I share, therefore I am: how technology is making us more lonely

"Connected, but alone?" was a TED talk given by Sherry Turkle last February. It's an excellent look at the ways in which we are isolating ourselves in and through technology. We have a desire to connect more with people, but the ways in which we are connecting are actually making us more lonely. Check it out:



And here are some of her quotes:

"We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere, connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives."

"We can end up hiding from each other even as we are all connected to each other." 

"Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding, and we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that we do is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection." 

"We use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves, so a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection." 

"People get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they become almost willing to dispense with people all together." 

"That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That's why it's so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed: so many automatic listeners. And the feeling that no one is listening to me makes us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us." 

"Technology appeals to us most, where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy." 

"We are designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship." 

"I share, therefore I am." 

"You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude. The ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself and where you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are, it's as though we are using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely."

GIving Up 'Getting Ahead' For Simple Pleasures

When I was out west, I would often remember with longing the rain and thunderstorms that would often come through Georgia. You might think I'm crazy, since southern California has some of the best weather in the country, but there's something peaceful about rain that made me long for it more often than once every six months.

This past Monday it rained. It rained a lot. All day in fact. I loved it. After falling asleep to it in the afternoon, I went downstairs, opened the garage door, set up a camping chair near the edge of where the water was dripping of the roof and I sat, watching and listening. It was extremely peaceful.

I also had a book in hand, The Hidden Wound, by Wendell Berry. This is my first Berry book, recommended to me by one of my favorite professors at Fuller. I don't know much about Berry, except that he is a Christian who has written a lot on agrarian ideas and that he has lived on a farm in Kentucky for the past forty years.

In the book, he is talking about racism and slavery that existed in our not so distant history. He himself grew up on a farm where his grandfather owned a couple of slaves. One slave in particular, Nick, become a childhood friend of Berry.

In one chapter, he is describing how Nick's life was rich in simple pleasures, contrasted with the "anxiety and the greed and the haste and the self-doubt of the white man scrambling for the top." Speaking about these pleasures, he says:

"In these times one contemplates it with the same sense of hope with which one contemplates the sunrise or the coming of spring: the image of a man who has labored all his life and will labor to the end, who has no wealth, who owns little, who has no hope of changing, who will never 'get somewhere' or 'be somebody,' and who is yet rich in pleasure, who takes pleasure in the use of his mind! Isn't this the very antithesis of the thing that is breaking us in pieces? Isn't there a great rare human strength in this--this humble possibility that all our effort and aspirations is to deny?"

Being back in Georgia, in the northern Atlanta suburbs that are so full of the excess of wealth and busyness, it's hard not to be sucked in to believe that these things are what I should be going after. Thankfully, a restful time in the rain helped remind me that these things are not life giving and that God's definition of success for me is far different from what the world tells me it is.

Here's a closing thought from Berry again, this time drawing on Henry David Thoreau, who gives some direction as to what true wisdom is:

"A Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums. Granting the frailty, and no doubt the impermanence, of modern technology as a human contrivance, the man who can keep a fire in a stove or on a hearth is not only more durable, but wiser, closer to the meaning of fire, than the man who can only work a thermostat."

Time lapse video of Pasadena City Hall around sunset

I created this video on a fun new iPhone app. Super cool.

The Medium is the Message

I recently finished a communication class here at Fuller. One of the assigned readings was The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church by Shane Hipps. I thought the book was really interesting, especially the first half.

Hipps owes most of his thinking on media to Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase, "The medium is the message." This is the thought that the medium (or media) through which information comes (books, TV, Internet, phones, etc.) is often more important for your message than the content itself.

In his book, Hipps is mainly writing about how the church is shaped by media. However, his thoughts can be applied universally to most other areas of life. Here are a few thoughts:

When we talk about media and technology as tools for the church, we assume they are simply conduits or pipelines useful for dispensing the gospel...

However, McLuhan’s simple yet provocative statement ‘The medium is the message’ issues a direct challenge in this understanding of media. He writes, ‘Our conventional response of all media, namely that it is how they used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. The content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.' In other words, media are much more than neutral purveyors of information. They have the power to shape us regardless of content and thus cannot be evaluated solely upon their use.

