the tindog coffeehouse

CNNMoney reported last night that Facebook is buying the Austin-based check-in-turned-travel-guide site Gowalla for an undisclosed sum, presumably to incorporate some of its concepts (and engineers) into its own fledgling Timeline profile concept and then shut the company down.

And I’d just like to point out that I called it back in September. Well, sorta.

When Gowalla relaunched as “Gowalla 4.0″ in September, it eliminated the gamification aspects of the service (the pins, stamps, and items) and even the whole check-in concept itself. Users would instead “create stories” and tag people in their stories and browse and share travel guides. The UI was gorgeous as always, but there was no longer any real incentive to use it.

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This is Part 6 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

In Chapter 5, Dyer focused on the “corrupting” part, examining how both Adam and Eve and their son Cain used technology as a way to separate themselves from God. But as Dyer illustrated, technology (“the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”) isn’t necessarily bad. It existed before the Fall, and even after the Fall, God continued to equip his people with more of it. Technology, then, must be neutral. Right?

Well, no.

We concluded in Chapter 1 that technology is, in fact, not neutral; as it changes, we change along with it. How and exactly why we change is the focus of this chapter.

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This is Part 4 of my chapter-by-chapter walk through From the Garden to the City by John Dyer.

We started out talking about how technology isn’t neutral, how it not only changes the world around us, but changes us as well. And we started to see how we approach technology as a sort-of mini-narrative, allowing us to bridge the gap between our current world and a better one. We then looked at Genesis and how technology really began in the Garden of Eden when God told Adam to cultivate and till the garden, taking God’s initial creation and making something new out of it. But what exactly is technology anyway? Is it the tools used to cultivate the garden, the product of that cultivation, or the know-how that guided the process along?

It seems odd that a book subtitled “The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology” would wait until Chapter 4 to define what the author means by “technology”. But better late than never, I suppose. As we’ll see, however, the definition isn’t as clear-cut as we think it is.

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I’m blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. Dyer began the book by trying to put technology in its proper perspective. Technology, he argues, isn’t neutral. As it changes over time, we change with it. What we view as new and futuristic today becomes normal (or “mythic”) to future generations, to the point where we no longer even think of it as technology.

Imagination.

In Chapter 2, he builds upon this point by looking at exactly what technology is, defining it in terms of a narrative:

Though we might not realize it, we compose these mininarratives whenever we encounter even the simplest gadget. If we happen to see a shovel, our minds can easily imagine the act of digging a hole, visualizing how the ground will look after we’re finished. This small effort of the imagination has a clear movement from beginning (the world before the shovel) to middle (the act of digging) to end (the world with a new hole)—the basic arc of any story. …

Technology, then, is the bridge from this world to the imagined one.

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I recently started reading From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. I’m only a chapter in, but I’m already intrigued by the premise and am eager to see where Dyer goes from here. As a Christian who has worked in the IT field for over ten years (and who has a History degree), I’m fascinated with the whole subject of the role of technology in the world and how it affects the Church.

I wasn’t intending to write a blog post about the first chapter. Maybe a post or two after I had finished the book. But apparently a lot of folks are blogging their way through it. (ChurchMag has a great chapter-by-chapter review with links to others’ blogs in the comments.) So I figured I would offer a few comments of my own. I should mention that at the moment I’m fighting a cold and am juiced up on tons of cold medicine, so this post will be brief (and probably nonsensical).

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I’ve been on Google+ now for three weeks, and I really like it.

Actually, I should rephrase that. I’ve been on Google+ now for three weeks, and I really want to like it.

I want to use it. I want other people to use it. I want it to be awesome. So far, though, it’s been mostly disappointing.

Like me, it seems like a lot of people just haven’t found a good use for it. Maybe because it doesn’t really fit in with the existing Facebook/Twitter ecosystem. Nothing about it feels natural or cohesive or intertwined with any of our other social networks. Of course, this is largely due to Google not publishing their API for third-parties to use, but I think it’s also because anything posted there seems so incredibly redundant.

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