the tindog coffeehouse

When Twitter launched Vine in January, everyone’s initial reaction to the social video app’s six-second limit was something along the lines of, “Huh?” What on earth could you do that was even remotely entertaining in six seconds? Even the stupidest commercials are at least 15 seconds long. And in fact most Vine videos are pretty lame. But there was a subtle brilliance in the limitation. Yes, the short length made it much more mobile-friendly, but like Twitter’s 140-character limit, it also forced creativity. As the Atlantic Wire predicted at the time, “The medium will evolve within the constraints. People will master the Vine. The clips will get less choppy; the rhythm will improve. People will create videos that make sense. And, just like the 140-character limit, soon enough, nobody will call Vine’s rules a limitation.”

When forced to work within severe constraints, there’s no room for fluff. Everything gets boiled down to what’s really important. Think about where you live. How many square feet do you really need to live? Sure, I could be really comfortable in a 10,000 square foot mansion, but I really only need a few hundred square feet. Maybe less.

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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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As you probably know by now, I’ve been blogging my way through John Dyer’s From the Garden to the City, a book about the redeeming and corrupting powers of technology and how that impacts the Christian Church. Of course, when we talk about technology in that context, we tend to assume that means the Internet and social networking, but other than the physical mediums of our modern-day telecommunications, we tend to forget that none of that is really new. In fact, the social media of today bears a striking resemblance to the social networks of 16th century Europe, which allowed Martin Luther’s charges against the Catholic Church to spread like wildfire.

From the moment in October 1517 when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, his anti-Catholic protests began spreading at a rate that even took Luther by surprise. The Economist takes a look at why this happened and finds that just like with the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement of today, technology was at the heart of it:

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