His point is that we often give little thought to how different media impact us. For example, he talks about how we are often oblivious to TV when we watch it. We don't understand that it is reducing our capacity for abstract thought, making us prefer intuition and experience over logic and reasoning, thus reviving elements of an individualistic culture.

To drive this point home, Hipps quotes a very hyperbolic metaphor of McLuhan:

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.

Hipps' point is that "the medium has far more impact on the culture than its content." I think it's so very important to notice the ways in which different media shapes the way we understand the world, not only for our benefit, but for the benefit of others as we seek to communicate truth.

I owe a great deal to my friend Roy for helping think through these things for the first time a few years back. Also my friend Scott has a lot of great thoughts on how technology is shaping us at his blog (particularly this post and this one). Also, if you're interested, here are a few other resources I would recommend:

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (one of my favorites)
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman
Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith by Shane Hipps

Steve Jobs and the Secular Gospel

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced his leave of absence from Apple. Andy Crouch reflects:

...In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), [Jobs] spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It’s worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn’t, say:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own “inner voice, heart and intuition.”

Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha, and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University. Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself, and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil it is strangely inert. Such a speech would have been hard to take at the funeral of Christina Taylor Greene, nine years old, killed along with five others on a bright Saturday morning in Tucson, Arizona. It is no wonder that Barack Obama, who had to address these deeper forms of grief this past week, turned to a vision which only makes sense if there is more to the world than we can see. Anything less is cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

Read the whole article

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Likealittle.com: making flirting easier since 2010

Brett McCracken shares some of his thoughts on likealittle.com, a new social flirting site:

"Though it remains to be seen whether likealittle will be more than a flavor-of-the-week fad, its popularity certainly underscores some of the broader social trends happening among “Generation Y” (or whatever the generation in college is called). Namely: The increasing preference to mediate relationships (even the very initial stage of relationships, such as flirting) via technology and avoid the difficulties and awkwardness of face-to-face communication wherever possible.

Naturally, if there is technology that makes the awkward things in life less awkward, we seize upon it. Who wants to nervously stumble over their words when making small talk with a girl they like when a cleverly crafted likealittle message will do? It’s the same reason why Gen Y communicates almost exclusively by texting on their phones rather than talking. Texting is more controlled. More efficient. Easier. It’s the same reason why updating scores of friends and family about your life in on fell swoop on Facebook is preferable to the laborious process of calling each of them or writing an email or letter to them.

Technology’s dominant raison d’etre has always been about efficiency. Making something easier, quicker, less painful. Think medicine, automobiles, assembly line, central heating. Communication technologies are similarly in the business of making the difficulties of communication easier. But there are always unintended consequences. Likealittle makes flirting easier, but it also makes it anonymous, objectifying and addictive (“dangerously” so). And, as with its various forbears, likealittle thrives because it creates a safe, low-pressure, “just me and my computer/phone” environment where it’s easy to say whatever we want. It removes those pesky filters (in person tact, nervous self-restraint) that sometimes keep us from saying the things that pop into our heads. As with texting and other “nonverbal signals be damned!” modes of fast-paced, send-before-you-think-too-much-about-it communication, likealittle feeds the culture’s ever worsening addictions to communication as diversion/commodity and narcissistic self validation."

Read the whole thing

The Difference Between Gutenberg and Zuckerberg

Neal Gabler (in the LA Times):

...Gutenberg's Revolution transformed the world by broadening it, by proliferating ideas. Zuckerberg's Revolution also may change consciousness, only this time by razing what Gutenberg had helped erect. The more we text and Twitter and "friend," abiding by the haiku-like demands of social networking, the less likely we are to have the habit of mind or the means of expressing ourselves in interesting and complex ways.

That makes Zuckerberg the anti-Gutenberg. He has facilitated a typography in which complexity is all but impossible and meaninglessness reigns supreme. To the extent that ideas matter, we are no longer amusing ourselves to death. We are texting ourselves to death.

