Program or Be Programmed, part 4: You May Always Choose None of the Above

Next up on the yorocko tour of Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, “Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for Life in A Digital Age,” command number three: You May Always Choose None of the Above. This follows the commands to Live in Person and Do Not Be Always On. See all the posts on Program . . . here.

I’ve long loved G.K. Chesterton, and two of my favorite Chesterton quotes are scribbled in blue ballpoint on the inside flap of my hardbound copy of Heretics and Orthodoxy:

“The admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.”

And

“Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.”

Both are from an essay entitled “The Suicide of Thought” that extols the necessity of limitation in any conception of freedom, either of action or thought.

Douglas Rushkoff has realized, though, that as important as the irrevocable choice may be for philosophy and democracy, we need to know who or what is setting the parameters of our choices. In a digital realm, everything must be pitched as a choice presented by a programmer as code. The classic example is the cd, in which a sound engineer records sounds as a series of digits that can be copied. This is a technological advance over cassettes and records, where an actual physical event disturbs a needle or cellophane strip thus leaving a real record of that sound event that is released when played back.

The record and tape are capsules that captured something that actually happened. The cd (and thus the mp3) are symbolic representations rendered in a series of digits in order to be copied. The difference has to do with much more than sound quality. It reaches into the nature of sound and music itself. For example, the custom of inviting friends over to listen to records gave way not to a custom of inviting friends over to listen to cd’s, but rather to a trade of cd’s and then a sharing of files, because the music itself became something different when it became digital. It became a commodity to be traded among individuals instead of an event to be experienced in groups.

It’s what Rushkoff calls “digital technology’s pre-existing bias for yes-or-no decisions,” its bias “towards the discrete.” He gets at the problem of the bias like this:

All the messy stuff in between yes and no, on and off, just doesn’t travel down wires, through chips, or in packets.

All the messy stuff in between. That stuff is not of interest to the program. Whether it’s in sounds that don’t register on the cd or consumer preferences, if it can’t be pinned to a 1 or a 0 and stuffed into a program, it isn’t valuable. “There’s a value set attending all this choice,” Rushkoff says, “and the one choice we’re not getting to make is whether or not to deal with all this choice.”

In the next post, I’ll explore how ministry is captive to all this choice, and ways that ministry shows an alternative.

I’d love to hear your experience and thoughts on it.

Program or Be Programmed, part 3: Live in Person

Find POBP part 2 (Don’t Be Always On) here, and part 1 here.

Media is biased outside of time. It promotes interaction that does not depend on the second-to-second interaction of real people but rather depends on sequential commands from those same people in order to carry out any of its tasks.

Media is also biased away from locality. It’s really good at connecting people and facilitating communication across distances (think of the primitive cans connected by string). Consider this:

. . . the bias of media has always been toward distance–that’s part of what media are for. Text allowed a person in one place (usually a king with a messenger running on foot) to send a message to a person in another place. To those with the power of the written word, what was happening far away became actionable, or even changeable. Similarly, broadcast media gave the newly minted national brands of the industrial age a way to communicate their value across great distances. Where a customer may have once depended on a personal relationship with a local merchant, how he could relate instead to the messaging of a nationally advertised product.

For all that, media tend to suck at conveying relationships and messages among people who share a localized space (however, the teenagers texting each other in the backseat of the same car, thus conversing without the awareness of the adults in the car, may be an important counter-point).

The “local” provides a homefield advantage. The real relationships that result from face-to-face interactions among customers or congregants are concrete things that add humanity (and therefore value) to interaction, and that can’t be replicated by media. Recent interactive media platforms like video calling can approximate that interaction, but as anyone who uses those tools regularly knows, it’s not the same thing. It’s not a worse thing; it’s a different thing altogether.

Churches often use media to intensify the local homefield advantage. Printed bulletins allow the whole congregation to say prayers and creeds in unison; graphics and video supplement music and sermons. But does that really do what we think it does?

Rushkoff refuses to use computer graphics to aid in the speaking gigs he’s invited to all over the world, much to the annoyance of conference organizers. Here’s his rationale:

. . . the reason to spend the jet fuel to bring a human body across a country or an ocean is for the full-spectrum communication that occurs between human beings in real spaces with one another. The digital slideshow, in most cases, is a distraction–distancing people from one another by mediating their interaction with electronic data.

Churches love few things more than a good distraction.

