The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture

Back in the Fall I attended the National Youth Worker’s Convention hosted by Youth Specialties in San Diego.  Great event as always with multitudes of worship, resources, and speakers.  Every year before I leave I buy 5 or 6 cds from sessions that I did not have the chance to attend for one reason or another.  Guided by the recommendation of a friend, I grabbed a presentation by Shane Hipps on the power of electronic culture.  I was leery at first (because haven’t we heard the anti-media message from Christians before), but eventually submitted to peer pressure and proceeded towards the checkout.

I listened to it on the short 2 and half hour drive home from San Diego and then again the following week in the office.  I was ecstatic to find a different message relating to media that made incredible sense. 

After another 3 or 4 months, I broke down and bought the book.  17 days later, the book was finished.   Now 2 months upon completion, I am finally writing a review.  Proceed if you dare.

Shane Hipps is a pastor in Phoenix.  He looks like a pastor, entitles books like a pastor, and probably even smells like a pastor (I have no evidence or source for the last statement).  The only problem here is that he doesn’t write or speak like a pastor.  He sounds like an expert on media theory and doesn’t build his premises with theology as the sole foundation.  This all makes sense when you learn that before communicating the gospel his main goal in life was communicating the awesomeness of Porsche’s cars as strategic planner for an advertising firm.

In his attempt to explain the powers that media possesses, he has a few simple statements that seem to guide us through this maze of information.  Concepts like “the message is the medium” and “instead of asking ‘what does this do?’ we would be better served to ask ‘what does this mean?’” are revisited often.  He also frequently references Marshall McLuhan and relies heavily upon his set of questions dubbed the Laws of Media:

• What does the medium extend?
• What does the medium make obsolete?
• What does the medium reverse into?
• What does the medium retrieve?

He does a terrific job explaining the complexities of media and communication theories.  One section I found particularly interesting was his comparing and contrasting of the communication forms of the printed word and images and their connection to shift from post-modernity into this realm in which we are going.  I really appreciated the time he took to explain the impact of different media types on culture and the church.  For me, it really helps me gain a better understanding of the big picture.  (I can’t stand it when authors assert a point and give no reason assuming you know it…if I knew it, I would NOT be reading what you wrote!)

Another area that piqued my interest is where he writes about not being mastered by mediums of media.  In our media saturated lives sometimes we lose perspective of what we are actually doing and become enslaved to various mediums in our behaviors without giving much thought as to what simple task is being accomplished by the said medium.  Hipps suggests that our understanding of the impacts of the media we use is vital to our relationship with Christ as our focus remains fixed on the cross and not on specific mediums (ie. projection screen, sound systems, videos, bulletins, etc.)

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in understanding the impacts of media both subconsciously and the greater cultural climate.  It’s well-written and relatively easy to follow considering the content.  For me this book really helped me to identify the implications of different media forms that are present in my life.  Good read.  Definitely worth 17 days of your reading time.

Short Standard for Christian Authors

A few days ago a friend (who will remain nameless) confided they had been given a copy of a book by a Christian author in return for a favorable blog post.  Sounds like a deal, right?  Only problem is that my friend didn’t find the book all that fascinating, yet felt compelled to post a review without any biting criticisms.

I read more than many of my colleagues and probably most of America.  In a given year, I generally top out at around 25 books (almost one every two weeks).  With the publishing conglomerates, especially the Christian genre, putting out more and more titles every year it becomes more and more difficult to sift through the insipid crap that is most new writing in search of something genuinely educational, thought-provoking, encouraging, and/or pertinent.  With only 25 opportunities to strike gold each year, I need to do better than 50%.

With so many of the titles I pick up pertaining to the church, youth ministry, and the like I have become fairly familiar with many of the authors.  In fact, I have become so familiar that at times I find myself reading with such great anticipation borderlining on rooting for the author because of prior works or talks.  Put simply, I become a fan(atic) rather than peruser of information.  Metaphorically speaking, in Christian publishing we give everyone a trophy because that’s the nice, kind and supposedly considerate thing to do.  After all, as a generation that was given trophies and ribbons for participation, what more can we really expect?

