It seems our basic informational requests are now mediated through computer applications. Instead of asking someone who you would consider to be knowledgeable on a subject for help, you first search the web for the answer. This has become so pervasive that we don’t even see the shift that has happened, until someone like a family member calls you requesting your help. Yesterday my mother texted me about a problem she was having with her phone. My instinct was to simply go to a web browser and do a keyword search for the problem. The first result I clicked gave me an answer, totaling less than 30 seconds of labor.

The question I was asking myself after I had resolved the issue was, why didn’t she just do this herself. It seems the answer lies in the fact that there has been a cultural shift that has rapidly shifted the way we seek answers to our problems. And while I would not enjoy entertaining consider losing the gains allowed by the internet, what I would ask is what have we lost as a result. The internet result I received was impersonal; I couldn’t even tell you where I found it or who wrote the information without looking at my browser history. Maybe I should of left a comment, thanking them for answer but is that really much better.

But my mother on the other hand did receive a personal interaction, she did further and deepen the relationship I have with her by asking for help. I wonder what a generation that relies on google more than a friend for help is losing.

My informal analysis would say that google is helpful for basic information, but when it comes to interpreting those elements, creating more complex elements out of those basic informational blocks then real personal relations are required. When you are stuck, when you aren’t sure how to go forward, it seems that people not mediated through web searches is required.

Further questions arise to this rise of web based education & learning. We are a long way from the world where one learned the family business from early in one’s childhood. Instead today, when we want to learn to cook, rarely is it next to one’s mother learning the passed on recipes of the family. Instead we google it, finding a recipe & watching youtube clips of strangers walking you through the steps. Instead of learning to tie a tie from one’s father we search for graphics & video clips to learn. Instead our experience of learning & personal growth being tied to relationships, building the history which is so vital for any relationship, we miss out on because it is through disconnected web searches.

Of late I’ve been taking this question and moving into the realm of church life. What do we do when no one needs to come to a physical building to learn about Jesus? What place does that building then have? What’s the point of our Sunday gatherings? What does discipleship look like when it isn’t information/knowledge centered & focused? I feel there is something of value in the gathering, but it seems our understanding of why it is valuable needs to be reevaluated. It seems we need to do some serious reflection upon the central role for the church because while we are trying to do the same thing (announcing the kingdom come, displaying the crucified God, making disciples to follow him…) for people to get there it will need to look very different. We don’t live in a world where information is limited and community is centralized & predictable. Instead we live in a world where everything is changing no one is staying anywhere very long, community is only portrayed {unrealistically} on TV but rarely lived out well but where information is flowing out of every device we interact with.

So what does the church look like in a world where information flows freely but people rarely truly engage with other people beyond the commodified economic exchanges of the day.

I find the whole topic of how technology and media affect us all very interesting. While I’ve read about the topic often before Carr definitely brings a new perspective as well as considerably different insights into technology and its affects upon us. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Carr’s focus is on how technology, specifically the internet is affecting the way our brains work. The neuroscience that he brings is all very interesting, even to someone like me who isn’t all that interested in science.

One of the central premises of the book is the plasticity of the brain. It was often thought, until fairly recently, that the brain was the one part of the body which was completely static. Carr details much research from the last century which has slowly come to realize that the brain is not static at all but is continuing to change and evolve throughout one’s life.

Our brains are no different than any other part of our body. If you run regularly your body will automatically respond by strengthening your legs, lungs, and heart among other things. The same goes for taxi drivers and their ability to navigate complex road systems. Neuroscientists have been observing the brains of London cab drivers. Apparently the area of the brain (posterior hippocampus) that is used for storing and manipulating the spatial representation of a person’s surroundings was much larger than normal. Also it continued to grow larger the longer the person drove cabs.

Carr gives many other examples of how the old adage of ‘if you don’t use it you’ll lose it’ applies to our brain also. What’s so interesting about this is the contingency and malleability of our brain and what potential that gives. Who we are and what we capable of doing is simply about development—which is rather Aristotelean, isn’t it? To become virtuous you must do acts of virtue over an extended and then it develops within you.