Wired for Distraction

An interesting article was published in the New York Times a couple of days ago entitled Growing Up Digital, Wired For Distraction. It looks at the growing problem of how technology is negatively impacting how students are learning. Leading a group of high school juniors myself, I constantly see how dangerous the distractions in their lives really are (they've also helped me evaluate and eliminate the distractions in my own life). Learning and reading is boring. Entertainment is becoming the goal in all of life. Neil Postman's famous book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is a very appropriate statement for what is happening to this generation.

Here's a few paragraphs from the article:

Escaping into games can also salve teenagers’ age-old desire for some control in their chaotic lives. “It’s a way for me to separate myself,” Ramon says. “If there’s an argument between my mom and one of my brothers, I’ll just go to my room and start playing video games and escape.”

(...)

Sean’s favorite medium is video games; he plays for four hours after school and twice that on weekends. He was playing more but found his habit pulling his grade point average below 3.2, the point at which he felt comfortable. He says he sometimes wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study, because he finds it hard to quit when given the choice. Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of focus, asserting that in another era he would have been distracted by TV or something else.

“Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean, sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded by a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods populated by Internet tycoons. Sean, a senior, concedes that video games take a physical toll: “I haven’t done exercise since my sophomore year. But that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I still look the same.”

Sam Crocker, Vishal’s closest friend, who has straight A’s but lower SAT scores than he would like, blames the Internet’s distractions for his inability to finish either of his two summer reading books.

“I know I can read a book, but then I’m up and checking Facebook,” he says, adding: “Facebook is amazing because it feels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the absence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway.”

He concludes: “My attention span is getting worse.”

(via)

Ted Koppel on Information Overload

I fear that we in the mass media are creating such a market for mediocrity that we've diminished the incentive for excellence. I think we're losing the ability to manage ideas. To Contemplate. To think. We're becoming a nation of electronic voyeurs, whose capacity for informed dialogue is a fading memory.

If you have never had even a passing acquaintance with Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, then you can't really understand the foundations of man's evolving struggle with philosophy and ethics. You begin to lose track of what has always been kind of undercurrent in man's development. And that is sort of a moral evolution. We have evolved in this century in technical ways that truly numb the mind.

Video here:



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Your Brain on Gadgets

Coupled with my post from a week ago, this NY Times article almost makes me want to give up technological gadgets all together, for fear that this is happening to me:

"Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored."

(HT:Challies)

What Kind of Brain is the Web Giving Us?

A recent Wired Magazine article, written by Nicholas Carr, looks at the effect of the internet on the human mind. In it he asks an interesting question:

"What kind of brain is the web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."

He goes on to note a few studies done and statistics measured over the last 30 years. The research shows that are brains are actually changing. Here's his conclusion:

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.

I post this because I already can see how my reading comprehension and ability to focus over has drastically waned over the last 10 years. It even took me several tries to finish the article because of my mind kept wandering elsewhere. I don't know if this is just inevitable and we'll adapt accordingly, or if this is something we can control. In any case, it's worth thinking about.

(HT:Challies)

Distracting Ourselves...From Ourselves

Justin Taylor recently posted some great quotes on the subject of diversion and being busy. The first is one from Blaise Pascal, French mathematician turned Christian. He says:

"I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

Wow. That is worth reflecting on. How well are you, how well am I able to sit in my room without TV, music, Twitter, Facebook, texting, browsing the internet, etc. and just think? Why are we constantly trying to fill in the gaps of silence in lives?

The second quote is by Peter Kreeft. It comes from a book that he wrote reflecting on the things Pascal had to say. He has some interesting and convicting observations:

"We ought to have much more time, more leisure, than our ancestors did, because technology, which is the most obvious and radical difference between their lives and ours, is essentially a series of time-saving devices.

In ancient societies, if you were rich you had slaves to do the menial work so that you could be freed to enjoy your leisure time. Life was like a vacation for the rich because the poor slaves were their machines. . . .

