Quote of the Day 7/7/09

We recognize, therefore, that the Church had good reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal. Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.

Pope Benedict XVI in "Charity in Truth"

The Results Are In

And the overwhelming response here at Balsbaugh7 was that people feel sick to their stomach at the thought of losing that old book smell.

So what is it about the physical book that makes it so important to Tao of Reading?

Is it mere "sentimentality" or "nostalgia" as one commenter suggests? Or is there something more?

Quote of the Day 5/02/09

The Sympathetic Mind leaves the world whole, or it attempts always to do so. It looks upon people and other creatures as whole beings. It does not parcel them out into functions and uses. The Rational Mind, by contrast, has rested its work for a long time on the proposition that all creatures are machines. This works as a sort of strainer to eliminate impurities such as affection, familiarity and loyalty from the pursuit of knowledge, power and profit.

Wendell Berry in "Two Minds"

Kindle - Books Update

Good conversation still going on around Kindle and books. Go back and weigh in if you're interested. I myself just had an epiphany that would require more development.

Well it would clear up some living room space ...

Stephen King with his Kindle

A friend of mine was over last night and, noticing the rather cluttered condition of my overflowing bookshelves, asked, "So do you just live by the principle that you're going to have twenty percent more books than you have room for?"

Well ... maybe soon that will never be a problem for humanity again! We'll all have the Kindle!

Backpacks full of cumbersome textbooks that add up to half the body weight of a seventh grader? Gone!

Shelves full of titles waiting to be read sometime in the next decade? Gone!

Libraries? Bookstores? Acid-free paper? First Editions? 

Gone! Gone! Gone!! Gone!!!

Think it won't catch on? Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos says sales of the Kindle have "exceeded our most optimistic expectations."

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week called, "How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write." Take a look at it.

This, too, is a sign of the approaching Singularity.

What do you think? Good? Bad? Neutral? Frightening? Exciting? Take the poll in the right hand column.

There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course? - Steven Johnson, WSJ

Comcast Jingles the Singularity

As if I wasn't already worried enough about the negative sociological effects of approaching the Singularity, Comcast comes out with these:





For those who don't know anything about it, "The Singularity" is a theoretical point in the near future at which, depending upon your definition, our technological inventions will surpass us in intelligence, we will be thoroughly integrated into our surrounding technology and it into us, or we will experience a quantum leap in technological advances so unlike anything that we have seen before that it will transform our very understanding of what it means to be human.

Poke around at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Ray Kurzweil's site, or the Acceleration Watch. If you're interested, you can become a full blown Transhumanist as you work towards a Transhuman future.

Or just Google it on your hand-held wireless device using hands-free voice recognition software while your car parallel parks itself.

There is a huge part of me that wants to to form some sort of Christian Neo-Luddite movement in response to this - start smashing Bluetooth devices in the streets or something. Or sometimes I want to do what Wendell Berry did - move away from it all and bide the end on some self-sustaining farm in the upper South, growing beets organically and killing chickens with an ax ground at a human powered wheel.

On the other hand, leading advocates of continuing down this technological path as far as we can will counter, "Which medical advances that we already have would you roll the clock back on?"

And that's a tough question. Every critique of rapidly developing technology faces that huge intellectual hurdle. Which cure would you deny humanity? Which technology? Which advantage? And why?

So ... can we just accept technological progress towards functional immortality? Towards a point at which we move beyond the restraints of biological existence? Should we?

If you could download your neural net into a non-biological humanoid ... would you?

What was once science fiction can no longer be so easily dismissed. How do you think about technological advancement and the future?

If you have some time and you haven't already done so, read what Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy had to say about some of these problems in an article for Wired magazine.

Thanks to my sister Jodi at Highchair Theology for putting me on to the jingles.

Everything's amazing, and nobody's happy.

My sister alerted me to this Conan O'Brien interview that has significant technoSabbatarian overtones.

What do you think?

Giiving up for Lent ...

... in the technoSabbatarian vein, googling, wikpedia and non-family blogs.

Thinking About ...

... how writing and books began the process of removing information from realm of the memory and placing it in outside of the human person, and how the internet and a hand held or implanted device might complete that process.

