The Medium is the Master

Got my I-Pod. Got my PDA/Cell Phone/Word Processor/Video Camera/Still Camera/Computer. I am Plugged IN! Are you?

This wonderful device is an icon of the New Age—the Digital Age, the dawn of an era of connectedness, the sign of Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men. You know, the truly sad thing about when the angels sang about the birth of Christ was that one of the shepherds didn’t have one of these beauties. He could have recorded the moment then and there and podcast it on the Net … and then the world would have BELIEVED!

The really sad thing is that this device is not an icon of a New Age. It is the symbol of a New Dark Ages, the herald of a new form of servile oppression, the subjugation of precious liberty to new forms of tyranny—all of us here are sitting square in the middle of these things and we think that, on the contrary, we are enlightened and we are free.

Here’s an interesting story: In the seventh century after Christ, when Europe was in the throes of what we normally call the Dark Ages, an Irish monk name Columba was forced into exile as punishment for having waged war over, of all things, a copy of a book. Times have changed. It’s recorded that 3000 people perished in Columba’s battle. His judges told him not to return to Ireland until he had brought 3000 souls to Christ. In the course of his exile on the windswept island of Iona, history tells us that he and his brethren would bring many more than 3000 souls into the Kingdom of Heaven. But he never returned to Ireland.

In Thomas Cahill’s popular if not always accurate book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, he tells Columba’s story and that of many other Irish monks who worked hard at the conversion of barbaric peoples, bringing them the grace of Christ mixed with the native rock and moss of the British Isles. In the beautiful prayer of St. Patrick, we hear the strands of this Celtic Gospel, the first time since the Psalms of David that the rocks and trees cried out in worship to God:

I arise today Through the strength of heaven, Light of sun, Radiance of moon, Splendor of fire, Speed of lightning, Swiftness of wind, Depth of sea, Stability of earth, Firmness of rock.

"I arise today Through God's strength to pilot me: God's might to uphold me, God's wisdom to guide me, God's eye to look before me, God's ear to hear me, God's word to speak for me, God's hand to guard me, God's way to lie before me, God's shield to protect me, God's host to save me From snares of devils, From temptations of vices, From everyone who shall wish me ill, Afar and anear, Alone and in multitude.

"Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

"I arise today Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, Through belief in the threeness, Through confession of the oneness, Of the Creator of Creation. Amen."

The Celtic Church did far more than save souls. In one of the most remarkable happy accidents of all time, they also helped to save Western Civilization, the works of historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, astronomers, and mathematicians—the progenitors of what we do in higher education today. For while they were busy sharing a religion of the word, they became masters of words, and as masters of words, they craved more and more words for their exploration and understanding. They found the words they sought in copies of works that had been saved somehow from the wreck of the barbarian invasions of Europe. The very typefaces we use on our computers today are part of the heritage of those frozen monks shivering with their brushes and quills in front of their folios.

A mere hundred and fifty years ago, the advent of the telegraph led people to believe that the Golden Age was upon them. New information technologies would bring the peoples of the earth together. Peace would become more convenient than war in an era when far-distant cultures could communicate with one another anytime, any day. No one dreamed that the first massive practical use of rail transit and wired communication would be in a rash of nineteenth century wars that would use these new technologies to deliver destruction faster and smarter than had ever been done before.

Since the advent of radio at the turn of the last century, the rapid pace of information technologies has outpaced our ability to stay current. Only ten years ago, analysts were discussing models of sweeping technological change, allowing 30 years for what they called market saturation. Not so anymore. The almost complete triumph of digital technologies simply ignored all the new models and swept away the previous generation of electronic toys in a third of the time predicted. Now the adage is, if you bought it, it’s obsolete. In a matter of a few months, you won’t be able to give away your current Xboxes or Play Stations. No one wants yesterday’s technology.

And now, to paraphrase Greek philosopher Heraclitus, you cannot step twice into the same data stream. Since Tim Berners-Lee’s launched the World Wide Web, free to the world, information has become a commodity as commonplace as the condiments at McDonalds. The world of the web rejoiced. The Internet has ushered breathless masses into the new era of globalization, making billions of individuals a part of what Tom Friedman calls the “electronic herd.”  Every person jacked into the Net, with or without wires, is now a stockholder in the welfare of the world, a newly empowered member of the kind of community Marshall McCluhan could only dream of.

And it is a dream, but to its underbelly clings a nightmare that no one anticipated. Who would have thought that the exponential proliferation of information would have the opposite effect from what was intended? Rather than sharing the rewards of accelerated enlightenment, the glut of knowledge unleashed on the world by the Net has turned what was once important knowledge into mostly irrelevant knowledge. Watch out—we have been Wikified. Ideas that were once as precious as gold are now like the little ketchup packets we collect in glove compartments, desk drawers and mini-fridges. It seems a shame to throw them away, so they’ll just sit there until they become rancid. Worthy ideas that once merited lengthy deliberation and studious contemplation are swallowed whole, digitized and reconstituted as tweets or cute quotes on Facebook statuses.

