5 Responses for "Daily Roundup: Teen Technophobes, Atheist Sunday School & Emergent Adulthood"

1. Doug December 3rd, 2007 at 10:50 pm 1

   I just recently found your site through…some kind of Byzantine technological connection or another. A link of a link of a link. Anyway, I like what I see thus far.

   Techno backlash

   I think this is spot-on. Its taking a while for our society to really realize that technology is neutral. It can be good or bad depending on how we implement it. It isn’t a short-cut to get around dealing with substantive issues - the same issues people have always dealt with. How do we relate? How do we do what’s right? How do we take care of ourselves and each other? If we answer those, technology will offer itself to be used toward our ends - not the other way around.

   Sunday School for Atheists

   I was waiting for this. I won’t be surprised if secular humanist churches start sprouting up. I’m not sure if you’d say I’ve given up on Sunday school - but I do it a little differently from my predecessors I think.

   Emerging Adulthood

   This is my experience. Adolesence is stretched out and attenuated until it isn’t that meaningful a descriptor after a while, but adulthood is hard when your net worth is negative, you own almost nothing, and you’re still a student in your late 20’s. Emerging adulthood works for me.

2. Drew December 5th, 2007 at 3:32 pm 2

   Technology is laden with the values of the inventor and the decision making process by which the tool came into being. But the unintended consequences of the medium reciprocate the values of the user and the new purpose. Think of language. Is language value neutral or is it a value laden tool that we use to encode our thoughts? One learns that language is value laden when one learns another language. A fine example is the word love and its various meanings in different languages. Issues like this are prevalent in any exegesis of a text.

   The automobile, the architecture of a public space, the media we use to transmit information, etc. are all instances of a value system themselves and then reciprocate those values and condition the values of future users.

   The World Wide Web was constructed as a flexible information space for academics to share content and for the government to network its computer systems globally. The very nature of information as a flexible and constantly refiguring object within this space has contributed to the unintended consequences of flexible identities and diverse networks of relationships. as the information has taken on a radically different structure than in previous generations, it has both contributed to the shaping of this generation’s ideas of value and information as well as offered a media structure to lubricate those values. So it is constantly reciprocating.

   Where things can change is in the intentional use of a technology for an unintended purpose. That is the question the church can ask. This is to say, what is the outcome of implementing this or that tool? If the tool serves a purpose, is that outcome a noble outcome? After this is addressed with some standard of theological vigor can we address how technology can be used to effect change in a like noble manner. But the medium has to be questioned since it will restructure the message that is communicated, and often it will restructure it with unintended consequences.

   The question to this end is not ought we use technology. We use

3. » Technology, Value, and the Church Notes From Off-Center: A personal journal on culture, religion, and education. December 5th, 2007 at 4:13 pm 3

   […] 5th, 2007 by Drew in Religion, Letters to Churches, Philosophical Notes I posted part of this on faith’d and thought I would expand the thought and share it here.  It really is kind of a trek back into […]

4. Andrew Zirschky December 5th, 2007 at 4:19 pm 4

   Actually, Doug and Drew, I think you’ve both missed my point and reaffirmed why the problem I’m raising is an important one to consider. (I will be posting at length on this in the weeks to come, and I will only summarize here.)

   You’re both still dealing with questions of the INCLUSION and EXCLUSION of technology. The question you’re both asking and answering is, “What should the church do with technology?” Doug, I hear you basically saying, “Include it, technology is value-free.” And Drew, I hear you saying with a McLuhan-esque ring , “Technology comes with values attached, include it carefully, exclude some of it.”

   And I’m saying: You’re asking the wrong question and having the wrong discussion. Not that there isn’t a place and time for the church to discuss the nature of technology and its inclusion or exclusion. But all those questions and answers begin and end with technology. I’m saying the question the church needs to ask in light of a digital culture is, “What is the nature of the Church and how has God ordained the church to bear witness in the world?”

   This is a question that begins and ends with God and the church, not with technology. And there is an important difference between these types of questions because ultimately the answers given to the inclusion/exclusion question are limited to consider technology and its use by the church in missional witness. But the question I’m wanting to ask looks first to the nature of the church, God and humanity, then attempts to describe what is happening in technological culture in terms of theological anthropology, and then DOES NOT give an answer that begins with the words, “Technology ought to be. . .” Instead, it gives an answer that begins, “The Church ought. . .”

   The way I’m going to answer this question, and you’ll see this fleshed out in posts to come, is that ‘The Church ought to offer communion in a world that can offer mere connections.”

   I’ll hang up this comment with that teaser and let you stew about what that might mean. I’ll begin to answer soon (although I have a baby on the way, so it may take longer than expected).

   PS — Drew, I think what you’re talking about in your comments can definitely lead to some bigger discussions about the nature of the church, but rarely does this happen by following the course of questioning you set forth. Also, I generally agree with your assessment of the value-laden medium, but I’d also want to push you in light of the postmodern critique on how much “value” truly comes “pre-installed” by author or inventor. I think far less than you seem to imply — especially as the distance grows between authoring culture and receiving culture.

5. Drew December 5th, 2007 at 4:59 pm 5

   My issue is indeed different, but related. That is, that we communicate the gospel through media that shape the reception of that gospel does have structural effects on meaning. So I think that deciphering and reconstructing what that communion looks like is bound up in structures of meaning that are value-laden.

   So I was not really asking the question of inclusion, but of the nature of the message we communicate to create said connections and the unintended ways that it will often be received by the receiver.

   I do think that the postmodern deconstructive task lends itself to challenging the value-ladenness of media. But I also think that one aspect that the deconstructive task often misses is to call into account the purchases the deconstructive task must make on the structures that it deconstructs. It is like lungs deconstructing the nature of air. Even if you are abstractly deconstructing it, you still need to breathe at the same time. So the nature of the postmodern critique often misses the mark on how things can be rebuilt on pragmatic grounds after and even during the deconstructive task. But such a discussion is much broader that the intent here.

   I look forward to reading more!