Let me put it this way: I would not let the moderators and fans of the Reddit creeper forums around my daughters; I’d worry they would sexually assault the girls. I don’t worry about Gawker writers and editors molesting my girls. However, if my girls were molested, I’d expect Gawker writers and editors to try to find ways to monetize it, use it to drive traffic, come up with banal, weakly ironic hipster-douchebag quips about it, pay witnesses to offer lurid details about it, and try to find clumsy and demi-literate ways to connect it to politicians they don’t like.
Consider trolls’ deeply contentious but ultimately homologous relationship with sensationalist corporate media. For example, when trolls court emotional distress in the wake of a tragedy by posting upsetting messages to Facebook memorial pages and generally being antagonistic towards so-called “grief tourists,” they are swiftly condemned – and understandably so. But when corporate media outlets splash the most sensationalist, upsetting headlines or images across their front page, press the friends and families of suicide victims to relive the trauma of having their loved one’s RIP page attacked by trolls (and in the case of this MSNBC segment, by forcing them to read the hateful messages on camera), or pour over every possible detail about bullied teenage suicides, despite the risks of “copycat suicide,” the only objectively measurable media effect, and in so doing slap a dollar sign on personal tragedy, it’s just business as usual. In both cases, audience distress is courted and exploited for profit. Granted, trolls’ “profit” is measured in lulz, not dollars. Still, the respective processes by which these profits are achieved are strikingly similar, and in many cases – which I chronicled throughout my dissertation – indistinguishable.
Christianity and the Future of the Book
Last year I led a seminar on this topic for some faculty colleagues here at Wheaton. Just before our last meeting I sent to the group a list of Theses for Disputation. I thought I might reproduce them here, in case anyone is interested.
No particular technology can be usefully evaluated in isolation from the whole network of technologies to which it is inevitably related.
Technologies have become the chief means by which networks of power and influence — what Michel Foucault called “power-knowledge regimes” — are sustained.
Brian Brock refers to the current regime as “technological modernity,” while Neil Postman calls it “Technopoly,” but both of them help us identify the key features of the regime: a commitment to rationalization and regularization of human behavior; a confidence that tools can direct human will into proper channels, with what is “proper” being wholly accessible to autonomous human reason; a belief in the inevitability of progress; and an insistence that technologies are always neutral, equally capable of being used for good or ill.
Stanley Hauerwas has rightly said that to be a Christian is to work “with the grain of the universe,” but none of those core commitments of Technopoly run wholly (or at all) with the grain of the Christian story.
Therefore, while working against the grain of anything is wearisome, to that we are called. Any thought that we can create a form of life that will allow us to live always with the grain, and therefore without struggle and tension, amounts to a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Paul’s images of “running the race” and “fighting the good fight” do not just concern internal “spiritual” struggles.
One branch or department of technological modernity is called “higher education.” As individual teachers and scholars, we have, in order to be in the world though not of it, chosen some degree of accommodation to the standards of this regime in order to achieve its accreditation and recognition. As an institution, Wheaton College has done the same.
Walter Ong points out that no society that has achieved literacy has even voluntarily returned to a condition of primary orality. This is a specific example of a general rule: When a once-dominant technology yields to a new one, it does not disappear, but its cultural role changes and it never becomes dominant again. Similarly, there is no point in imagining that either we as individuals or Wheaton as an institution can fully, or even mostly, extricate ourselves from the regime of higher education. This is the specific form the burden identified in point 5 takes for us.
So our daily vocational prayer might be something like this: “Lord, I want to work with the grain of your story, your Creation, your Way. Teach me to discern the direction that grain runs, and help me to identify what runs against it. Through your indwelling Spirit and the common life of your Church, give me courage and strength to follow the path that you set before me.”
Any thoughts about the role of the book in our professional lives and more generally our lives as Christ-followers must be pursued within the parameters of the reflections above. We should not revere the book or any other technology in itself, but value it insofar as it helps us to work with the grain of God’s universe.
