We Become That Which We Behold | McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage

This is the second in a series of posts looking at some quotes from Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage. Previous Post: As We Begin So Shall We Go

This post will be broken into looking at three smaller quotes from The Medium is the Massage. All three quotes center around aspects of how technology has effected the way we perceive the world.

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.

In this example, we see how the idea of writing lead to applying an organized stance to many other parts of civilization. I think this example and the second serve a double purpose, while showing how technology has reshaped the way we perceive the world, it could also be argued that the way we view the world has shaped our technology.  In this case, consider the current trend of social media – has/is social media changing the way we view the world? or has/is the way we view the world shaped our idea of including social media? The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but also explains why stories revolving around technology getting out of hand is horrifying: our technology shapes us. (consider for instance The Matrix, the storyline of Battlestar Galactica or Dollhouse as some easy examples of our wariness towards technology)  This next example as well could be interpreted in this double nature of us shaping technology and technology shaping us.

Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement.

Once again we see how technology, in this case easel painting and the printed book, have the power to reshape how we view the world.  This once again brings forth the question though about whether we shape our technology or our technology shapes us.  The third example is the strongest in terms of Marshall McLuhan’s stance that our technology has the power to change us.

The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured the American Dream. It created totally new urban, social and family worlds. New ways of work. New ways of management. New legislation.

This is perhaps the most well documented of McLuhan’s observations which I have quoted here. When the railway was established (and later the invention of the automobile, and the telephone) it reshaped the way we consider the family and how we are related, because for the first time we could have more distance from each other while still having the possibility of connectedness.  It has led to the ability of families to be more distanced from each other while still being connected, but has invariably reshaped the way we think about where we live and the sort of considerations that would go forth in such a decision.

In all three of these examples though, we can see an illustration of one of McLuhan’s classic statements “we become that which we behold.”

Buzz for Groups | Buzz Tips

One of my biggest complaints with Buzz as I was playing around with it was that it felt like it was missing a context for being able to have a message that is only able to be seen between a handful of people.

It turns out this is due to my own shortsightedness of not playing around with the public/private settings. By setting a Buzz to private, you have the option of a buzz just showing up to those who are your contacts, or you can use defined groups for a more limited exposure. In my case, I’m thinking of experimenting with Buzz as a communication tool for the leadership team of our church plant. Here’s how I went about doing so.

I started by entering some text and selecting private on the public/private dropdown.  I created a group called church plant and added my contacts and then made sure to check the box.

Voila, I can now do filtered social media sharing that is accessible only to a small group that I have defined. (Screenshot below) I think that this could be perfect for a scenario when you have an idea or something that you want to discuss in a medium other than email, but don’t want to be open to everybody.  In a sense, I’m already finding this to be greater potential than my use of twitter or facebook, in that I can very easily and quickly limit the scope of who can read something I’m writing and looking for comments on.

Quick Tips on Google Buzz

Google has started rolling out support of Google Buzz in Gmail this morning. So far, I am liking it, though I’ll see as I use it a little more.

I thought I would post a couple quick tips that I’ve found/figured out to make it more managable.

The first thing I did was go in and configure my account to link my twitter feed to my Buzz, I figure I might as well have them converge. To do so, on the Buzz section of gmail, there’s a link that says “xx Connected Sites.” Clicking on it allows you to configure a few things into it. You can set up your Google Reader shared items, Twitter, Google Chat Statuses, Flickr, Picasa, Youtube, and Blogspot. I have Google Reader, Google Chat and Twitter enabled on mine.

The second thing I noticed was that when you get a follow up comment to one you’ve posted, it appears as a new message in your inbox. I do my best to keep my inbox uncluttered and use filters to do so. Lifehacker has already posted a filter option to help you out in this regard, you can easily created a filter by clicking “Create a Filter” in the top right corner and typing “label:Buzz” in the “Has the Words” field. This is great, because it skips the inbox, but still shows up on the Buzz filter as an unread update.

I like the potential of Buzz as long as it stays with useful social media and doesn’t get inundated in Farmville, Mafia Wars or some other sort of game invite the way that Facebook has (the primary reason I loathe Facebook).

