hughbiquitous

I’m starting to think that the web rots the mind.

That’s not an absolute statement, mind you. But I think that there’s some truth in the idea that “the medium is the message” and that our interaction with the web has an effect that is independent of the content we encounter there.

For example, television accustoms us to 22-minute conflict resolution and commercials popping up every so many minutes. There are similar issues with the web: as a blogger, I find myself trying to write everything in paragraphs of no more than four or five printed lines because, as a reader of online content, I know how the medium works.

(Indeed, see web design tip #10, “Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones. Information on your page should be designed for the short attention span of most Internet users. Keep paragraphs and sentences short unless context mandates otherwise…”)

The Need for Examination

Back in August I bookmarked a number of blog entries and articles expressing concerns about our technological saturation and its effects. The points were well taken—we need to examine our habits:

Keith Plummer: “Christians are prone to assess our use of information technologies solely on the basis of what kind of information is being conveyed with little thought given to how uncritical and excessive use of information technologies may have undesirable effects even when we are using them to communicate good things.”

Douglas Groothuis (quoted by Justin Taylor): “Any area of culture that decreases godliness and enhances worldliness must come under the loving discipline of Jesus Christ–for his glory, for our good, and for the good of those we serve. Christians need to withdraw from aspects of our technological culture … in order to gain perspective on ourselves, God, and our culture.”

John Mark Reynolds: “[The New Media] could also develop a nasty laziness in me. If I can write quickly, why refine my ideas? Why not hop from one idea to another without ever revisiting them? Doesn’t the public demand something new? This underestimates the public and threatens to leave me and any other new media writer severely weaker than we need be.”

Jerram Barrs: (sorry, it’s more than five lines…)

A good test of whether television is servant or master is, when your children have watched something, do they then go out and do something related to what they have seen? Is their imagination stimulated? Television is a servant when your children can watch a program then say, “Well that was fascinating. Let’s go and play Robin Hood,” or “Let’s go and do this thing.”

Is television stimulating your children’s interest and imagination, or is it actually having the opposite effect? When you turn it off, do they just lie around on the floor and say, “What am I going to do now?”

So, What Are You Going to Do Now?

When my church’s blog launched in 2004, the ideas I interacted with there stimulated my interest and imagination, and sure enough, I found myself saying, “what am I going to do now?” The answer came when I launched this blog in January 2005. It’s been fun and it’s definitely provoked me to greater and deeper thoughts (and clearer expressions of those thoughts, too). You might even say that blogging has become a discipline.

But there are times when I wonder if blogging has “jumped the shark.” (It should be noted that some say that the phrase, “jumped the shark,” has, itself, jumped the shark. But I digress.)

I think—I hope—the answer is “no,” but that blogs (and bloggers) are maturing. Hopefully the ideas are growing and the thoughts are stewing. Hopefully readers will get more comfortable reading longer paragraphs and writers will reward them with longer paragraphs worth reading.

I’m eagerly anticipating the first whiff of autumn in the air. This summer has been long, hot, and taxing.

Back around Memorial Day, things were quite different. Since then, I’ve been promoted to a manager’s job, church has been a whirlwind of change, and huge chunks of my world remain unsettled as a result. In addition, there has been the general messiness and frailty of life in our fallen world… in the month of August alone I had to replace my Civic’s transmission, our stove, our landline phone (twice), and my Ryobi trimmer/edger.

I like stuff to “just work,” but it feels like nothing in my life has been “just working.”

Hopefully I’m not being naïvely optimistic when I say that the prospect of fall seems to offer a welcome dose of stability. As Thomas Wolfe said, “All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.” It’s not October yet, but bring it on…

One measure of the familiar is returning this week; namely, we’ll be restarting our second hour at church on Sunday. I’ll be returning to the teaching rotation along with Eric to teach Wayne Grudem’s Christian Beliefs — though I must add a quite-serious “Lord willing,” because teaching space is contingent on various facilities issues getting worked out. (Those facilities issues are one of the things that made the summer feel really long to me, and I’m at a long arm’s length from any sort of responsibility for that stuff. God bless the guys who keep the roof over our heads and the lights on!) In any event, I look forward to working with Eric again; I’m grateful for his friendship and his partnership in advancing the life of the Christian mind at Grace Fellowship and beyond.

Elsewhere, as Señor Bulldawgy has noted, there’s been precious little activity this summer from my blogging friends — my “band of bloggers,” you might say; it’s a few of us on the music team from church he’s talking about: John (keys), Kevin (guitars), and David (percussion) are among the five-star chefs of Grace Fellowship’s musical kitchen. Meanwhile, I’m the home-ec student in the corner playing bass. I love playing with those guys, even though I can’t smile and play at the same time.

But I digress… there has indeed been little in the blogosphere to enjoy. For my part, I posted exactly one entry in August, and it wasn’t much of one at that. I’ve begun to just not care that my Google Reader account has 100+ (and that’s a big “+”) unread items. Not long ago, a series of blog posts I read made me wonder whether technology is our servant or our master. I suppose the blog slowdown among my friends is a hopeful sign on that score.

Hopefully, the autumn will bring my circle of friends an abundance of time to think and write. In that hope, I offer two measures of authorial advice that Justin Taylor recounted last year.

• J. I. Packer on How to Become a Better Writer
• C. S. Lewis on How to Become a Better Writer

I’ll add one more of my own. I did something this weekend that I encourage you bloggers to do: browse your own blog archives. See how your passions and interests may have changed. See if you are struck by any posts that make you think “boy, that was lame” or “I want to write more like that.” It was a profitable exercise for me, I think, but time will tell…

So bring on the fall — lowercase “f” — and see you on the blogs!