Tag: Douglas Rushkoff

Monday Morning Quarterback

Note: Monday Morning Quarterback is a weekly post reviewing Sunday, the busiest, most stressful, most gratifying day in the week of a pastor/parent/spouse/citizen

 Song of The Day:

http://rd.io/x/QEq_K0LNvqc

 

6:00. Up. Snoozing is for suckers.

6:02. Hobble down the stairs, the pinky toes on both feet aching from having clipped them, alternately, barefoot, on the same chair leg the day before. Had to put the chair down.

6:41. Put the finishing (and beginning) touches on the Junior High Youth Group outline for that afternoon, and email it to volunteers, assigning the easiest parts to myself.

6:42. Breakfast of bran flakes with fiber pellets on top of shredded wheat. Whinney.

7:14. Decide against the turquoise blue tie I picked out the night before. That’s a more confident man’s tie.

8:07. Stop at the grocery store to pick up snacks for the high school Sunday school class, because the teacher who normally gets them texted yesterday that she’s sick.

8:10. Mini bran muffins and rice milk in my cart, confident this is cook kid food these days.

8:59. The other Sunday school teacher arrives, and he’s carting a box of donuts. Yeah, cool. Whatever. Those muffins were for decoration anyway.

9:22. Snap a picture from the back of the adult Sunday school class as the speaker explains, “I’ve often thought that the greatest moment in my career was writing that speech for Martin.” Measuring my life’s accomplishments in light of the awareness that “Martin” is Martin Luther King, Jr., I die a little inside and slink out the back door.

9:41. Stroll past the the church’s newly emerging coffee klatch of parents milling outside the Godly Play room. “Hey guys. I see you’re drinking some coffee. Some java. Heyyy. Drinkin’ coffeeeee.”

10:06. Giggle with the visiting Rabbi during worship announcements about the time, two years ago, when he brought a Megilah scroll to show the children and I assisted him by unrolling it so far as to nearly break it. Realize he’s not giggling.

10:08. Acolyte struggling to light the middle chancel candle. Heroically leap from my seat between the visiting Rabbi and Head Pastor, striding towards the struggling child to bring light into the wo—-oh, wait. It’s lit. I’m just gonna sit down now. I’m sure nobody noticed.

10:16. As it is our annual exchange Sunday with the local synagogue, pronounce, “The peace of GOD be with you” to a congregation conditioned to receive “The peace of Christ.” Mentally rehearse my explanation for this while I shake peoples’ hands.

10:19. Introduce the Rabbi to the children. “Children I want to introduce you to my friend Rabbi Jonathan. Uhhh, this is Rabbi Jonathan.”

10:20. Rabbi Jonathan is fumbling with the handheld microphone and the Megilah scroll he’s once again brought. Hesitate. Hesitate. Finally go to help, grabbing the microphone and holding it in front of his face like Phil Donahue.

10:46. Realize during Rabbi and Head Pastor’s sermon that this annual exchange, though sometimes clumsy, though sometimes uncomfortable and uncertain, is a good, good thing nonetheless. Wonder if anything really good is easy.

11:17. Defending the church’s openness to gays and lesbians to a church member, recalling my first job interview after seminary. The committee asked how I felt about homosexuality in the church, and I, unprepared, stuttered out some answer about The Bible not allowing it. To the committee’s great credit, they never called me back.

12:47. Lunch at a local restaurant with a new couple from church and their young daughter. Our daughters play together under the table, behind the window curtains, on top of the bar . . .

1:29. Drive home over a shrieking melody of protest from 4 year-old, who preferred to drive home with her mother.

 

1:43. 4 year-old still screaming, gagging on her tears.

1:56. Mommy returns with “Princess dress” from the Goodwill. Tantrum over. 4 year-old stops crying as well.

2:55. Dozing off while family watches The Rescuers Down Under, slipping into dreams of Newhart.

3:30. Head to grocery store to get youth group snacks. Forgot my wallet. Turn around.

4:44. School three consecutive junior high students in Connect Four. Can’t Touch This.

5:32. Talking to junior highers about the dangers of misrepresenting yourself online. Speak through me, St. Rushkoff

7:08. A member of the Indonesian church with which we share space hurriedly invites high school youth to join in a memorial service reception meal in the Fellowship Hall. I go. Shake a few hands, decline numerous offers of food, explaining about the youth group meeting, then leave, confident that I’ve just set relations between our churches back several steps.

8:11. Students planning for next week’s Souper Bowl of Caring. They want to perform a parody soup song in church. They’re considering “99 Bowls of Soup on The Wall,” “Five Hundred Twenty Five Thousand Six Hundred Soups,” and, my personal favorite, “Aye, Aye, Aye, Aye! Yo Quiero Sopa!” Adult volunteer’s suggestion of “Gizpacho, Gizpacho Man” goes politely unheeded.

9:39. Gleefully reading Matt Schultz’s blog post on the outrage that is Commercial Dad.

10:14. 4 year-old is still awake, crying now for the stuffed animal she left in the car (see video above).

10:21. Return to bed with stuffed animal. “Thank you, Daddy.”

 

What Have I Done?! (Or, On Fooling My Daughter’s Developing Feedback Mechanisms)

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Douglas Rushkoff’s latest piece for Edutopia says no iPads for kids under eight. Gulp.

In a piece titled “Young Kids And Technology at Home,” Rushkoff (who I recently interviewed for PLGRM Magazine) takes the metaphorical screen off the figurative tablet (and tv):

all screens may be different, but they’re still screens to young children. On a most rudimentary level, this means they either depict two-dimensional realities (like cell phone interfaces and sideways-shooter arcade games) or use their 2D displays to depict 3D realities, such as TV shows. No biggie — except for babies and toddlers, whose ability to understand and contend with 3D worlds is still in development. They don’t fully understand the rules of opaque objects (that’s why peekaboo behind a napkin poses endless fascination), so high quantities of time spent sitting in front of 2D screens may actually inhibit some of their 3D spatial awareness. That’s why so many pediatricians recommend that kids under the age of two probably shouldn’t watch any TV at all.

My daughter is approaching five, and she’s been manipulating 3D representations of reality on a 2D screen since she was three. On a five hour drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles last year, she played almost constantly and went berserk when the battery finally died. Since then we’ve improved her emotional connection to it; she understands that it’s in her long term interest to shut it off when we say so. Now when she asks to play it, she cranks up the charm and bats her eyes.

Her favorite apps by far are the dozen or so Toca Boca simulations of cooking and making clothes. I love these apps, and I quite proudly show them to people whenever the little one is playing them in a restaurant. Still, Brother Doug wants none of it:

Little kids play with balls, seesaws and slides as they develop their vestibular senses, and come to learn about the wonders of gravity. They move on to Frisbees, bikes and Hula Hoops as they explore angular momentum and harmonic motion. The weightless world of a digital game or virtual environment fascinates us for the way it defies the rules of the real world; until we are firmly anchored in the former reality, however, these new principles are not neurologically compatible with a developing sensory system. Up and down, light and dark control a whole lot more in human biology than we might like to think. Best not to fool these feedback mechanisms before they have a chance to come online in a developing child.

Have I been fooling my daughter’s feedback mechanisms? Those of you with young kids, how do you manage their interaction with digital stuff?

 

 

 

Rushkoff to Google: Don’t Give Up on The Humans

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?

Program Or Be Programmed, part 1

“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.

Youth Ministry as Media Literacy

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?

The Apple Church Is Just That Good: What Would Google Do? pt. 4

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.

Douglas Rushkoff, Prophet of Our Era

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.