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.

One of the reasons I enjoy blogging is that I enjoy writing. More than that, I enjoy wrestling with language to make it do something that elevates discourse and glorifies God. I can relate to Alan Jacobs, author of the Books & Culture Magazine piece Sentences, in which he confessed something of an obsession when it comes to finding the right words to express an idea with the appropriate rhetorical flair. (The problem for us bloggers is that blogging is supposed to be quick, but that’s another story.)

Mr. Jacobs rightly notes that virtue is at stake when wordsmithing:

John Updike was widely reviled, and rightly so I think, for using the collapse of the World Trade Center towers as an opportunity for making beautiful sentences: “Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface,” he wrote in The New Yorker; one of the towers “fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air.” Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic offered the most incisive critique of Updike’s approach: “Such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible.”

Contrast Updike’s approach to depicting the horrific with another writer’s:

And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.” (Matthew 27:33-37)

… or this writer…

Two others, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments. And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him… (Luke 23:32-35)

One more:

So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. (John 19:16-18)

In Matthew’s account, the crucifixion actually happens after once sentence ends and before the next one begins. You almost get the sense that the evangelists were telling you to look away while the deed was being done. Their descriptions were simple and straightforward, without being clinical. Perhaps this was because their readers surely knew the graphic details of what was being retold. Or perhaps they just understood that the point of telling the horrible story was not to be indulgent.

Having endured the 9/11 spectacle, I think it entirely inappropriate to try to capture the horror of what happened that day in purple prose. It also makes me doubt Mr. Updike’s integrity as a writer, because his writing obscured my view of the grave reality of what happened — something a writer in his position should have respected above all.

This study of contrasts makes me appreciate the evangelists’ minimalism. It lends credibility to the evangelists and the Gospels themselves — they are written with just the sort of direct clarity one would expect from those who really experienced the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God.