle in the hopes of understanding predestination runs the risk of falling into despair. Only when the reader has fully experienced the meaning of the first seven chapters is he ready for the eighth, which in turn, is the necessary introduction to those that follow: “After that, when thou art come to the eighth chapter, and art under the cross and suffering of tribulation, the necessity of predestination will wax sweet, and thou shalt feel how precious a thing it is. For except thou have born the cross of adversity and temptation, and hast felt thyself brought unto the very brim of desperation, yea, and unto hell-gates, thou canst never meddle with the sentence of predestination without thine own harm, and without secret wrath and grudging inwardly against God; for otherwise it shall not be possible to think that God is righteous and just.” (103)

Though Tyndale is quite clearly making the standard reformed case that God predestines believers to eternal election or eternal damnation, he realizes that this is a hard truth and one that requires other Scripture to make it palatable to the Christian soul. That is why the famous passage about the potter and the clay in Romans 9 comes where it does, namely, following Romans 1-8. If we take little chunks of Scripture away from their context to prove a specific point we run the risk of talking about God not how he really is, in the sense of perfectly righteous and just, but how out theological framework has already defined him to be. A good warning from a man who went to his death for the Word of God.

A Danger in Theological Writing, part one

This post will contain mostly a giant quote. But it is a good one. As someone who is interested in theology, frequently reads theology, and tends toward the very human error of getting excited about one theological truth to the neglect of another, I have read some things in various materials lately that have caused me to reconsider how I come about theology and understanding of Scripture.

Here is A.W. Pink, a British theologian of the previous century, at the introduction to his now classic work The Sovereignty of God.

"Almost all doctrinal error is, really, Truth perverted, Truth wrongly divided, Truth disproportionately held and taught. The fairest face on earth, with the most comely features, would soon become ugly and unsightly, if one member continued growing while the others remained undeveloped. Beauty is, primarily, a matter of proportion. Thus it is with the Word of God: its beauty and blessedness are best perceived when its manifold wisdom is exhibited in its true proportions." (9)

The catalyst for the writing of Pink’s book was what he saw as the almost exclusive concentration on the freewill of men and women in his contemporary world, to the exclusion of God’s sovereign control. He hoped his book to act as a corrective to this, to restore some balance and proportionality to doctrine that his readers might come to see God more for who he really is than who they would rather imagine him to be.

This is a good warning for me, a warning to not focus on the one thing that seems so important to me at the time and to forget that our God is vast and contains multitudes, including incredible paradoxes. I agree, then, wholeheartedly with Pink. The source of most errors that I have ever witnessed in the church is not ill intentions or sin, but focusing on one thing to the point that another equal truth is entirely ignored. Balance really is the most precarious position.

Apple and Advertising

My favorite ad from the big game the other night (oh, by the way, I am glad my prediction was wrong as concerns the actual footballing: Go Packers), was Motorola’s ad for their new tablet. Hoping to grab some market share aware from Apple’s dominant iPad, Motorola went straight for the jugular. That it was successful speaks to the brilliance of the marketing team that created the ad, and to the ripeness of attacks on the technology shibboleth, Apple.

During the 1984 Super Bowl Apple made one of the more famous commercials of all time, featuring a defiant woman throwing a hammer through a giant projection screen featuring  Big Brother from George Orwell’s classic book. The ad states that, because of Apple, 1984 will not be like 1984. However, now Apple has become what they purported to overthrow, a massive corporation whose users exhibit slave-like, obsessive devotion to their products. Steve Jobs operates as the prophet to the Apple-ites. Every new product is treated as an oracle from above. As I sit and type this (on an Apple computer!) in the school’s library I am surrounded by other Mac users and the white computer with the bitten apple logo is a staple for being taken seriously as a counter cultural insider at local coffee shops. The white earbuds connected to an iPod are visible on half a dozen people from my vantage point. Here we all are, not conforming... together.