Perhaps this might just be a generational thing.  If so, the older staunch generations have much on us younger folk in that they are actually willing to call something crap if the believe it to be.  There’s an older gentlemen I know who most would describe as quite grouchy and gruff (and I can’t really argue against such a description).  He thinks everything’s crap that wasn’t produced before the advent of plastics.  While he is often overkill, certainly no one could argue that his opinions are resemblent of a neutered cat like so many Christian media critics.

I can’t remember the last time that I read a review of a book or resource in Christian publication that gave a negative review of something written or produced by a Christian.  When was the last time you saw a Christian pastor get hammered in a Christian publication (minus the ultra-conservative bunch) over their crappy writing and advice for other Christians?  Even though there are some good critics out there, the majority are too often help captive by affiliations and partnerships with other organizations.

It is this happening that has caused me to limit my circle of influence when it comes to reading recommendations.  I have a few friends who are critical readers and not just trying to impress all the bookstore hipsters with their newly embraced lifelong love for the written word.  I wish the Christian magazines, websites, and periodicals had more people like my friends who don’t mind saying something “sucks” even if it is written by a Christian.

What bothers me the most about this is that it seems to be such a mainstay in Christian media where everything is great because it’s “Christian”.  For example, the movie End of the Spear.  Great story!  Terrible movie!  Yet received endless praise from Christianity Today and it’s contemporaries.

As Christians, we be more concerned with putting out good material that enriches people’s lives rather than patting fellow Christians on the back because it’s nice.  Beyond the lack of objectivity, it’s polarizing.  Faith has nothing to do with good and bad writing.

Into The Wild

After a 2 week hiatus from reading, I dug in and slammed the final 80 pages of Into The Wild by John Krakauer.  This has been a story that has been of interest to me for some time since I read his article a few years ago in Outside, originally in January of 1993.  My piqued interest in Chris McCandless comes from a part of me that most everyone doesn’t know and dates back to my teenage crisis of realizing my father was quite imperfect and therefore not a reliable source for anything.

When I was about 13 I decided to run away from home for a reason that now seems to be no more than I was upset and momentarily thought my life sucked.  As an amatuer to this new episode, I ran all the way out the back door and into a tree in our front yard.  As I sat in this tree I watched my parents search the surrounding neighborhood.  I felt justified, because parents “should” do this sort of thing if they really loved me.  They knocked on neighbors doors and called my friends’ parents to see if they had heard from me to no avail.  As my legs started to stiffen and my butt became numb from the aptly placed branch I was sitting on, I hear my mom making another phone call.  Now, my mom makes lots of phone calls and she can talk with the best of them, but there was something different about this conversation.  As she continued in an unusually tense and scared voice, I noticed she was talking to the police.  Now any young boy can tell you that it’s all fun and games until the authorities get involved.  Forget inconveniencing the police, this meant I had crossed the line from being hugged and loved in my triumphant return to chastising and possibly being cuffed (my dad has an odd sense of humor).  I climbed out of the tree as fast as I could to alert my mom that I was found so the police wouldn’t show up.  At last the intense ordeal met its culmination in my appearance.

While I held up in the tree I had a lot of time to thing about really important things such as where would I sleep, are pine-cones edible, and would I be the first person to freeze to death in Houston, Texas.  During what couldn’t have been longer than 2 hours, I started to think about the essence of survival and how to identify such things in the environment by which I was currently surrounded.  My fascination with survival had begun experimenting to find the best ways to survive if by any chance disaster struck.

I started this experimentation where many early adolescents start their search with fire.  To survive you need heat as a source of cooking and warmth.  I found that a garage full of flammables too unstable to be kept in the house was just the place to begin my search.  I found that gasoline is much more flammable than lighter fluid and that dry ice provides hours of entertainment.

So anyway, my fascination with survival and the solitude afforded by the wilderness had begun.  Although Chris McCandless would have laughed at my “excursions” for their lack of risk compared with his exploits, I think he would have understood the spirit and attitude from which such actions arose.

 Into The Wild frustrated and befuddled me often with the stubbornness of McCandless, but I didn’t feel like I needed an apology.  I understand such lack of flexibility and desiring to push yourself in ways that are only quantifiable for you, while perplexing others.  His intent effort of trying to make things more challenging can be compared to turning up the AI (artificial intelligence) settings on an XBOX game is maddening at times and certainly proved to be of no benefit to his survival in the end.  It would be unending to sit here and scrutinize all his decisions and the results would be less than satisfying.