If you decide you absolutely hate Google Buzz though, it’s easy to disable, if you scroll to the bottom of your gmail, there’s a text link that says “turn off Buzz” to easily disable it.

The Medium is the Massage: As we begin, so shall we go.

You may have noted I’ve been referring quite a bit to Marshall McLuhan lately. I’m going to add to that a bit more, with a series of posts based on some quotes I highlighted while reading The Medium is the Massage.

The line, the continuum -this sentence is a prime example- became the organizing principle of life. “As we begin, so shall we go.” “Rationality” and logic came to depend in the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts.

For many people rationality has the connotation of uniformity and connectiveness. “I don’t follow you” means “I don’t think what you’re saying is rational.”

Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little “visuality” in it is lost on him.

Rationality and visuality have long been interchangable terms, but we do not live in a primarily visual world any more.

McLuhan rightly noted that the ways we organized things around us reshaped how we think of rationality.  As the printed text became our primary medium, the sequential became the basis for rationality.  In terms of the Myers-Briggs typology the dominant trait would be Sensing over iNtuition.  The intuitive has had a tentative place, because their ability to draw connections from seemingly unconnected places is viewed as irrational by those accustomed to needing everything presented in a sequential manner.

As an illustration of this, in seminary I had a class where the professor would not offer outlines and would teach by facilitating dialog rather than going through from point a to point b and so on.  For the more intuitive inclined, like myself, this approach was refreshing and helpful to how I learn. Yet to more sensing types this style of teaching was perceived as almost irrational, and at least unhelpful.  Why is this so? Because for the modern era, we have been shaped by the medium of the printed text and its sequential manner.

In the broad sense, this is the illustration of McLuhan’s statement “as we begin, so shall we go.”  What we start with will shape how we continue to understand. That means for those of us who have grown up with television and the internet, that this is being reshaped.  In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan states that the television is leading to us having a much more eastern, connected sort of approach to how we see the world.  At the least, the prevalence of the internet and television is reordering how we perceive the world.  I sense that this movement is towards a more intuitional approach of viewing information, as both internet and television thrive on juxtaposition of objects that don’t necessarily belong together.

Duct-Tape Programming

I read an interesting article today about “The Duct-Tape Programmer“, definitely worth the read. Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts:

Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

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Sure, there’s nothing officially wrong with trying to write multithreaded code in C++ on Windows using COM. But it’s prone to disastrous bugs, the kind of bugs that only happen under very specific timing scenarios, because our brains are not, honestly, good enough to write this kind of code. Mediocre programmers are, frankly, defensive about this, and they don’t want to admit that they’re not able to write this super-complicated code, so they let the bullies on their team plow away with some godforsaken template architecture in C++ because otherwise they’d have to admit that they just don’t feel smart enough to use what would otherwise be a perfectly good programming technique FOR SPOCK. Duct tape programmers don’t give a [expletive] what you think about them. They stick to simple basic and easy to use tools and use the extra brainpower that these tools leave them to write more useful features for their customers.

While this article was specifically about coding, it is leading me on a rabbit trail which I want to pursue in the realms of leadership and productivity.  Alas, that will need to be written another day.

Social Media / Spirituality

Much time has passed since I promised this post.  It seems that I decided to give myself a writing sabbatical for a while, things have just been busy.  This post probably won’t be nearly as substantive as I’d hoped, but I will do my best to put some thoughts out there.

Much emphasis is put on community as an integral part of ministry lately.  Much of the reason behing social media in relationship to ministry is along these same lines.  There are some definite benefits to using social media in this way.  Here’s a few that came to mind as I was thinking about this:

• provides an environment where some anonymity allows people to be comfortable asking questions they might not in person.
• social media provides a level of continuity in connection that isn’t necessarily possible otherwise due to people’s busy schedules.
• it allows for a democracy of ideas, a place where everyone can be heard and their ideas considered(this can also be perceived as a weak point, depending on how you approach it)
• allows for development of more complex thoughts than is possible by verbal communication – there is more time available to craft thoughtful responses to people’s questions.