Which made this ad extraordinary. Not because I give a crap about the Motorola tablet. Why in the world would I prefer one multi-billion dollar company’s product to another’s? That’s not what this is about anyway. Why sacrifice the cool factor, the in-factor, of the iPad for a Motorola look-alike? The slogan “A tablet to create a better world” is inane, and plays in to the same sort of technological triumphalism that has made Apple’s shtick seem old. How exactly does a slightly different tablet computer make the world a better place? As far as product selling goes the ad may or not be effective. As social commentary, though, the commercial said everything it needed to say.

This wasn’t the first time someone has taken on Apple in an ad campaign. A couple of years ago, HP did largely the same thing in a spot where they give hip looking youngsters a wad of cash with which to buy a computer. Deciding Apple was too expensive, and that they just weren’t “cool” enough to buy one, the attractive hipsters went with an HP model and pocketed the extra cash. Those ads were good and proved a point, but not quite as artistically as what Motorola has accomplished.

The Motorola spot went right after the 1984 aesthetic. The monotonous white clothing, everyone with their white earbuds  waiting for a white train on a white subway platform and working in a sterile, white office all remind the viewer of the pervasive whiteness of Apple’s products (not to mention its users). The man is reading a copy of 1984 on his Motorola tablet. The romance angle mimics that between Winston and Julia in the Ministry of Truth. Of course the ad doesn’t show what happens to Winston and Julia at the end of the book, but the idea of breaking out of the ordinary and accepted has a certain appeal. Also, the fact that the defiant couple look like a couple of standard issue Apple users helps to further the effectiveness of the ad. I love it when an ad can tell a compelling story, and Motorola spent their $6 million to tell a great story.

There is much to appreciate in the ad, many angles from which to mock Apple and things like Apple. And this is one of my favorite. The famous and hilarious website Stuff White People Like chronicles just these sort of mock defiant postures and preferences adopted by the (mostly) white, (mostly) upper middle class who imagine they are exerting individuality in becoming exactly like one another. Indeed, the subtitle to SWPL’s first print book is, “Your Guide to the Unique Tastes of Millions.”

Which couldn’t really say it better. At this point can you really imagine yourself to be more counter cultural for buying a Mac instead of a PC? An iPad instead of a Kindle or the Motorola thingy? Well, in a sense, yes. This is exactly the thrust of Apple’s marketing. Buy our computer because you are unique, artistic, visionary, and nothing says that like owning our computer products. And when you see someone else with the same white laptop (preferably in a coffee shop brewing “free trade” coffee) you can share a knowing nod, you are after all fellow revolutionaries in the war to bring down the madness of corporate excess from companies like Microsoft, not to mention so very creative. And it is brilliant advertising. Everyone wants to feel this way. And if the barrier to entry is spending a little more on a laptop you need anyway, why not make the jump? Heck, I just ruined my laptop and am looking for ways to justify buying a Mac. I am everything I am railing against. But I can appreciate a joke directed at me and people like me, and on this score Motorola had a zinger the other night.

Super Bowl Prediction

I just thought I would get this into writing before kickoff here in a few hours. Let me briefly state my qualifications for making this pick: I have watched, perhaps combined, a single NFL game this year if you add up all of the fractions of games I have watched. I detest Ben Roethlisberger, but not because of all of the new stuff that has come to light. I don't follow it too closely, but he seems like an all-around scumbag. Not that this has made me like him anymore, but the reason I detest him is that his senior year at Miami of Ohio he single-handedly dismantled the CSU Rams while I sat in the crowd with my chest painted green and gold like an idiot. I don't like Troy Polamalu, and let's face it, you don't either, you just like his hair. If I had to choose between visiting Pittsburgh or visiting Green Bay I would choose to visit Green Bay because at least there people talk funny. Jordy Nelson, wide receiver for the Packers, is a K-State grad so I always wish good things for him. Aaron Rodgers seems like a class act, and the anti-Ben. Brett Favre's fall from grace (finally) would be sealed nicely with a Packers Super Bowl championship in the year of his public meltdown. He, Tiger Woods, and Ben should all hang out sometime.

So, with all of those qualifications stated up front, I am predicting a Steelers win. This just isn't my year for sports. Steelers 24, Packers 17.