So after developing the idea that our brains are malleable, he then explores how the internet is changing our brains for better or worse. While he explores this idea in different ways, ultimately he wants to show us how the way the internet is constructed affects us in a deep way and causes us to then think and act like the internet itself. The object which we made is then remaking us into its own image.

An example of this is Google. It’s great, it gave us access to quick, easy, relevant results to vast information.

Google is intentionally fashioning the web to make it more distracting. Carr breaks down how the Google advertising model encourages clicking and aimless browsing because each click-through and distraction is another dollar for them. Our wasted time and mental energy is Google’s profit. They give us many free online products, therefore we are online more therefore clicking more therefore making them money. Kind of like the candy dentist’s office give kids when they leave.

When reading an article online, everything is vying for our attention, the images & videos, the hyperlinks within the article, the hyperlinks in the sidebar, the ads, not to mention all the other distractions of email, social media, text messages in the background. All those reasons make it distracting and mentally taxing to read online. Carr describes how each hyperlink in an article causes you to stop reading if only for the second to process the decision of clicking on the article or not.

There is so much information I could mention, how scholarly journals have seen a decrease in both the amount of citations and the diversity of articles cited. Instead of perusing through a journal, skimming many marginally relevant articles, they simply read or skim the most popular readings—the top results of a search—and ignore the rest. Which creates a self-perpetuating problem of homogeneity. Or how hyperlinked text has shown to decrease students learning ability. Or how a simple walk in the woods can increase testing abilities compared to a walk in the city—showing how are brains desperately needs margins to be able to process information.

All this has made me think about how I am using the internet and technologies in general. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my smartphone since I got it. Is its convenience worth the cost of distraction and the unknown mental and social costs? I’m still on the fence.

I’ve for some time tired to do certain things to stop or slow the distracting fragmenting nature the internet can have.

On my blog I have hyperlinks hidden until hovered over. The thought was most hyperlinks of importance would be understood to be there from context and the conventions of how things are mentioned. Also I’ve tried to pair down the them to be less cluttered, though this could be done further.

When reading blogs or social media,I will cmd + click a link so it opens in the background, allowing me to continue on that page with of the distraction of the back and forth. Often I will open multiple links while skimming through twitter updates, then focus on going through the tabs one by one. I think I developed this habit long ago when page load times where much longer as a way to offset waiting, but it helps in staving off distraction.

More boldly would be…scheduling of & limiting internet use. For some time I’ve been curious and interested in how great men and women of history ordered their life. It seems overwhelmingly that structure and consistency in schedule was vital for those great writers, artists, diplomats, etc. They all generally had times of production where all distractions were eliminated. They then had times for errands and ordinary work which today could be translated as email or other internet tasks. Though I’m apprehensive about doing this completely.

How To Spot a Church Movement – Tall Skinny Kiwi

Andrew Jones passes on some wisdom that he gained from Fuller prof. Dr Paul Pierson.

Key ideas that stuck out to me:

They always begin on the periphery of the institutional church

The result is the desire for a more authentic Christian life that often leads to concern for the church and world.

The movement is countercultural in some ways, often because it reaches out to those who have not been valued by their society.

Consequently there will be opposition by many in the dominant culture and church.

Make Plans, Not Resolutions: Reflections on Proverbs 16 – Jeremy Carr

The night before seeing this blog post I had a significant conversation with my wife about our plans for the future. I’m not sure how to take these words, because I’ve always been uncomfortable with planning. It seems so contradictory to faith and trust in God’s sovereign plan. It seems this post makes things rather simplistic, rather than speaking to the complexity and the aspect of faithful obedience while blind to an understanding of future events. On one hand we are to plan. I see this closely tied to Genesis 2, where we are called to be God’s stewards of the Earth. Conversely though, we often times—seen most strongly in the Bible—we are called to blindly step forward without much of a, or any, plan. The pin which holds it together I would argue is obedience. If you aren’t living in obedience then the call of faith won’t come. That life of obedience requires planning, but that won’t get you all the way when it comes living faithfully. Many times you will be called to do things that aren’t planned for and can’t be explained logically.

