(Ir)religiosity

I couldn’t help but recall Bonhoeffer’s notion of “cheap grace” when I read Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker on the ambivalent role of social media and social networking in activism.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.  This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism. [...]  It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. [...] Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Of course I have to agree with him, even as one who quite rightly passes as a “social media evangelist” at times.  While I am certainly not a luddite when it comes to these sort of things — I think that social media and networking serves a great, innovative, I dare say revolutionary, purpose at its best — I think it would behoove to acknowledge that technology, especially those that tend to encourage, at their worst, a dangerous type of narcissistic solipsism, always cut both ways.  I would much rather name that penchant and be mindful of it such that I can apply a healthy dose of suspicion to it as needed (which is almost constantly for me!) than to let it go completely unmitigated.

So, even though I find myself immersed in all this — very much on purpose — I still think it important to remain brutally self-critical.  And on that point I think we could use a little less cheap activism and a little more honest confrontation of socially entrenched norms and practices, to use Gladwell’s phrase.  And then maybe one day we can actually get at something Gladwell doesn’t much but is no less potent or operative — the power dynamics at work and the differential that remains largely unchallenged even when these technologies are but to good purpose.¹

Sometimes I actually wonder, in quasi-Bonhoefferian fashion, if at times no activism might actually be better than cheap activism.  It would certainly be more honest.

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1. This cuts both ways too.  On the one hand, social media seems radically democratic, allowing almost anyone the opportunity to be heard in ways that traditional mediums did not.  But on the other hand, while it may create space for the free exchange of opinions and debate, it rarely, if ever, creates the impetus for the liberative reconfiguration of power relations.  It only creates a space for that possibility to maybe be talked about.  Important, to be sure, but not enough in itself. [↩]

Not sure what to make of this.

He found me!

Reading through Jean-François Lyotard‘s The Postmodern Condition yesterday I was immediately struck by this quote.

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities the produce and consume — that is, the form of value.  Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production:  in both cases, the goal is exchange.  Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value.” (p. 4-5)

This is exactly the temptation of social media, I think.  If used with restraint and discretion social media outlets can be very useful tools to share knowledge and information.  But we must recognize the danger of changing the nature of knowledge by commodifying into something to be consumed rather than something to be internalized or reflected upon.  Then the act of consuming itself becomes the goal and not the use of knowledge or the information.

For example, I find myself following more people on Twitter or subscribing to more blogs not because I believe they are useful and enriching but because I need “more.”  The goal is not quality, but quantity.  More followers, more RSS feeds, more Facebook friends, etc.  I even catch myself doing it the bookstore, it’s not the book itself that I need or want but the act of buying and consuming more.  It is as if there is some sort of jouissance to be found in the act of consuming information and the abstraction of mere quantity.

So I think social media can be a useful and important tool in transmitting and sharing knowledge, but its potential won’t matter much if we allow the very nature of knowledge and information to be destroyed so we can consume more and actually “know” less.

Thoughts?

I’m going to take a bit of blogging and social media break.  For a few reasons.

First, I’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning for a canoeing/fishing trip at the Boundary Waters.  I’ll be gone for about a week.  No computer.  No cell phone.  No iPod.  No technology.  It will be refreshing.  And it couldn’t come at a better time.

Which leads me to a second reason.  I’ve become increasingly irritated and disappointed at the lack of substance and content in the “social media world” lately (blogging, twittering, etc.).  That is not to say that good, engaging and original content isn’t out there, it is.  But it’s getting drowned out by all the crap and the noise.  It makes me tried and cranky.  I’m sick of reading banal blog posts and my twitter feed being dominated by spymaster games or reports on someone’s workout routine.  For me, these are useful tools to share information and float new, creative thoughts or ideas.  But there seems to be a lot of rehashing going on and the endless noise both drowns out the things worth paying attention to and dilutes the larger conversation.

The lack of originality and the dominance of pure junk and noise has affected me and my creativity more than I realize.  A lot of what I blog about comes from inspiration from either what I’m reading offline or what I’m reading online.  Lately I just haven’t been inspired by the latter.  Again, that is not to say good stuff isn’t being written or shared.  It’s just being overshadowed and marginalized.

So I’m going to take a much needed break for a least a few weeks.  And when I get back and I may seriously cut back on my media intake by purging my feed reader and twitter.

Hey, I might even toss out thoughts and ideas the old-fashioned way and have some real conversations.  Imagine that.