[But] now that everyone has slave-substitutes (machines), why doesn’t everyone enjoy the leisurely, vacationy lifestyle of the ancient rich? Why have we killed time instead of saving it? . . .

We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .

If you are typically modern, your life is like a mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiple diversions."

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Recently I read Brave New World (by Aldous Huxley) and 1984 (by George Orwell). I had heard great things about each book and how both authors wrote about different, yet similar, takes on the future. I thoroughly enjoyed reading each one and it was interesting to see what aspects of each author's philosophy seemed to be true about the world we live in today. Both were incredibly engaging and thought-provoking, so I encourage you to read them if you haven't.

Rather than give my own synopsis of each one, I just wanted to highlight a quote that was the main impetus for me reading these books back to back. It comes from a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death which is written by Neil Postman. Read the quote carefully. Both scenarios are likely (and frightening), but I ultimately agree with Postman's conclusion. I believe we are living in the age of over stimulation that Huxley describes and are truly amusing ourselves to death:

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Also, here's a great cartoon that illustrates this quote.

Virtual Life Creating Private Worlds

The latest Adbusters article reveals how the Japanese are being affected by growing technology of virtual, private worlds. The article looks at recent killing sprees as well as general public interaction to illustrate how "privacy is not simply sustained, it’s thrust upon you." And I don't think the U.S. is too far behind...

Here's the conclusion:

"Committing to a relationship or the achievement of an ambition is usually a lot more challenging than creating a sudden buzz on the internet, posting a blog entry, tweeting 140 characters or adding new friends to your Facebook, Mixi or digital address pages. But a retreat from reality poses its own set of risks: newly emerging anxieties and uncertainties that we are only now beginning to recognize and understand...

Divorced from the very human responsibility to contact and interact directly with other living beings, we may feel hollowed out, emptied of the sense of an evolving self that can make existence worth its painful bouts of adversity and growth. A life spent lurking too long in the shadows of the virtual world might turn out to be no life at all."

Books: the perfect technology

After having the Kindle for about a year, Tim Challies explains why books are the perfect technology:

...I came to see that all of the things that frustrated me about the Kindle were things that made it not like a book. It's book-like qualities were it's best qualities; it's non-book-like qualities were the ones that got to me. All of the things that annoyed me were the things that made the experience more like operating a computer and less like reading a book. Pages took too long to turn; I could not splash yellow highlighter on the pages; I could not skim through the book looking quickly for a word or phrase or note; I could not scrawl notes in the margins. Sure, there were a few advantages--the notes I did take (saved in a text file on the Kindle) could be exported to my computer simply by plugging in a USB cable; books were less expensive and instantly added to my collection; hundreds of classics were available for free. But overall, the Kindle experience paled in comparison to the happy, familiar, comforting experience of sitting down with a book. Everything I wanted the Kindle to do, a book could do better.

I don't own a Kindle and I think this pretty much sums up why I doubt I'll ever prefer electronic reading to book reading.

The beginning and impact of Facebook

Yesterday marked the 5th anniversary of the beginning of Facebook. And if you've never looked in to how it started, it's worth checking out. Al Mohler shares his thoughts:

"Today's student generation, the "Digital Natives," know of no existence before cell phones, the Internet, e-mail, and text messaging. Social networking perfectly fits their lifestyle and worldview. They assume 24/7 social contact -- or at least access to this contact just a few clicks away.

Social networking is like any new technology. It must be evaluated on the basis of its moral impact as well as its technological utility. Social networking sites offer unprecedented opportunities for communication and contact -- and that is both the promise and the peril of the technology."

Longing to be Known

In the latest Relevant Magazine, there's an article entitled The Problem of Pride in the Age of Twitter written by Brett McCracken. In it he looks at the rise of technology and social sites that provide virtual community. Although his tone is rather bleak (I disagree that we are fundamentally boring), I think he has a good point regarding our desire to be known. Similar to my post yesterday, if we are not careful, we can allow our "status" and info on Twitter or Facebook (or blogs!) feed our narcissism.