So this is the place I am. Trying to understand how to continue moving forward in faith when you don’t have much of a idea of where you are being lead.

The Revolutionary Table (aka living la vida local) – Mark Van Steenwyk

Mark describes himself as a ‘foodie’. He is not the only one; there has been a resurgence of food-conscious persons within the U.S. recently. Mark as many others also have realized the implications of their food choices beyond the organic/fast food dichotomy. Mark’s post speak of the economic implications that purchasing foods shipped around the world, cheaply priced by being subsidized by the backs of the farmers in already poor and marginalized countries.

What is most helpful, is that he finishes his post by giving a list of different web resources for living a sustainable lifestyle through locally-seasonally grown & preserved products.

Augmented Reality used to Fix Cars – Slashdot

Here’s a story via slashdot. I have never been good at fixing any car I’ve owned. Maybe this is what I need.

Pack a Gun to Protect Valuables from Airline Theft or Loss [Air Travel Tip] – Life Hacker

Never time you travel, just pack a gun in your check-on luggage. TSA will make sure that it doesn’t get lost.

the difference between “cultivating communities” and “building churches” – Kathy Escobar

A thoughtful post about the personal struggles of a community being a community instead of building a church. The interesting point that she makes is that she found that they needed to separate the two. Having them mixed caused a lack of commitment within the group. Having strong doses of music, teaching, & programs caused people to disengage from the messier {though essential} parts of community building.

If I reflect I can see a lot of her experiences within my own experiences. My community, while making up some families of our church, isn’t really tied to the church much at all. We could drop one or the other without much noticeable impact on the other.

It seemed that in previous centuries the church building was a cultural center for the community; today though, it has a periphery place. It may be a place of teaching or worship but not community. What are the implications for that? Is that good? Is it something I/we should be trying to counter-act?

She also recommends Jean Vanier’s Community and Growth a great read on communal living. He is the founder of the l’arche community in canada where henri nouwen lived and was deeply inspired.

Haiti | To Hell With Altruistic Capitalism – Kester Brewin

Here is my last link for the day. With all the blog post about Haiti or Pat Robertson’s comments on Haiti, here is Marxian analysis. I can deeply sympathize with his outlook. It is amazing that we can ignore the horrible conditions of a nation for decades, and it isn’t until a natural disaster that we come to help. Kester Brewin rightly points to many of the problems originating from economic relations, where we have dealt extremely unjustly with them. I pray that this incident will shed enough light upon the people of this nation for long enough for some substantial change.

My question, is twitter like a lot of the Church? Studies by Harvard & Nielsen suggest that Twitter has been better at signing up users than keeping them. It seems the church, especially evangelical circles, has done well in years past to draw ‘converts’ in. Things like Billy Graham crusades were highly effective in drawing in the masses.

The question is: what are we doing in the church to keep those people in the church, helping them become disciples of Christ? The Billy Graham bubble has busted, the mega-program centered church peaked in the nineties & is on the quick decline. Their is worry among some that the emergent ‘conversation’ is fizzling out? So what is left when all the lust is lost and there isn’t any new thing to dazzle the masses with?

Furthermore there is a recognition that Twitter is becoming a service for onlookers instead of a diverse multi-faceted conversation. Isn’t this just like the church, 20% of the members doing all the work, while the other 80% just show up to be served.

I’m a fan of both, Twitter and the Church. I’m interested to see what either does to offset this trend.

It seems that one of the biggest battle grounds of this war is over speed. I tried the beta 2 of FF and didn’t really notice any speed differences. Though this is from my eeepc (with the old celeron, not even the newer atom processor) so that could be the biggest bottleneck right there.

I’m a sucker for shiny new things, so I have already downloaded the FF 3.1b3. I hear development on chrome for linux is moving quickly, that will be nice to try out too. If I’m impressed with the new beta, I might write some more about it.

