Thanks for the kind words on my post, folks!
I generally dislike unsolicited advice, but over at my macro blog I wrote a post offering some advice to people who are coming to micro.blog from Twitter.
a bit of advice
Elon Musk’s imminent purchase of Twitter has a good many people scurrying for the exits, and some of them are coming to micro.blog — which is awesome! I’ve written often here about micro.blog, and here’s a selection:
- Micro.blog and the open web
- Why a social network that scales up is a bad thing
- On Cal Newport’s New Yorker essay that described micro.blog
- Some “hidden” features of micro.blog
Let’s start with this: on Twitter it’s hard not to be aware of your follower count; on micro.blog you cannot know how many people are following you. Moreover, there is no re-post button. If people want to link to your micro-post they have to do so manually, by copying the link and inserting it into their own post. Similarly: there is no like button. If you like someone’s post you have to reply to them to say so. And: there is no algorithmic feed — it’s just chronological, there’s no other option.
What all this adds up to: On micro.blog, you have absolutely no incentive to flex, shitpost, self-promote, or troll. You’re there to post interesting things and/or chat with people. Nothing else makes sense.
And that’s why it’s great.
So if you’re coming over from Twitter, please try to leave your Twitter habits and reflexes behind. They won’t help you at micro.blog.
UPDATE: Here are some brief thoughts about Mastodon, which, by contrast, is exactly like Twitter, in all the bad ways.
“You can't see it so I help you”
There’s a lot going on in Edward Yang’s masterful Yi Yi (2000), but I just want to focus on one theme here: how an eight-year-old boy named Yang-Yang is confronted by an epistemological conundrum. He realizes, first, that he can’t be sure that other people see what he sees; and second, that he can only know half of the truth about the world, because he can only see what’s in front of him — what’s behind him remains always invisible.
Yang-Yang responds to this difficulty by getting a camera. It takes him a while to learn how to use it properly: at school a teacher confiscates a stack of blurry, uncomposed photos and mocks them as “avant-garde art.” But gradually he gets the hang of his new device, and finds his true subject: the backs of heads — as many of them as he can photograph. Late in the movie he hands his uncle a photo. The uncle is confused at first, but then realizes that it’s the back of his own head. “You can't see it so I help you,” Yang-Yang says, to which his father replies, “So that’s what this is all about.” (It may not be irrelevant that the uncle is notable for his complete lack of self-knowledge.)
Yang-Yang’s father, NJ, has troubles of his own, including conflict with his co-workers; a wife, Min-Min, who has fallen into deep depression when her stroke-afflicted mother becomes comatose; and the sudden reappearance in his life of his first love, a woman named Sherry. When NJ and Sherry talk we typically see him from behind — we see only the back of his head. What message his face carries is not for us to know.
There is one exception to this rule, though. When Min-Min’s mother is brought home in a coma, the doctors tell the family to speak to her every day. Tell her what they’ve been doing, whatever, but speak to her because maybe — the doctors don’t have much hope of this, but still — maybe that will help bring her back. When they do this we see their faces; the blanket-covered lower body of the unconscious old lady is visible just at the edge of the frame. At one point NJ visits, in the midst of his struggle with what to do about Sherry’s reappearance, and says, in highly general terms, that he’s having a tough time. We see his full face throughout this scene. Also: he comments, “This is like praying, you don't know whether the person you're talking to hears you.” But we know she doesn’t see him.
Late in the movie, when Min-Min returns from an extended period of retreat in a Buddhist monastery, she tries to tell NJ what she has learned — and what she has not learned. She sits, distressed, at the foot of their bed, while he sits near the head of it — behind her. He sees only the back of her head; she doesn’t see him at all. Yet they speak words of remarkable honesty to one another; perhaps some things are easier to say when you’re not looking into someone’s eyes. Perhaps also that’s why it can be easier to talk to a comatose person who probably can’t hear you than to talk to an angry or unhappy member of your family.