Call it research for a savage post-apocalyptic novel if you like...

I want to know from any of my tech-savvy friends, what would it take from a hardware, software or power supply angle to completely take out the collective storehouse of knowledge we call the world-wide-web?

Think creatively. What would someone have to do if they wanted to do it?

Of Blogs and Books

OK, 22 Words has done it again.

I understand that for some reason it is necessary to make short paragraphs on blog posts.

I also understand that this doesn't necessarily mean that people who read blogs can't read books with long paragraphs.

But... I do really fear for the future of the older classics in this new culture of techno-literacy. As people become more and more accustomed to shorter paragraphs, twitter content, IM, etc., I fear they will have completely unsuited themselves for Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hugo ... even Steinbeck.

If this happens on a large scale, I do not think it will be a failure of education, desire or inteligence, simply a matter of habit and conditioning. That's what scares me the most. It's so easy.

And then what? As Morissey might say: "Come armageddon!
Come, armageddon! come!"

Unfortunately, only a couple days after that post on short paragraphs in blogs, I found some of these very fears disturbingly realized reading the comments of 22 Words's fairly literate readership in response to the question, "Are there any good books you don't like?"

Dickens used to appear in the newspapers for crying out loud! Now he appears on lists of books that fairly literate people couldn't get through.

It's almost enough to make me drop out altogether, like one twentieth century writer, thinker, and human being I admire an awful lot.

Ice and Snow Adventure

Instead of working on the computer or watching a ball game Sunday afternoon, I ended up going on a snow and ice adventure hike with Dietrich and Emily. (Anna had a friend over.) The chances of this having happened without technoSabbatarianism is ... next to nil. Another benefit!

Here are some shots:




The next three are Dietrich and Emily breaking through a small ice fall ... and cozying in.





And this was breaking a hole through the ice ... right before the grand colapse.

I don't even know what to title this post ...

... but the video below explains every impulse behind my urge to technoSabbatarianism.

If you have 20 minutes, sit down and watch this. Like all TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) speakers, Susan Blackmore does an excellent job weaving together some high level, interdisciplinary thoughts in an accessible short speech. But this ... this ... is like nothing I've ever heard before.



What she embraces as a whole vision of reality is capable of sustaining itself as a world view because it a) can not only account for the phenomena but also go head to head with other world views, b) is stable enough to adapt to change, and c) is visionary enough to inspire allegiance and devotion.

But it is scary as Hell - maybe even scarier.

When you get a chance to listen to it, pay close attention to her language and the way she is re-shaping reality.

I'll post some of my thoughts on this soon, but please comment on what you think.

Preparing for the Second technoSabbath

I have a teaching on the Psalms to give this week and a faculty seminar on Surprised by Hope this afternoon!

Trying to prep for week two of technoSabbatarianism is getting a bit hectic, but Jen is going to join me. And it is good even to force myself to plan ahead for not having technological assistance.

Thinking about ...

... the difference between wisdom and knowledge, the overwhelming bias towards the latter in an information age.

●Knowledge is not wisdom.

●Though tangentially related, the two cannot be pursued in the same way or at the same time.

●Information is a consumable good; knowledge is a storehouse of consumed information.

●Our age has made information an cheap, attractive, marketable good.

●In the information age, if one wants to pursue wisdom with greater zeal or devotion, he must find a way to turn his energies away from the aquisition and consumption of more and more information.

Thoreau went into the woods to live deliberately.

technoSabbatarianism may only be step one ...

Day One Dependency

Well ... that was an education in my own dependency!

I'm a true believer now. Anyone want to join me?

techno-Sabbatarianism: InBeginning

I have decided to start practicing techno-Sabbatarianism - beginning this evening.

My aim is to find a symbolic way to be in this matrix of a globally integrated electronic information and entertainment age that we call the twenty-first century but not of it.

I could drop out of it altogether. In fact, I've always been attracted to the Amish way, to Wendell Berry, to Thoreau, to Annie Dillard as the Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and to the self-sustaining agrarian life. But I also know that attraction is at least eight parts nostalgia for a golden age that was hardly golden.

