the tindog coffeehouse

The Internet is a funny thing. For all its apparent permanance, it’s often times a very transient thing. Technology changes. The way people access the Internet today is drastically different than the way they did a few years ago and is lightyears ahead of the days of dial-up. And the way we interact with the Internet is different, too. The first time I launched a website on this domain, way back in 1998, it was as a “home page”, which is to say a static HTML page (built with FrontPage 98) that had a few images and some text but nothing in the way of dynamically-changing content.

Today we not only expect dynamic content but social interaction as well. Every news article and blog post is followed by a comments section. Readers are prompted to like, tweet, and share it. It’s more than just about generating pageviews, it’s about cultivating a following.

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Mat Honan at Gizmodo posted a long but interesting history of the photo sharing site Flickr (“from Yahoo!”) and why it sucks. Short answer: Yahoo! has no idea what it’s doing and is basically stuck in 1998 when it comes to the Internet. They bought Flickr in 2005 and then proceeded to do nothing with it, allowing Facebook, Instragram, and others to replace it. Where Flickr was once a thriving community for professional photographers and amateurs alike, it’s now a mere shell of itself. Many true professionals have moved on to sites like 500px, while most iPhone-toting non-photographers (myself being one) really only care about socialness and prefer platforms such Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

So if Flickr sucks so bad (which it does) and is basically a ghost town (which it’s not), then why do I still use it? Because there’s not a better alternative.

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Last May I chaperoned my daughter’s 2nd grade class on their field trip to the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. One of the most popular exhibits was an outdoor area called the DinoDig, which is basically a giant sandbox where kids can dig around for fossils they can keep. The kids lined up, eager to have their turn in the sandbox, and as soon as the door was opened, they rushed out and started frantically digging for treasure. Within seconds, kids started rushing up to me asking if their new-found items were fossils. “No, that’s a rock,” I would reply over and over and over. “Sorry, that’s a rock, too. And that’s a rock, and that’s a rock, aaannd that’s a rock.” I don’t know if any kid found an actual fossil that day, but I’m sure a lot of kids — my daughter included — went home with pockets full of common rocks.

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This is Part 11 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. (Thankfully for you, it’s also my last.)

The subject of technology and how it relates to the Church certainly isn’t new, and there are a ton of different books and blogs and so on out there that have their own spin on it. The reason for that, I think, is because technology is a moving target. It’s constantly changing, and therefore how we think about it, how we approach it, and ultimately how we use it changes as well.

Technology, we said, is “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes.” It’s a means to an end, a bridge from one world to a better one, allowing us to overcome some sort of problem to accomplish a goal we couldn’t have on our own. Defining it further, we broke it down into four separate layers: technology as hardware, technology as manufacturing, technology as methodology, and technology as social usage. The first two layers, we concluded, are inherently neutral; a shovel is just a shovel. However, the knowledge used to create those tools and how the tools are used are most definitely not neutral; how we approach those various tools is determined by our own internal values but also has the ability to reshape those values over time.

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This is Part 8 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

We’ve talked at length about both the “redeeming” and “corrupting” potential of technology and concluded that it’s not neutral; as it changes, we’re changed as well. How we view technology, then, becomes a critical question. Do we view it through the filter of instrumentalism, the idea that the tools themselves are neutral and it’s only the usage that’s not? Or do we approach it from the side of determinism, the belief that the progress of technology is an “unstoppable power” that “operates independently of human choices”?

For the Church, that’s not an easy question. Yet, if technology is defined as “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”, then it would seem as though the choice of which tools the Church uses is absolutely critical.

Mediums.

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I don’t use Klout (and have no desire to), but I thought this was a brilliant take on it as well as all social media:

When I was growing up, what we knew about each other wasn’t called data. It was called interaction, stories, and information. It came in the form of experience and shared events, gossip and oral history, and reports and report cards. Not every story told about us was unbiased, accurate, or even true. …

I had high hopes for Klout when it started, though I thought they were taking something close to impossible in trying to quantify influence. I was interested to see how they would approach it, hoping they might identify something useful toward sorting the gamers and spambots from the people who were making the social web work. Did I think they would identify true influence? Not really. But I thought they might find a stone of solid respect around engagement activity that was worth looking at. It seemed a big quest, but possible. …

[But] I became more aware that my data, your data, our stories are their product and they seemed to become less aware of the responsibility that might come with a offering product like that. …

In the process of opting out, I was faced with a list of options that asked why. I was looking for one that said “Changes in the algorithm” or “Too many changes.” I found it telling that the only choice I found that might describe my reason was “I don’t like my Klout Score.” That, of course, implies something that could be all about my ego and not in the least about their product.

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