This is not to say electronic media ought to be banned from sanctuaries. It’s only to say that we need to know what that technology wants to do–facilitate communication across distance–and to think strategically about whether our use of that technology is actually doing that (Skyping with a far-flung mission co-worker, for instance) or forfeiting the homefield advantage that our being together in the same place at the same time wants to give us.

How does your church use media in worship or education or governance? Are you feeling a pull away from the local in your technology use, or toward it?

PresbyMEME: Why I Am Voting Yes on Amendment 10a

The presbyteries of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are voting for the next several months on an amendment to one part of the church’s constitution that will remove language requiring of ordained officers (Ministers, Elders, and Deacons) “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman” or “chastity in singleness.” The proposed amendment will replace that language with a statement of standards for ordained officers that says nothing *ahem* explicitly about sexuality:

The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation . . . shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation . . . Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.

Yorocko is glad to take part in a PresbyMEME advocating passage of this amendment. Organized by former General Assembly Moderator Bruce Reyes-Chow, the MEME is challenging men and women who support the amendment to explain their reasons, answering a few simple questions:

Name, City, State: Rocky Supinger, Claremont, California
Twitter and Facebook profiles: Facebook, rsupinger; Twitter, yorocko.
Presbytery and 10a voting date: San Gabriel Presbytery, March 8, 2011.
Reason ONE that you are voting “yes” on 10a is… My friends and colleagues, who serve the church faithfully and intelligently and with their whole lives but who, counter to the momentum of the gospel of Jesus, are forced to shutter a central part of their identity behind a veil of religiosity that is based less on an understanding of God’s grace than it is on a misguided desire to witness to that grace by maintaining misinformed standards of sexual morality.
Reason TWO that you are voting “yes” on 10a is… The language. The current language is less than two decades old and represents a novel attempt to codify standards for ordained officers in a way that the Presbyterian church had resisted throughout its history, and with strict reference to sexuality. The language of 10a, on the other hand, speaks broadly of candidates for ordination’s “calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for office,” not just standards of sexual behavior, and it places the responsibility of assessing those criteria squarely where Presbyterian polity wants it: on the shoulders of the ordaining body, not in the articles of the church’s constitution.
Reason THREE that you are voting “yes” on 10a is… So that the Presbyterian Church (USA) can better participate in God’s incoming reign of release, freedom, vision, and peace. Since current ordination standards effectively bar gays and lesbians from consideration for office, and since gay men and women in North America continue to be targeted for harassment and exclusion, and since the message Jesus preached was one of a radical reconsideration of what constitutes “religious” behavior, one that was founded on the oft-repeated-in-Scripture announcement that the harassed and excluded were of God’s special concern, the church needs a better way to welcome all of those into ordained service those who know themselves to be despised by the world yet treasured by God.
What are your greatest hopes for the 10a debate that will take place on the floor of your Presbytery? That a single mind may be changed in the direction of passing 10a, from the beginning of the debate to the end. My experience with these debates in the past is a frustrating collection of advocacy pushes and posturing that shows no evidence of the qualities of debate. The vote could be taken without the debate with an identical result. My hope this time is that some small opening will be created for us to hear one another, and to hear God speaking through one another.
How would you respond to those that say that if we pass 10a individuals and congregations will leave the PC(USA)? The likelihood that people will be bothered by a church action is a poor reason to shy away from taking it. People and churches left when churches integrated on racial lines. They left when it ordained women. They’re leaving now, as we speak, simply because the presence of an honest conversation on the subject indicates to them infidelity and a lack of moral vision. While it’s crass to say of those who would leave over the passage of 10a “good riddance,” I’m persuaded that they’re likely to leave anyway, and I’m convinced that fear over membership loss is a terrible guide in moral decision making.
What should the Presbyterian Church focus on after Amendment 10a passes? The same things it’s focusing on now: proclaiming the good news of the gospel, worshiping God, serving the poor and needy, promoting social welfare, and building community for those who have none. I suspect, however, that the church’s definition of marriage is the next thing that needs to be thoroughly considered in light of Scripture and our current context.
How does your understanding of Scripture frame your position on 10a? It frames it on every side. It was abundantly clear in the last round of debating this subject that the people quoting the Bible in the debate were those advocating change. I don’t understand Scripture to be a rulebook handed down once-and-for-all from Heaven, but rather the Spirit-inspired witness of God’s people over multiple conditions and contexts to the ever-expanding reach of God’s welcome. In that light, 10a, while not an easy amendment to summarize, is a no-brainer.