We are awash in a sea of trivia. But far from being a calm sea, the face of the trivial world confronts us every day with newer and more tempestuous manipulations created for our endless amusement by a trillion dollar digital entertainment media. Who wants to wrestle with the thorny implications of stem cell research when you can have NFL Sunday Ticket on a wide-screen liquid high definition TV display? Who wants to deal with the Middle East when you can become a Jedi Knight in near real-time adventures online with hundreds of thousands of others in a global gaming community complete with artificial economies, cultures and personalities? Who wants to hold local officials accountable when you can spend countless hours managing almost limitless music files, paring down several thousand selections to the essential several hundred you absolutely need to have on your multi-gig I-Pod? Who wants to deal with difficult relational issues when you can function on a whole new level of personality profile management by creating customized interactive space on the web where you can meet hundreds of new faces every day on your own best self-edited terms?

As mass media becomes more and more massive every day, in new and more user-friendly permutations of print and audio and video, the sheer work and time required to juggle one’s personal data becomes an ever more daunting challenge. In this room alone we represent countless unpurged emails, thousands of digital images, tens of thousands of music files, and an equal number of digital documents, all the flotsam and jetsam of this grand digital revolution. I myself have a link to a news service that affords me more than five hundred fresh news items every morning when I boot up my computer.  It’s cool. There’s no way I could go through all of those in the course of a day, but somehow the sheer size of the selection makes me feel empowered. So we have all become hoarders, sitting on mountains of personalized data, and rather than sift through it for quality and beauty, we pile on more and more until that one item that may once have been precious to us becomes just another meaningless calendar item on Facebook.

And where in all this shoreless ocean of data may we find the landmarks of the old knowledge once so carefully nurtured by the Celtic monks and powerfully unleashed by the printing press? No, the landmarks are not entirely gone. They have only descended far beneath the surface, like the legendary lost city of Atlantis. The canon of Western Civilization, including Homer and Cicero, Aristotle and Augustine, and even the Bible, has not been destroyed as it was in the old Dark Ages; they haven’t been burned with the libraries that housed them. No, they have simply been moved to someone’s hard drive, stored among countless other bytes of data that includes everything from where to get an airline ticket to how to self-diagnose whatever it is that’s ailing you.

The Canon suffers from a variety of negative weights, however. First of all, it’s so…yesterday, most of it a lot longer ago than the end of Classic Rock, and is therefore obsolete. Secondly, it is not interactive. It is not rated “E” for Everybody. Thirdly, it’s not inherently progressive, as is the technology we deal with every day. So we won’t be seeing The Western Canon II or III or X. No automatic upgrade is forthcoming. Fourthly, the questions raised in the Canon remain largely unanswered and demand serious contemplation and earnest, informed discussion. There is no instant replay to help us get the call right. And finally, the canon is very much tied to antiquated books employing languages that disappeared many long years ago or words with which we are no longer familiar. Shakespeare’s vocabulary of 20,000 words dwarfs our much more efficient current average of 2500 or so. A few abortive efforts have been made to bring elements of the canon onto film. But most everyone agrees that the book was better.

And lest one think I am bemoaning a culture-centric problem, anthropologists tell us that the advent of the Internet, with all its golden opportunities worldwide, has driven cultures everywhere to seek its beneficent provision and therefore to speak its language: Business English. The blessings of commerce bestowed by the Internet with one hand have partnered with the curse of culture-loss on the other. Long-isolated regions with rare languages and customs have to pay a heavy toll to be brought to the global marketplace—the fare is typically the loss of language and cultural differences. Many cultures are now preserved entirely in their souvenirs. Recent research has indicated that dozens of languages are dying out every year. Is this a bad thing? Some people say it’s the necessary price to pay to secure the Holy Grail of globalization. One person from India told me you can’t stop cultural change. It’s best just to let it happen.

So the shameless attention-getting metaphor with which we began, that of a New Dark Ages, isn’t strictly accurate, is it? Rather than less knowledge and information, we have a near infinity of more knowledge and information. Rather than less business and commerce, we see prosperity coming to the nether regions of the world. The backward portions of the planet have gained access to the rest of the globe, an access denied them for centuries. Surely these good things outweigh the bad? Perhaps they do.

So rather than dealing with a darkness upon which we might shine a light, our problem is more like that of Indiana Jones in the scene from The Temple of Doom where a priceless diamond is kicked onto a floor covered with hundreds of pieces of ice. Which is the ice and which the diamond? The Internet unfortunately doesn’t come with a pop-up guru to help us discern the gems from the garbage. The Internet is simply there, like a riverbed is there. And where oh where is the digital guide who will help us pan through the gigabytes to find the gold?