Here's a couple paragraphs:

"We've become obsessed with 'status,' but not status in the sense of being objectively measurable (as in our class or social status), but status in the attention-deficit sense of 'what I am doing right now.' Communication is no longer about learning things from people or sharing experiences; it's about knowing what they're doing and how they're feeling--or at least how they want the world to perceive them as such.

Our lives have suddenly become much more dramatic, worthy of being 'performed' on a stage visible to millions. But since when are our lives so interesting that we feel compelled to share them with the world? Do we have delusions of grandeur? Perhaps it's not primarily the fact that we can tell our stories to the world, but that--more so than ever before--we desperately long to.

There is a real sense of emptiness in this generation. We've grown up in relative stability and lived borderline boring lives. For most of us, mo major wars, crises, famines or holocausts have plagued our lives. Meanwhile, we've consumed more media than ever--living in movies, television shows, video games and other fantasy worlds. There's been a dissonance between who we are (boring, unknown) and what the media has made us want to be (interesting, glamorous, famous). The result is a massive cultural longing to be known. Not by a few, but by many."

Become a wise consumer of culture

Josh Jackson, editor of Paste Magazine, recently wrote a short blurb on the search in our lives among the countless entertainment options.

"I think I may have a problem...With nearly every CD released coming through my office, most every film I want to see already in my Netflix queue and more magazine subscriptions than would be humanly possible to read, I’m never at a loss for some form of entertainment to fill the gaps in life. Even when I’m standing in line at the back, I’ve got a phone in my pocket with access to free games, YouTube videos and the rest of that wonderful composite of all the knowledge of recorded human history: the Internet. I’m in danger of, as Neil Postman put it, amusing myself to death.

It’s been 47 years and billions of entertainment options since that great ‘malaise’ Binx Bolling, in Walker’s Percy’s The Moviegoer, found more meaning and purpose in his trips to the cinema than in his own life. To counter that, he became enamored with the search--’To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.’ I like to think I’m on that search, and I find that books like The Moviegoer, as well as music, film, magazines--and even TV and video games--can illuminate the path ahead. But only if I’m vigilant about actually living, and separating the wheat from the chaff when I do stop to enjoy a piece of our culture.

...At Paste, we see it as our job to help you discover entertainment options pertinent to your search--not to serve as a replacement for your own story. I believe we were put on this earth to help redeem it. The best music, film and culture will do you no good if you’re buried under it. Become a wise consumer of culture. Or better yet, become a creator of it."

I've blogged before on why you check out Paste Magazine. Do it.

My new iPhone

So, I was finally able to pick it up yesterday. After anxiously awaiting the July 11th release, and then having to order it and wait two weeks to get it...it's finally in my hands. I'm pretty excited at all the new possiblities that lie ahead in my productivity and entertainment with this little device. I spent most of the day yesterday setting everything thing up (which is a ton of fun for me) and getting everything I want on there.

Amidst all the excitement, I also understand some of the dangers ahead. With constant access to the internet, my email, calendar, and other random entertaining things, I can easily let it control my life. And sure enough, this morning I read a great article concerning this very idea by Tim Challies. Here are some of his thoughts:

"It seems to me that, as society continues to move in its current direction, and as we become ever more “wired,” Christians will have to be focused and deliberate about moderating and perhaps removing some of this ever-present background noise. If we are to be thinking people, people who think deeply and deliberately about spiritual matters, we simply cannot allow our lives to be overshadowed by the noise of technology.

Truthfully, I cannot think of anything that distracts us so fully and completely and consistently as technology. For too many of us, technology is a master and not a servant. It is our owner, not our possession. We let it run and rule our lives. We allow technology to determine the course of our lives, taking us where it leads. We determine our schedules with TV Guide in one hand, an iPhone calendar in the other. We invest countless hours in online friendships, many of which are shallow and insignificant, while ignoring people in our local churches and communities. Perhaps while ignoring even our own families.

Technology is a great servant but an evil master. Technology is proof of the greatness of God and something we ought to be thankful for. After all, He is the One who has endowed humans with the ingenuity that makes it all possible..."

Read the whole thing

This looks cool