I was able to save about 30px just between the search box and the content below on gmail. Gmail is a very complex site, so many different divs; it was very hard to figure out what to change, even with the enormous aid of firebug.

Here is the CSS code to gain the desired results:

/*take out google logo on google docs*/
#logo-section {display:none;}
/*gain space on gmail around search box & logo*/
.IY0d9c {height: 44px;}
.zYsCRb {height: 44px !important;}

I should probably figure out how to limit the css only to certain websites, or I could end up with some weird outcomes.

At my previous employer I used google images a lot. It was a good place to quickly grab product images. Though it was never perfect. Google’s indexing grabs images from everywhere, which is nice but also not nice when you are looking for quality.

Thank God for my wife, she suggested I use flickr recently. It isn’t as though I didn’t know about the site. Everyone has a flickr account, you can upload your images to share with all your friends. I even had seen it used by artists. But for some reason, probably out of habit, I never thought of using it a resource for searching for certain types of images.

I have been trying to put an image in with every post, over on FUMCclass.com. I have quickly learned the power of using flickr instead of google for this type of work. What is most satisfying is the use of the creative commons licensing on flickr. I like to see that people are sharing images openly.

One day, when I get the time and energy I will love to start uploading a lot of my photography which just sits on my hard drive not being used.

Well I spent a majority of yesterday working out a syllabus for my Romans class. I had been putting it off for few weeks now. Partly the reason was I needed to finish working through the text so as to get a big picture of what is going on, but that was mainly an excuse for my procrastation.

I’ve got most of it done, but I have a little bit more formatting stuff that I want to do.

I haven’t messed with making a word doc in a while, I forgot how frustrating that program is. That is whenever you want to do anything even mildly creative, it seems to laugh in your face. When I used to work the computer store, I used InDesign a lot; I got used to being able to infinitely tweak the formatting.

It seems in the process of dumbing everything down for the average user, they {Microsoft programmers} have made advancing formatting virtually impossible.

Maybe I am expecting too much from the program, but when I {a fairly advanced user} can’t figure out how to move a table around on the page, then something seems very wrong.

</rant>

Whenever I get the finished product posted on FUMCclass.com, I’ll post a link.

{update: I have finished the syllabus, here it is.}

Who Would Jesus Smack Down? written by Molly Worthen for the NewYorkTimes.

Ms. Worthen gives an interesting view into the world of Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll. I haven’t read much about the Seattle based pastor, but the one word I know to describe him is “contraversial”. Some know him as the ‘cussing pastor’ others demonize him for his neo-calvinistic views.

However you want to think about him—I will keep a position of non-judgment since, I’m not a part of his community and don’t really know him besides the sound bites and articles—he is definitely an interesting character for his unique blend of old hard-line reformation theology and hip hard edge contemporary style.

Gaza Debate Goes Virtual posted on Slashdot.

I didn’t really look into the details of this story, but the abstract which you can find at the above link is very interesting. Among other things “- ‘mapping the war in Gaza’ – was launched by Al Jazeera and takes user-submitted reports, tweets, and Microsoft Virtual Earth to track the number of casualties and other developments.” Also there was some kind of demonstration on Second Life, as well as all kinds of twitter & facebook debates.

Jesus Is Not a Brand written by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson for ChristianityToday.

This is the “plus one” since I actually didn’t read it this evening. I read the print issue of Christianity Today whenever I go up to the library. I really don’t like navigating their website, but the magazine usually has at least one article of interest to me. I happened to read the current print issue before it showed up on the web, so I’ve had to wait to post a link. I was really excited about the cover story, it deals exactly with what I’ve been thinking through for the past few months.

What place does marketing have within the church? Is Jesus another product or the church a service to be bought or consumed? These are some of the questions that the article discusses.

The topic that he discusses is a dilemma that is unavoidable for every Christian community in the U.S. I recommend this to everyone who cares at all about Jesus. I say that tongue-n-cheek, but also with absolute seriousness. This is a huge problem, it hits at some of the roots of the idoltry of our nation which have found there way into the church. As a related read, there is the story of Jesus clearing the merchants from the temple (Mark 11).