YoRocko!

Here’s the presentation for a workshop I gave at San Gabriel Presbytery’s Winterfest event this weekend. It’s about churches and their use of social media, and it cribs heavily from Douglas Rushkoff’s “Program or Be Programmed.”

Douglas Rushkoff gave a Program or Be Programmed talk at Google last fall, and the video of it is on his blog. It’s embedded below, but I’ve extracted the juiciest quotes, which churchy commentary interspersed.

“Computers are essentially anything machines.”

“After I had played with Basic for the first time, I looked at the New York city streets and said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a grid pattern not because cities grow up into grids but because someone in history decided to make this a grid. And for a 12 or 13 year old that’s a profound moment, and it’s a moment that most people don’t have very often, if at all.”

Likewise, the congregation, the presbytery, the synod, and any nationally organized religious denomination is there because people in history decided to make it that way. The Christian congregation is modeled on the post-temple Jewish synagogue, which was a response to a particular historical situation. The model for it isn’t in the Bible. And the further up the associational pyramid you go, the more abstract and theoretical the decisions have been that the structure should be that way. North American Christians should all recognize this and be able to spot the biases of the structures that frame their religious participation.

“When I say, ‘program or be programmed,’ I don’t mean it just as a metaphor.”

“You wouldn’t know what an operating system was if there was only one operating system.”

The same is true of religion, isn’t it? Or of any theological construct within a religious tradition? My recent anxiety over the encounter of the youth from my quasi-liberal church with evangelical camp culture illustrates this. I want my kids to recognize that the altar call is an operating system programmed with a certain bias, just like the hymns they sing on Sunday.

“This media is biased towards binary logic, which then leads to polar conversation, which then polarizes the political landscape.”

“I so don’t care about what technology is doing to us. I care about what we’re doing to one another through technology. Technology is not doing anything to you. It’s people that are doing things to you.”

Every theory of technology has a hidden doctrine of humanity.

“Everything in the digital space is basically a snap-to grid in one way or another. You’re here or you’re here.”

“Just because you have more choices doesn’t mean you have more agency. It just means you have a wider number of choices.”

“The fact that you can keep going forever means that it doesn’t actually work.”

This pertains to the economic model of making money by getting closer and closer in what you do to the actual making of money. Abstraction is lucrative. Aggregation is the new content creation. So why not aggregate the aggregators? The problem is that with each step you get further from the creation of any real value until you have a culture of people who no longer know how to create it. How do churches help Christians actually create value in the world and not just combine and distribute value they got somewhere else?

“The more anonymity is an aberrant behavior, the better off we are.”

“The biases of our technologies matter. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, right? But guns are more biased towards killing than pillows.”

So what is the bias of the typical mainline protestant congregation? The top 15 megachurches in the United States have an 80% turnover rate. Scads of people come once or twice but don’t dig in for the long haul. That’s a bias toward occasional non-committal participation. What about your typical Methodist or Presbyterian church in anywhere, USA?

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“In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”

Welcome to Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for A Digital Age.  In the coming weeks I’ll use this space to explore those commands from within a context of Christian ministry, often referring explicitly to youth ministry.

Every new communication medium brings with it a capability that people miss. That’s the unsettling observation that spurred the book’s writing (see Rushkoff expound that here). A text alphabet brings the capability to read, but people use it to listen to priests  read; the printing press brings the ability to publish, but we use it to read elite authors; digital technology brings a chance to program reality, yet we employ it to publish on platforms programmed by programmers. Every new communication technology realizes in full the promise of its predecessor.

I spend an awful lot of time and anxiety in my ministry setting trying to implement the programs of others. Evangelism programs, education programs, worship programs, service programs: I’m trying to apply other peoples’ programs and so find “success” in my vocation. What I’m getting from Program Or Be Programmed is the bald assertion that I’m a full technology and ministry iteration behind. I need to be programming this stuff myself.

That goes well beyond writing my own youth lessons instead of purchasing them from Youth Specialties. It starts with that (it already has). But it proceeds to ask not simply, for example, how youth ministry can make use of the social media tools that teens are using, but, further, what important tools for accompanying young people in faith yet need creating? And how can we create them?

An answer may well be a piece of software that one of us writes. If that sounds too intimidating, though, then at least it should begin with hearing Rushkoff’s 10 commandments for this digital age, commandments that will help us to program the coming reality, and not simply be programmed by it.

Up first: Do Not Be Always On.

I just finished this book today, and I’ll have a multi-post review of it over the next few weeks.The seeds of the book were planted here.

Read it. It’s not just good, it’s Rushkoff.

Douglas Rushkoff recently inspired me to teach media literacy to my youth group. It’s a subject I’ve paid much attention to as a layperson but not one I’ve ever formally “taught.” In looking for materials, I found this curriculum by the Center for Media Literacy. The first installment was last night.

