We Must See Everything

We are everywhere.

It's a funny thing, being part of this half-evolved human social organism.  Here we are, just a decade and a half into this new millennia, and we can know everything.  I have access to such a wild array of information that it boggles my mind.

I can watch our planet from space, or rest in the nest of a bird and peer at tiny fragile hatchlings.  I can see images of almost any place.  I can read almost any text, written by almost anyone, on almost any subject.  All of the music and all of the storytelling of the world is open to me.

We have so much information, in fact, that it seems to blur the lines between what is rightfully mine to know and what is not.

I can watch, should I so choose, acts of impossible barbarity and monstrous sadism.  I can steal memories that are not my own, shared by our culture's insatiable hunger for gossip and sex and violence.

Memories of the beautiful and the celebrated, shared privately with their lovers, can be mine to steal.  Memories of intimate violence, horrible and personal, are passed around the collective consciousness to be clucked over and passed along.

I can watch men die, by the blade, or by a gun in a child's hand.

A young woman can look with erotic hunger into what she imagines is the eye of her lover, and I can take his eye and have it be my own.

Bam, she goes down, and we can all watch it, all of us, over and over.  And she can watch us watching her, and feel ashamed and isolated.

Or we can choose to look away.  There are things I do not want to know, that I do not want to see, because they do not belong to me.  I have no right to see them, because in the very act of seeing them I do another harm.

I will not take, without permission, a moment that was yours.

Returning to the Void

One of the unanticipated pleasures of my recent trip to the middle of the Pacific Ocean was the complete absence of the internet.

Oh, the scenery was stunning, and the wildlife--particularly under the surface of the water--was an amazing riot of living beings.  The food was amazing and very slightly overabundant.

But what I grew used to, in the seven days at sea, was the complete zeroing out of this medium.  No email, no texts.  There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no bloggery.  The 24 hour news cycle was obliterated.

Day after day where the routine of engagement with broader media was throttled back to nothingness, and the longest period of time I've completely disengaged from social media in years.  Honestly, I didn't miss it.

What did strike me, upon my return, was the degree to which my soul balked at re-engagement with my typical pattern of media engagement.  I did what I usually do.  FaceBook in the morning, and intermittently through the day.  Twitter twice, and then time on Buffer to populate my content.

As I "populated my content," though, I found myself doing so more reflectively.  Here I'd gotten through nearly two weeks of non-content-populating life, and the world trundled on unchanged by my failure to populate it with my carefully crafted content.

As I stared at Facebook, it felt, all of a sudden, slightly intrusive.  "Why do I feel compelled to bother with this every day," I thought.  It felt like an irritant, an alien object, an itch in my eye.

It felt like a television left on in the morning background, on which plastic people in overbright outfits sit around and feign enthusiasm for some trivial thing they care nothing at all about.  They chatter on, endlessly, mercilessly, dead to your presence, like some horridly creative PsyOps exercise at Guantanamo Bay.  I do so love morning television.

Well, not quite like that.  Social media felt different.  Hungrier.

Social media felt like being in the room with a void, an emptiness that pulls and tugs at you.  It felt like a darkly shadowed door in that old abandoned house, inside which something--just out of sight--sparkles as it catches the light.

"Populate me," it glowers, wordlessly.  "I have things you can hate.  I have reasons to be outraged.

I have pictures of kittens.  I have quizzes.  Or...other things you might like."

So, of course, here I am again.

Between My Face and Your Face

Years ago, I wrote a children's novel.  It was in my third year at U.Va., and involved many an early morning working vigorously in the computer lab, a Super Big Gulp full of Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew surreptitiously fueling my muse.

Wickersnides, it was called.

I'm old, so this was pre-Internet, and pre-cell phone.  The novel lived on a couple of five and a quarter inch floppy disks, one primary, one backup.  It's a silly thing, a story of a boy trapped in a vast store run by an oligarch who has cornered the market on everything.  That oligarch's final plan for world domination: a screen that showed you whatever you want to see.  You could even wear it like glasses.  In doing so, it subjugated you, bending you to desire whatever you were told to desire.

It also involved giant talking waterfowl.

I self-published the critter a year or so back, as part of a promise to my 1989 self.  It's sold exactly the way you'd expect a self-published, semi-edited, unmarketed eBook to sell.  Meaning, it didn't.  Is cool.