I could spend a lot of time talking about how the digital montage makes your life at college infinitely more difficult than it should be. The sad fact is that classes are an interruption in the otherwise surging daily data flow. College classes have become like annoying infomercials inserted into a perfectly good movie. College would be great if it weren’t for these annoying academic interruptions, right? The problem is that our classes just don’t carry any of the relevant qualities that would make them important to us. An instructor, unfortunately, is not just someone on a cell phone for whom you can pretend you are driving through a tunnel.

Some people have found a way to minimize the interruption. With snazzy new laptops that allow up to four screens to run at the same time, you can actually have Facebook, MySpace, your personal blog or email and a page for your notes about the Power Point lecture. With a little practice, you can switch in and out of these so deftly that the academic material is nothing more than a ticker running at the bottom of your life screen, like those on CNN and FoxNews, something you can check now and again if something important flickers by, like something that might end up on the test.

More importantly, what effect is the digital era having on our spirituality? Some churches, in an attempt to stay current and relevant, are offering larger auditoriums with theater style seating, musical numbers with full choir and orchestra, staged dramatic productions and a host of other amenities to bring in the seeker—including Starbucks. It costs a lot of money to compete with the rapid flow of mass culture. But many believe the money is well spent as mega-churches like Joel Osteen’s in Houston and Rick Warren’s in Los Angeles redefine what it means to go to church.

Did you know you can go to church on the Internet now? That’s right. Just visit http://www.worshiponline.com/ or http://www.virtualchurch.com/ and you can customize your very own worship experience in the comfort of your own laptop. No worries about getting up early on Sunday, no packed parking lot to negotiate, no fear of being late, no glares from fussy ushers, no whispers at your lack of church fashion sense. Just grab a cup of joe, slum around in your grubbies, belly up to your computer and let the blessing soak right in. Let’s just hope the Holy Spirit got the email to be there.

Here’s an interesting quote from an enthusiastic supporter:

As a renewed, vital church, we can go out into the byways of the Internet and invite these online seekers into fellowship with us, via church-sponsored chat rooms or electronic forums. We can equip them with electronic Bible studies to help them nurture a more vital faith in this virtual realm. The online church is unfettered by time or space. At any time, across the time zones, two or more Christians can gather in Christ’s name in a chat room and have church. One participant may be in his pajamas and munching on a breakfast bagel, while the other, several time zones away, may be logging on at the end of a long day. With the Net, it doesn’t matter. The boundaries of time and space are transcended. Church on the Net is not a weekly or twice-weekly occurrence. Church can occur at any time, at any place. (Andrew Careaga is the author of E-vangelism: Sharing the Gospel in Cyberspace)
http://www.next-wave.org/dec99/embracing_the_cyberchurch.htm

Christian pollster George Barna has predicted, very controversially of course, that the digital impact on the traditional church will be cataclysmic. In his recent book Revolution, he claims that upwards of 50 percent of traditional churchgoers will find alternative kinds of worship experiences in the next 20 years. Many current pastors fiercely dispute Barna’s claims, not surprisingly, even as they podcast their church services, spruce up their websites and develop sophisticated marketing strategies to keep their numbers up. While Barna’s prophecies may or may not be fulfilled, one thing is certain—if the church 20 years from now looks as different as today’s church does from how it looked 20 years ago, it won’t be your daddy’s church anymore.

But let’s bring all this down to a more important level, to you and me today, to what it all means. Only ten years ago when I first came to Lee, we actually communicated by hard copy memo, a relatively small percentage of faculty had computers in their offices, cell phones were pretty exotic, with antennae sticking out of them. I-pods were a dream not yet realized. When you left class, you actually talked to the people in the hallway and when you walked across the campus, you said hello to people on the sidewalk, who either said hello back or, if they were introverts, walked past you stiffly pretending you weren’t there.

Look at us today. As we leave chapel, look around and count how many people whip out their cell phones, walking relatively blindly along, rendering that little nod and non-smile of a smile when you try to greet them. How many others will have those wonderful white cords growing out of their ears? How many will have their laptops cracked open within fifteen minutes, checking their MySpace and Facebook?

Is all this bad? The research is not all agreed. Some are saying that all the new forms of connection weaken our traditional relationships and create a host of shallow, surface relationships. In other words, as we have digitized our music, our photos and our videos, we have digitized our friends and we have found a way to store them in databases with their names and faces and a nice link to their page where we can drop in a nice little “love ya, thinkin’ about ya” message to stay in touch before me we move on to the next dozen or so who merit similar attention.