It’s got 25 sessions in it, five dedicated to each “Key Question” is addresses. That makes for simple lessons with very specific objectives. Last night’s: define “media,” “mass media,” and “media text,” and explore the difference between one-way and two-way communication.

My kids are crazy-smart, so they get this stuff pretty easily. Maybe too easily. I was prodding them at the end of the night, “Are you guys interested in this, or should we do something else?” A few said they liked it; that’s enough for me. Next week, deconstructing advertising.

Addendum: Here’s one of the questions I tacked onto the lesson: if the Bible is a media text, is it one-way or two-way?

Addendum 2: I also asked kids to name the one-way media of communication the church uses vs. the two-way media. They identified the  worship bulletin as an interesting case study: there are two-way elements in it (call to worship, unison prayers), but it’s a printed text that participants can’t change. So it’s a one-way medium, right?

Right?

So I’ve been hearing these rumors about an iPad . . .

Another Apple product launch, another cultural phenomenon. Cupertino’s lovers love it. Their haters hate it. It’s success is indisputable. When was the last time a consumer product captured the cultural imagination like this?

Oh yeah, the iPhone.

Apple is the anti-Google, and their reign over all things networked really has no serious challenger. So why wasn’t this event called, “Theology after Apple?” Why not, “What Would Apple Do?”

In fact, Apple is the only anti-Google Jeff Jarvis could come up with. Not even God, he insists, is “immune from the power and influence of Google.” Evidence? How about open-Source Judaism, inspired by Douglas Rushkoff’s Nothing Sacred (“wasn’t the Talmud the world’s first wiki?”)?

No, only Apple seems to be exempt from the consequences of refusal to collaborate, to design platforms, open up, eschew advertising, and think distributed in the post-Google world. Jarvis ticks off the offenses:

Apple is the opposite of collaborative.

Apple still spends a fortune in advertising.

Apple is the farthest thing from transparent.

Apple abhors openness.

So why, if such Google-intransigence has buried entire industries, does Apple get a pass? Why does the brand still kill its competition? For Jarvis it’s simple: “It’s just that good. It’s vision is strong and its products even better.”

You’ve been to the Apple church, right? Impeccably manicured grounds; stirring worship aided by professional sound and lighting technicians; clear, concise, simple sermons with easy-to-use life application; unequivocally “Biblical” theology; a lifestyle niche small group ministry; slick branded merchandise, from Bibles to bumper stickers; youth recreation facilities to make Leslie Knope green with envy.

The Apple church is just that good. It’s has a clear vision articulated by a revered and unchallenged  executive. Its products are simply excellent.

That’s a straw man of a setup, I know. You’re meant to start pointing out the Apple church’s flaws. But, like Apple, it doesn’t care about its detractors. It’s thriving, and the future is bright. And for those of us trying, from within Emergent or mainline Protestant or Catholic traditions to get our heads around a “Googley” church, the success of Apple church is an unsettling counterpoint.

This one’s been killing me for a few days.

I love me some Douglas Rushkoff. From this documentary to this media primer, and from this comic to this economics text, Rushkoff’s stuff influences my thinking about our culture and the church’s relationship to it as much as anything I read or watch or listen to. It never fails.

Rushkoff addressed the SXSW interactive festival a couple of weeks ago. The above video contains clips from that talk. Watch the thing. Here are some money quotes, though:

“We are attempting to operate our society on obsolete code.”

“If you are not a programmer, you are one of the programmed. It’s that simple.”

“And now we get the computer. Do we get a nation of programmers? No, we get a nation of bloggers. We write in the box that Google gives us.”

“Text gave us Judaism. The printing press gave us protestantism. What does this one [the computer] give us?”

For churches, what does this one give us? That seems to have been the question driving Theology After Google, and it’s the itch I’m scratching while reading What Would Google Do?

As for an answer? I can’t say for certain, but I’m a bit worried.

The early evidence suggests that this one gives churches Facebook pages, populated by comments like, “What should we use this Facebook page for?” This one gives churches online giving. This one gives churches websites that are either miserable because they don’t understand the web and so function as online marquees or stellar because they do understand the web and so can manipulate traffic through Search Engine Optimization.

Program or be programmed: that’s Rushkoff’s maxim. How do churches program? Somebody please tell me. I don’t have any positive answers or illustrations or examples.

Maybe start with the negative questions first: how do churches avoid being programmed by the technology?  How do churches learn the biases of the media the culture is using? How do churches help people (inside the church and out)  understand those  biases as well?

I’ve toyed with the idea of a media literacy unit for the church youth. Rushkoff makes that notion suddenly feel urgent.