Technology is a human good. Technological progress has contributed greatly to the relief of human suffering, the spread of the gospel (in one sense, anyway), care for the earth, and many other worthwhile human endeavors.

And yet ... there is some things about technological progress that is troubling to me. Deeply troubling. For one , it's linked in many ways to a rationalist, modernist, enlightenment vision of reality that I simply don't buy into. For another thing, I've read too many books like Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World not to see glimpses of these dystopias in the viral consumerism that threaten to alter for the worse our basic understanding of what it means to be human and to be in society with one another -- perhaps even what it means to relate to God. Furthermore, technological progress is a thing that is rarely called into question and much more rarely resisted in any way. We rush headlong, in fact, to fill our lives with its textureless lights and manufactured noises.

I intend to practice techno-Sabbatarianism (according to the Christian calendar) by resting from technology from sundown on Saturday (around the time when we usually practice an opening of the Lord's Day ceremony in People of Praise) to sundown Sunday evening (or thereabouts).

The principles and kosher rules of techno-Sabbatarianism are subject to revision, but right now I'm thinking no Internet, no phone calls, no television, no movies, no radio, no compact disks - except for emergencies or acts of mercy.

Adjustments

As you can see, I've been tinkering with design for Balsbaugh7.

As a part of that, I will be gradually removing the "Thinking about" sidebar item by taking an item off the list, making brief comment on it in a short blog post and then labeling it. Let me know if there's anything you were particulalry interested in at some point.

I'm also thinking about a platform for a new web-site that would be a thinned out version of this one, leaving out the family stuff and just dual posting most of the rest - education, commentary, scripture, music, etc.


Balsbaugh7 wouldn't change at all, but techno-Sabbatarian would offer a more professionalized version of the content for those who read but feel like they are peeking in on a family meeting and so feel weird commenting. (That's not in the least a suggestion for my sisters and mother to stop commenting! That's been the #1 benefit of having this blog, and the reason I wouldn't want to run only a disincarnate idea blog.)

I also wouldn't mind if technoSabbatarian becomes more widely read someday (like when I write a book and need to promote it :-) so I'm thinking of soft-promoting techno-Sabbatarian by using it rather than Balsbaugh7 as my link when I comment on other more widely read blogs.

There's no content there yet. But if you want to check out the design, go to www.technosabbatarian.blogspot.com

As a bonus, you can also see the final five blogs I decided upon!

After you take a look, let me know what you think.

●Any comments on the idea of doing this in the first place?

●Any comments on the banner design?

●www.technosabbatarian.blogspot or www.techno-sabbatarian.blogspot? (hypen or hyphen-less)

●What on Balsbaugh7 would work well there and what makes this feel more like a family blog (that I also want to run)?

I'm working on a welcome post that I will also have some questions about in the next couple days, so if you want to contribute, start thinking about what the principles of techno-Sabbatarianism should be.

Thinking about ....

... limiting my blog consumption to no more than 5 blogs by people I don't know very well or to whom I am not related. This may become one of the kosher rules of techno-Sabbatarianism.

I'm committed to:

22 Words (Abraham Piper's blog -- updated at least daily but never more than twenty-two words, random, incarnational, provocative and helpful seeds from a guy in a knit cap who I've seen twice at Town Hall now)

leithart.com (Peter Leithart's thoughts on scripture, philosophy, theology, politics, etc -- heady and oft updated but worth working through or, if time does not permit, skimming for gems from the author of Against Christianity)

Baxter's Ongoing Thoughts (C. Baxter Krueger's thoughts on theology, Christian culture, the church, etc. -- well written articles by the author of The Great Dance, updated less frequently)

a time to tear downA Time to Build Up (Peter Enns's reflections on the Bible and contemporary Christian faith -- a historical-critical slant the author of Inspiration and Incarnation)

From there on, however, I can't decide between

Jesus Creed (Scott McKnight exploring the significance of Jesus and the orthodox faith for the 21st century)

internetmonk.com (Michael Spenser dispatching from the post-evangelical wilderness)

Desiring God Blog

or the next best thing that might come along.

Any suggestions? What else do you all read that I might find inspiring?

Thinking about ...

... becoming a techno-Sabbatarian