Other research says its great—that the quality of some relationships is actually improving, that people who tend toward shallow relationships now have the benefit of stronger ties.

I won’t pretend to tell you I know the answer, though I do, of course, have my suspicions. What we do know, without needing a big research project to tell us, is that a world in which data flows ceaselessly and indiscriminately is a world full of noise. It’s like trying to have an intimate conversation in a room where music is blaring or where other people are chattering loudly. How many of your conversations this week have been interrupted by a cell phone?

How does this affect our most important relationships? Yes, the relationship with God and the relationship with ourselves? 

I want to leave you today with three startling and revolutionary recommendations. They are startling because they go against the flow of the culture. And they are revolutionary because that’s a great marketing term and it just sounds better. Here they are: No.1 – Take Time to Unplug. No. 2 – Listen to the Silence. And No. 3 – Let’s get Carnal Again.

Okay. 1. Take Time to Unplug. The Bible talks about a variety of fasts—where you deny yourself food, disciplining your body so you can focus on God. I strongly believe that Electronic Media has become a much greater distraction for us today than food. It’s certainly a whole lot more pervasive and demanding on our time and energy. So I recommend that we find ways to take regular electronic media fasts. We do this in our home every so often, when things get frenetic and tempers are flaring and people are saying ugly things to one another. You’d be surprised the calming effect that takes place when you just turn off a few things, especially the TV and the video games. Somehow the constant noise has a way of rubbing against your psyche, like a splinter under your nail. Turning it off can allow you to breathe and relax.

Now don’t get all alarmed. Some of you are actually terrified by this thought. The delirium tremens are actually kicking in as I speak. But you can take small steps, baby steps, at first. Take a few hours, for instance, and just turn down the volume of your digital life enough to realize that there are trees and flowers and birds and wow!—even people around you. Trust me when I say the effects of this kind of self-denial are positive.

The best thing about pulling the plug for a while is that it places you in the drivers seat. You are in control of your Media and not the other way around. Believe me when I say that this makes a real difference. It can help you build muscles for keeping yourself from passive, useless consumption—a subject for a whole different sermon.

Secondly, Listen to the silence. There’s a wonderful quote in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. In it, one of the characters, Danny, tells his friend Reuven: "You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I hear it."

One of my favorite passages of scripture since the time I was a teenager is found in Isaiah 32:

2 A man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the storm, as streams of water in a dry place, as the shade of a large rock in a weary land.
3 The eyes of those who see will not be dim, and the ears of those who hear will listen.
4 The heart of the rash will understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers will be ready to speak plainly.
15 Until the Spirit is poured on us from on high, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is considered a forest.
16 Then justice will dwell in the wilderness; and righteousness will remain in the fruitful field.
17 The work of righteousness will be peace; and the effect of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever.
18 My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in safe dwellings, and in quiet resting places.

I think it is still true, as it was with Isaiah, as it was with Elijah and as it was with Jesus himself, that we find God in the quiet places, in the silence, where that still small voice can finally break through all the mess of information clutter that assaults us day in and day out. And so I encourage all of us to try to find that silence, to do what we can, not only to remove ourselves occasionally from all the noise, but to take advantage of quietness to make contact with the most important person of all, with God. There’s nothing like it to restore a thirsty soul.

Finally, let’s get carnal again.  What do I mean by that? We are used to thinking of carnality as having to do with our flesh natures, with the natural man that is opposed to the Spirit of God. That’s all true. But in a literal sense, the word carnal is related to the same word as Incarnation. We are physical beings. We were not meant to be these cerebral entities floating in solution with wires coming out all over the place sending our thoughts here and there to other cerebral beings floating in solution. And when God decided to redeem us, he didn’t send a broadcast or an Instant Message. He sent His Son, in the flesh, to suffer and die.

What does the Incarnation mean for us in the Digital Age? It means we have to be more intentional about face-to-face dialog with people. You may find this idea laughable, but it wasn’t funny when a man in Korea literally played himself to death at an Internet café last year. It’s not funny when people allow themselves to be snared into Internet affairs or caught in the web of a whole new crop of Internet addictions. It’s not funny when a corporation as reputable as Radio Shack decides it’s okay to lay off 400 employees—by email.

Another way of being the Master of the Medium rather than the other way around is to talk to flesh and blood people, to let them know they are important by not taking that cell phone call or by not staring at your computer screen when they are talking to you. I know someone who broke up with a guy in part because he wouldn’t take time away from his video games.

So get carnal. Don’t go all cyber on the rest of the world around you. Let people on the other end of the cell phone know they have to wait in line behind the people right in front of you. And let the people right in front of you know that they matter—that includes your instructors as well as your fellow students.

In closing, think for a moment whether or not the Medium is the Master in your life. If it is, then chances are that God is on call waiting for you.