These are all good things, and I think valid reasons for using social media to speak of spirituality, christianity, etc.  This is not to say that there aren’t things to be worried about.  I personally am constantly worried about twitterfication. That is, using something like twitter that establishes a small character order serves to only really allow bumper sticker slogan type responses.  I for one find bumper stickers excessibly frustrating because nothing meaningful is ever abbreviated to a small sentence or two.  There is always much more thought needed to develop than what we might otherwise have available.

I have one other huge worry about too much emphasis on social media, and that is this: I am not sure that there is enough cost to the community created by social media. We intrinsically value more the things which cost us something, yet the allure of social media is that there is a low cost for connection – it flexes around our schedules, if we don’t like some one we can “unfriend” them, we don’t have to deal with the hassles of real life interaction.

One of my professors in seminary said of community “Community is always where the person you least want to be around is.” Another pastor that I think hits some good points speaks of God’s Kingdom as a party full of people we wouldn’t be caught dead with on a Saturday night.  Social media usually forms our comunity around those who we like or share similar affinities with.  While it is helpful to have these sorts of relationships, we have to be careful that we don’t miss out on the enriching that happens by being formed in relationship with others who we wouldn’t necessarily spend time with.

Although I have these doubts, I believe social media is a useful tool.  It is useful in its roll as a tool to augment community founded in real life interactions even more though. I fear that church communities which would be too heavily reliant on it though will have some troublesome implications which we must deal with. (Truth be told I think that these challenges are existent for everyone in the facebook generation and not just church communities).

Social Networks and Spiritual Discussion

I have gone a long time without contributing on the discussion about social networks that I wanted to pursue.  Unfortunately, life has kept me busy and this is the first time in over a week I’ve had a chance to sit and write.  I’m sitting in a lodge in the mountains in Colorado, taking a little break before enjoying the outdoors.

I am viewing this post as a springboard to a long discusion about social networks, spirituality and evangelism.  I’m operating with a few different ideas floating in my head, so I hope to float some of those thoughts out there to give you an idea where I’m coming from.

The first is that I recently read Flickering Pixels: The Hidden Power of Technology to Shape Your Faith by Shane Hipps.  He borrows deeply from McLuhan, especially around the quotes “The medium is the message,” and “you become that which you behold.”  The basic idea of the book is that the technology we use shapes us in ways beyond how it communicates a message.  The very form of the technology shapes how we process.  My personal opinion is that a more accurate statement than “The medium is the message” would be “the medium greatly shapes the message.”

I’ve also been bookmarking and noting some different comments about how the facebook generation processes.  I found this article helpful in that it lays out a few ways that the internet community driven sort processes.  I’ll list a few here, but check out the article for the full list.  Some of the statements I’m finding significantly helpful are:

1. All ideas compete on equal footing
2. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed
3. Contribution counts more than credentials

Here’s a series of quotes from another article.  ”People tend to come to social media loving the freedom and openness that it provides, along with the ability to empower everyone and to feel like you are giving them a voice. But sometimes eventually that freedom and openness is seen as a liability and threat, and eventually turns to control…When you invite social media to play a large role in your organization, you have to be willing to let go of some of the control as well. This is why I think many churches and leaders are skeptical…because they don’t want to give over control.”

I’ll be back in a day or so with some of my thoughts.

Open Discussion: Social Networks and Spirituality

In the topics suggestions, ee posted this:

Obviously you are already doing this, and may have already had some posts on this, but I thought it would be interesting to hear your take on evangelism in the age of social media/networking.

How do things like Twitter/Facebook/Search Engines/etc. affect the way that one connects with spirituality, and how do you see the role of the pastor/priest/mentor changing (if at all)?

I will eventually give some response, but first I’d love to foster an open conversation: How do you think social networks effect spirituality? How does it shift Christian engagement in evangelism? Do you think it should reshape the role of pastor/spiritual director?

Firefox 3.5 Does Cool Things With Videos!

Check out this video showing previews of how the new build of Firefox will handle videos!

HT:TechCrunch

new iPhone!

some of you may know that I bought myself an iPhone for my birthday. I decided it would be fun to post a picture of me and the beauty. How much better that I do it from my phone!