It’s noteworthy, perhaps, that Yang-Yang shares part of a name with the film’s director, because Edward Yang repeatedly films his characters through glass, in such a way that we see those characters but also reflections in the glass — reflections that show us what is behind the camera. Maybe, then, this is one of the roles of movies: to show us that half of the truth that we don’t ordinarily see, that we’re debarred from seeing. (One teenage character: “My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies…. It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.” I’d like to know his uncle’s name.)
One more note: In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes: “For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex — to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head…. A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling.”
I was so annoyed by the size and heft of my iPhone 13 Pro that I traded it to my son for an SE – which is dramatically more comfortable to carry around but yikes, the camera is also dramatically inferior to the 13 Pro’s. Tempted to ask for a tradeback….
department of corrections
My friend Joe Mangina — who, unlike me, is a real theologian — has written to correct something I wrote in my sketch of a demonology.
I would only question your naming of Sin and Death as being among the Pauline “principalities and powers.” It seems to me that these fall in a fundamentally different category. The principalities are created realities, of God knows what ontological status, but anyway created and, tragically corrupted. But Sin and Death aren’t created. They are names for the corruption — for Evil — itself. This may seem a theologian’s quibble, and I’m happy to acknowledge that from the ordinary mortal’s point of view these are all powers or systems opposed to God that enslave humans. But it does make a difference. The powers can be — at least eschatologically and in principle — redeemed; Sin and Death, not so.This is precisely right, and not at all a quibble. (And I knew better! Annoyingly sloppy on my part.)
We don’t really understand the “ontological status” of the Powers: I wrote about some of the complications here. Demons, whom I describe as the agents of the Powers, are equally difficult to fix ontologically, as we may note when we hear “My name is Legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9).
Moreover, it has not always seemed clear to Christians that angels, demons, and human beings exhaust the categories of sentient creatures. Milton writes darkly of “middle Spirits” whose nature lies “Betwixt the angelical and human kind” (Paradise Lost, Book III). In The Discarded Image C. S. Lewis details the medieval belief in creatures whom he calls longaevi — these are very close to Tolkien’s Elves — whose place in the drama of human salvation is uncertain and debatable. In That Hideous Strength Lewis has one character speculate about the existence of “neutrals” — beings who originally were not concerned with the spiritual warfare that dominates the human world but who are being drawn into that conflict, being compelled to choose a side, as we all ultimately will.
But in the end, this much can be said about all sentient creatures: At the name of Jesus every knee shall bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10–11). That includes the Powers, the angels, the demons, the rulers of this world (kosmokratoras), and humans made in the image of God.
But it does not include Sin and Death, which shall be eradicated. That’s the key difference: All powers and rulers, whether in the end redeemed or not, will confess the One Lord who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But Sin and Death will be altogether destroyed.
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“Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”[/caption]
DBH:
[T]he religion historically called “Christianity” is not a “truth” that exists among and in competition with "false" non-Christian religions. “Christianity,” in fact — which is not really one thing, in any event, but only a loose designation for a diverse set of beliefs and practices and cultural forms and numerous often incongruous religions, comprised within a single but nonetheless porous hermeneutical and historical “set” — is only one limited trajectory within history's universal narrative of divine incarnation and creaturely deification, superior in some ways to alternative trajectories, vastly inferior in many others. (A strictly Reformed theology of, say, penal substitutionary atonement is infinitely more remote from the Logos who has become incarnate in created nature and history than is, for instance, the bodhisattva ideal unfolded in the Lotus Sutra and the Bodhicaryavatara; indeed, the latter in some very real sense attests, under the veil of the unfamiliar, to the truth made present in Christ, while the former is totally antithetical to that truth and therefore pure falsehood.)
So religious traditions that deny every single clause of the ancient Christian creeds nevertheless “in some very real sense” — real but, alas, undefined — attest to the truth of the Incarnation, while other religious traditions that affirm every single clause of the ancient Christian creeds nevertheless remain “totally antithetical to that truth.“ Good to know! (Also, the scare quotes are doing some seriously heavy lifting here.)