What matters is that I had the chance to read it to my boys when they were little, and they loved it.  And I shared it with friends, who, being friends, told me they loved it.

But life has caught up with it.  Looking at Google Glass, the marvelous and utterly desirable wearable contraption that augments your reality and makes the hearts of Google stockholders go pitter pat, I find myself suddenly reminded of that old story.  It's a wearable screen.  You can talk to it.  It can show you whatever you want.

On the one hand, neat.  I want one.  Scrolling my sermon on the HUD would mean never having to look down again.   I'd be Rev. Locutus of Borg, baby.  Seriously awesome.

On the other, well, I don't know.  How will this deepen our connection to the place we are?  Already, human beings with smartphones tend to drift, distracted, through the reality they inhabit.   Smartphone addiction is a real thing, that gnawing sense that something must be...hold on...no...ok...going on in that vast neural net we inhabit.

If it's right there, every moment, does that help?  Or would it be just a more effective delivery mechanism, the difference between snorting cocaine and crack, the difference between smoking opium and shooting up heroin?

It's not even going to be in your pocket.   It will be your reality.   Or, rather, it will be in between you and reality.

That's the challenge with all interactive and social media.  On the one hand, media can connect us with others and open our eyes.  It can deepen our experience of those we might otherwise not encounter.  It can change things for the good, as it did when those images of peaceful civil rights demonstrators being brutalized in the South poured out of America's televisions in the 1960s.

Or it can stand between us.

And that makes me think of that injunction, the one offered to Moses on Mount Sinai.  "You shall have no other gods before me."   Literally, the Hebrew of that passage tells us that we should put no other gods between us and the face of God.  "Let your experience of me be unmediated," said our Maker.

That's the danger of all media, and all mediating structures.  It can become the thing that does not augment, but distracts.  It can become not a path, but a wall.  It doesn't connect, but divides and shatters.

Church Information Forms, Websites, Lipstick, and Pigs

Having recently pitched out the crazy idea that there might be a way for Presbyterian churches to find a pastor in less than two years, some of the comments on that article in the Presbyterian Outlook got me to thinking.

One of the underlying assumptions of the Presbyterian "interim period" is that this is a time when congregations take stock of who they are, rediscovering their mission and vision.  As a part of that process of finding their identity, the Pastoral Nominating Committee goes through discernment exercises, and creates the Church Information Form, the See Eye Eff which will let potential pastors know 1) who the church is and 2) what they expect from a Teaching Elder.  Writing that CIF can be a major undertaking, and it's not without value.

Here's da ting, tho.  

Having recently been through the process of seeking a ministry myself, I can say that while CIF review was an important part of the process of my assessing a congregation and considering an approach to that community, it was not the only part.   

Of equal and in some ways greater importance was the congregational web-presence.

Where the CIF is the face of the church made up all purty-like for potential suitors, the website is the face that the congregation shows the rest of the world.   Sometimes, of course, that's just putting HTMLipstick on a pig.  But more often than not, a quality website indicates a solid congregation.

And so I'd look at the sites with a careful eye.    How recent and dynamic was the content?  I know that 2008 seems like just yesterday, but it isn't.  If there's nothing that indicates activity in the last three months (and here, I'm being nice), if there are stale links and stagnant content, then you really don't care.  You just don't.

There are other questions I'd ask myself.  How well-structured was the site for potential visitors and newcomers to the community?   Did the site connect to or integrate social media?  If it did connect to social media, was there any evidence that the community actually did anything with that media?

I'd go deeper still.   Did the web presence mesh with what I was seeing in the CIF?   Were the hopes, visions, and particular identity of that Christ-community something that you could see clearly on the site?   How warm and grace-filled was the content presented for public consumption?   

Perhaps most importantly, because this is the primary metric by which Teaching Elders should assess their connect with a community, could I see myself being a member of that church?   Not just the church that pitched itself to me on an in-house datasheet, but the church as it presents itself to the world.

When I went a-looking for a new congregation, what I found in web-assessing my current church was not the biggest and most slickety website in the world.  But it was updated regularly enough to show care.  It was filled with pictures of actual human beings, souls who were part of the worship and life of the community.  Perfect and super-mega-shiny?  No.  This was not the work of a big-parking-lot church with a  IT budget in the mid-six figures.  But it felt true and reflective of a small community that was both warm and web-savvy.   The web spoke who they were, and that was, well, terrific.