There is a great section towards the end of the book when John Krakauer sets out for the bus accompanied by a few friends as they sit around a fire trying to make sense of it all.  After initial criticisms of McCandless, they seem the be confronted with their own mortality and realize that what happened to this boy could have happened to any of them on their many haphazard wilderness trips.  They had just been lucky enough to return to civilization.

After reading this book, a friend posed the question of whether or not McCandless was actually crazy.  For the record, I don’t think he was crazy or that he had a death-wish.  My gut feeling is that his tragic flaw was that he based too many of his overarching principles on fiction and philosophy as opposed to reality.  McCandless was no dummy, but he made some poor choices when establishing his principles that eventually contributed to his early death.

Although the story is tragic and at points downright sad, the dreams that it breeds of absolute freedom and pioneering of the open continent are fantastic.  His early death aside, Chris McCandless lived the life that he had always desired.  He made the selfish choices that deep down most of us are too afraid to act on because we fear the disappointment that would loom on others behalf.  It also seems that he discovered that innate hope to be selfless and part of something bigger during his travels as he was intent on returning to community.

The story that Into The Wild tells is mysterious, adventuresome, and compellingly told by John Krakauer.  His writing style combined with his expertise and experience of outdoor matters provides an informative and insightful blend of reading bliss.  The tragedy is great, but the life exhibited is spectacular.

In following up to my own experience, I have since moved past my teenage angst ridden distaste for my father and we have a pretty good relationship today where we talk a couple times a week.  Not that he became perfect, I just discovered I wasn’t either.

Free Audiobooks and Stumble

So this morning I was ticked off because Gmail wasn’t loading on my IE browser.  My course of action was to check out the IE website for any updates to try and kill this bug with a proverbial flyswatter also knows as an updated driver.  While there I found that IE has some new applications available (ala Facebook) so I thought I would check one out because after all it was only 7:36am and I had 9 minutes till my staff Bible study exactly 30 paces from my office.

I ended up downloading Stumble (also available for you FF fiend) and played around with it for 8 and half minutes with just enough time to make it 30 paces.  BTW, I brought donuts to our study this morning anonymously and unannounced…it’s amazing how excited people get over unanticipated frosted, fried bread!  So back to Stumble!  You select different interests and it will bring you random sites that fit your criteria as previously decided.  I had a little more time after lunch to tinker with it and found even more great stuff!

 The find I’m most excited about so far is a site that offers free audio-books of the classics.  It’s ingeniously entitled http://www.freeclassicaudiobooks.com/. 

So the moral of the story for all you kids out there…bring donuts anonymously to your next morning meeting…then you will have some time to spare before the meeting to play with stumble.  You could also download it here: www.stumbleupon.com.

Working Weekends and Happiness

This is the most dreaded weekend that I encounter every month.  I have youth events on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  I don’t usually dread the spending time with students part.  The part I dread is the time away from my wife while she has so much time available.  Oh well, 1 down, 2 to go.

 When I got home tonight Meredith was watching one of those news magazine shows (it’s just like watching Time or Newsweek).  Anyway, the topic of the show was happiness.  Based on a book The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner, the show highlighed its findings.  It turns out that the happiest places in the world are Denmark, Singapore, and India.  “Odd combination” you say.  I thought the same when I heard the results.  Turns out the only thing that these countries have in common besides have consonants in their names is the intricate sense of community that has been developed in each place.  It’s good to hear that happiness doesn’t lie in zeros, ones, and decimal points that headline reports and dominate media.  Not that the findings in this book will redirect our pursuit of happiness in America, but at least they give us a reason for such change.

Into the Wild

For Christmas, I was given Into the Wildby Jon Krakauer.  It tells the story of a young man who graduates college and takes to the road to see the land.  It’s adventurous and bittersweet as his ventures eventually lead to his young death.  One of the most fascinating parts of the book occurs as the authors tries to understand what drove Chris McCandless to do the things he did.  Although the adventure is fascinating, I have been much more enthralled with the psychological aspects of the book.