As a corollary, any decision to stick with paper codices instead of digital texts will be a trivial decision if in most other respects we are unreflective participants in Technopoly.
The codex certainly seems to have been especially well-suited to the preservation and transmission of the Gospel, but we don’t have a control group for purposes of comparison, nor can we roll back the tape of history and replay it with the codex taken out. A Church without codices might have been worse than the one that arose; it might have been better; it surely would have been different, with a different mix of virtues and vices. There’s no way for us to know.
There is no power-knowledge regime under which the Gospel cannot be preached and the Christian life practiced. God will not leave us comfortless, even if He allows our codices to be taken away.
If we value codices, we should strive to preserve them. But we can only do this if we first think critically and seriously about why we love them — what virtues they embody that we do not want to lose.
If we do this, then we will be better prepared to adapt if codices (or other technologies that we like) decline. Being practiced in working against the grain of our social order, we will remember that even unfamiliar and unpromising technologies can be turned to godly purposes.
This does not mean that those technologies are neutral, only that they are to some degree redeemable. Remember, our decision to accept, even if only provisionally, the rules and standards of our disciplines and institutions means that we have given up a full range of choices about our technologies.
“I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!” — Lesslie Newbigin
Zombies are supposed to be dead but still walking around. The horror is, among other things, an existential one: that our dead are coming for us, relentless in their pursuit to reduce us to their condition. We see these shambling, decaying bodies, and are reminded: on some level, that’s us. Inevitably. No matter how hard and how long we fight. A zombie is a particularly hideous memento mori.Of course, you can take that basic horror and ramify it with specific social/cultural/political points, as Romero and others have done, but you build on that base of existential horror.
The modern “viral” zombie is almost a complete inversion of this. The group doesn’t inevitably and hopelessly succumb; instead, there’s the excitement of watching them (some of them) defeat and escape from the plague. Modern zombie movies are fantasies of election – we identify with the survivors, and so become convinced that we would be like them. And these survivors seem so much more alive than we do – partly because they’ve escaped the constraints of civilization, but not only because of that. Since zombies are death, that fantasy of election is a fantasy of escaping death entirely – precisely the opposite of what a zombie is supposed to make us feel.
Jeff Atwood, answering the question, “What’s your best time-saving shortcut/life hack?”:Do not under any circumstances keep to-do lists or use to-do apps. If you can’t remember the most important things you need to do every day, you should work on that. And if you can’t remember something you “need” to do, it’s probably not worth doing in the first place.
Well … By this logic, shouldn’t you also refuse to keep a calendar? There’s a baby-out-with-the-bathwater element to this. No doubt, some people become obsessed with their to-do apps and project management software and life-hacking strategies, but for most of us these tools are simply helpful and don’t need to be treated as Enemies of Life. When I know that I’m going to have to turn in a form or finish a project by a certain day, or when on a Monday I sit down to think about the things that need to get done during the week, I write that stuff down for reference. Why exactly is that a problem? What is it interfering with or preventing or compromising?
Ramsay’s one weak spot, the chink in his mental armature? Silence. He can’t bear it. Chefs must always be badgering, exhorting, browbeating, insulting. Noise in the kitchen, at all times. Nothing unique here: Ramsay is a true modern man, living in dread that two seconds of silence will suck him beyond retrieval into the cold hell of himself. We all need the chatter, do we not? The twitter, the flutter. But Ramsay is particularly loud and naked in his fearfulness. At the Juniper Hill Inn, the executive chef reacts to familiar waves of Ramsay pressure (“Come on!”) by going half-catatonic: his eyes are dead, he won’t say anything. A terrible quiet descends over the kitchen. Ramsay crouches and raises his hands to his head. “It’s … so bleeping painful now!” he moans. Silently, sullenly, the chef works his skillet. Ramsay is close to panic. “Open up!” he begs. An abyss yawns and stretches: here comes emptiness. The brain-hum sharpens to a whine. So escalate, quickly. Fill the void with imprecations, boost the language until that robot locust squawks again. Hurry! Bleep.