Long and short of it?   In this era, a congregation that doesn't have a web presence that tells the truth of who they are won't go far.  Pastors...ones worth their salt...know this.  

SOPA Blackouts, Censorship, and Jesus

Today, a significant chunk of the 'Net is either going dark or protesting a bill wending it's way through Congress.  That bill, entitled the Stop Online Piracy Act, or "SOPA," is intended to prevent folks on the web from copying and profiting from content that others have created.  It would allow owners of Intellectual Property to sue and/or take other legal action to shut down any site hosting or linking to purloined copyrighted material.

That's the idea, anyway.  The reality is different.  The reality is that such provisions would paralyze YouTube, Facebook, and Google.  It would make the broader functioning of the Net...at least, a net as we know it...impossible.

Having experienced Net censorship myself a few years back, I know how quickly something like that could deteriorate.  Having pitched up a bit of gentle YouTube push-back against some neoatheists, someone claimed terms of service violation, and my video was summarily removed.  To the credit of the atheist film-maker I was satirizing, he spoke up in favor of leaving the vid up...but no dice.   Once the censorship djinn is out of the bottle, things get bad fast.

There are a couple of places you can school yourself about the ramifications of this bill.  One of the better ones was pitched out by Gizmodo, and came my way via the net-savvy Vice-Moderator of my denomination.  Reading through their description, and following the link to the folks who are supporting SOPA, I encountered something that presses my buttons.

Among the many entertainment industry intellectual property holders that were actively supporting this misbegotten piece of legislation were the following:

• Church Music Publishers' Association
• Christian Music Trade Association
• EMI Christian Music Group
• Gospel Music Association

Given that I'm reasonably sure that True Religion Brand Jeans isn't actually faith-based, this means that amidst the corporations that put their own profit above a just measure of Net-freedom, and alone among the world's religious traditions, we find Jesus people.  Or, to be more accurate, we find representatives of AmeriChrist, Inc.

These are the community of folks that send the letters to churches, pressuring Jesus people into paying for the right to sing songs about Jesus, and honeychild, that has always ticked me off in a Matthew 21 sort of way.

Way I figure it, if you write a song and say you're singing it to the glory of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you have no right to keep other Christian people from singing it too.  None.

Sure, we should pay for your albums and download your stuff from iTunes and not try to sneak in at your big venue events.  We should buy your hymnals and songbooks, those few of us who still do that sort of thing.  Let the oxen eat what it's treading out, as the Apostle says.

But the moment you tell me that I need to license your song before my choir or praise team can sing it in worship is the moment I know you're not really serious about the whole Jesus thing.  The moment you tell me I can't put my rendition of your song about Jesus up onto my congregation's YouTube/Vimeo account as a way of sharing the Good News, well, that's when you're no longer in the Gospel business.

You're just in the entertainment business.

Because the Gospel is always free, brothers and sisters.  The Gospel is always free.

Our Permanent Record

Earlier this week, I worked with the big guy as he dug into a class project. It was a family history project, in which he had to gather original documentation of a particular ancestor and then assemble a narrative of their life.

The ancestor we went with was his great-great grandmother, Ella Sandidge Furman. Ella was born in 1881, and was something of a rarity for women of her time. She was not just literate, but a college graduate, and was president of the Hollins University class of 1900. As my eldest son explored her life, he had access not just to records of her birth and her marriage, up to and including a tintype of her on her marriage day. He also had her diaries from between the ages of 14 and 16, and a small leatherbound book of daily remembrances she wrote to mark the birth of her daughter.

As my tweener boy pored over the daily writing of a young woman who would eventually give birth to his great-grandfather, he wondered what she would think if she knew that 125 years later, he would be sitting and reading them.

Which got me to wondering...how much of what we write and produce now will convey across that span of time? Of the billions of text messages and tweets and Facebook status updates that shimmer and sparkle before our eyes now, how much of it will stick around? I think the answer may be that most of it will be lost, vanished in the vast chaos of the churning interwebs.

Or, worse yet, it won't be lost. It'll stick around. All of it. Every last tweet. Every last status update. Our great, great grandchildren will look back at us, and be bored witless. Sorting through the terabytes of data, our endless party pictures and gibbering over our latest consumer acquisition and lolspeak, they'll marvel at our inability to really say anything at all.