The first Emerget Outliers meeting happened yesterday evening.  We met for around two hours and discussed everything from Caputo, Derrida, and deconstruction to secularization, evangelism, and the sinner’s prayer.  It was great.  The group is wonderful and I’m looking forward to more meetings in the future.

We plan to meet again in two weeks.  Updates will be posted regular on the main site and we hope to utilize the forum as a means to set up the next group conversation.  Hope you will join us.

Evernote is hands down my favorite Mac application.  It creates space for all the things I find worth keeping on the web (unless it’s a full page, I use Delicious for that) or noting.  It is my all-purpose capturing tool.  And it does what it does very well.

Now things just got better.

Following David Wierzbicki’s lead I’ve decided to share one of my Evernote notebooks.  This one is my primary repository for good quotes, short thoughts, and other nuggets that don’t really warrant a Delicious save but I’d still like to keep archived for reference. Up until now I’ve only used it intermittently, but I hope to put it too good use now that I’ll be sharing.

So if you have an Evernote account you can link my web clippings notebook to your account, or, if you don’t use Evernote (I don’t know why you wouldn’t!) you can grab the RSS feed.

Also, if you are sharing with Evernote, let me know and I’ll add you.

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It will be tweeted.  Every major US media outlet failed to cover Iran on the brink of revolution yesterday.  I think this picture really encapsulates it.

A lone protester confronts police forces.

Many protesters inside Iran are tweeting.  Here’s a pretty good list.

Today I’m on my way to Oklahoma City to attend Oklahoma Annual Conference and to (hopefully) be certified as a candidate for ordained ministry in the UMC.

Along with some others, I plan to tweet from AC and, if I feel inspired, to blog a bit.  Not sure if that will happen or not.  I’ll be pretty busy with meetings, catching up with some old friends, and leading worship at my former church on Wednesday night.

So, follow me on Twitter!  And if you’re up for it, follow the #okumc hash tag to keep up with all the goings on at Oklahoma Annual Conference.  If you’re not Methodist or just don’t care I apologize in advance for all the spam tweets you will be receiving this week.

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I agree with N.T. Wright:

“It really is high time we developed a Christian ethic of blogging. Bad temper is bad temper even in the apparent privacy of your own hard drive, and harsh and unjust words, when released into the wild, rampage around and do real damage. And as for the practice of saying mean an unjust things behind a pseudonym – well if I get a letter like that it goes straight in the bin. But the cyberspace equivalents of road rage don’t happen by accident. People who type vicious, angry, slanderous and inaccurate accusations do so because they feel their worldview to be under attack.” (ht)

I couldn’t agree more.  Blogging is at the same time both great and dangerous.  It brings out the best and the worst in us.  I am grateful for the many friends that I have made through this platform but I get really put out with the slander and hateful words that are put forth under the auspices of speaking the truth or defending the faith, or whatever else.  As Christians we have a great opportunity to have rich and robust conversation and to model what charitable dialogue and respectful disagreement might look like.  At our best we do that well, but sometimes we blow it.

I’m here because I want to do that well.  I blow it sometimes too, but I hope to create space for kind discussion and participate generous conversation with others.

The last sentence of the above quote is spot on I think.  People tend to really lash out when they perceive their particular worldview to be under attack (which is all the more interesting when you consider that Christianity does not offer a single worldview).  And the detached, abstract nature of commenting on blog without the dynamics of a face to face encounter are enough to make some people brave enough to type something they otherwise probably wouldn’t say directly to another’s face.

Maybe that’s a good way of approaching it — in the same way you would a face to face conversation.  Either way, I think there is always room for improvement.  We’ve got to be better at treating one another like children of God in our blogging and especially in our commenting.

I opened my Facebook this morning to find this:

It is conceited I know.  But it’s not every day one of your intellectual hero/ines is perusing your reading list.  So I’ll indulge myself.

But seriously, his latest post on the nature of belief is well worth your read.  It is interesting to observe how quickly a conversation, especially a theological conversation, concerning belief and the nature of one’s beliefs capitulates to what one can know with certainty — beyond the shadow of a doubt as it were — and the empirical factoids that one can observe in an ‘objective’ manner about the world.  Belief is hopelessly reduced only to what one can sensibly see rather than pointing toward the incoming of a reality that, in Peter’s words, “does not yet exist,” the incoming of something wholly beyond mere fact, something wholly beyond epistemological certainty, and something wholly Other that inaugurates the very real possibility of the im/possible.

Peter draws particular attention to the absurdity of our relegating to the realm of absurdity any belief that might appear to be counter-factual.  It is an important observation and one I hope we do not ignore.