Oct 17
Mondays are my Sabbath day, and they represent a chance to relax, do some recreational reading, tidy up some loose ends around the house, and often spend some time blogging. Today, as I was reading some comments, I noticed on my dashboard that my most recent post was number 500 in the history of this blog! I don’t post nearly as frequently as many bloggers do, but 500 still seems like a lot to me! It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing this for that long. Read more
Like most people, I was saddened to hear of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ passing yesterday. I am certainly no technophile (although I do love my MacBook) and my knowledge of the world in which Mr. Jobs was so influential is minimal, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, based on the little I do know, I marvel at the impact this man and the company he founded have had upon how we live in the modern world. It seemed like Jobs was not only a visionary leader but a genuinely decent human being. Not a bad combination. Read more
I’m in the midst of a very busy stretch right now, so there’s not a lot of time for original posts. This morning, however, in the midst of my busyness, I came across a few prescient quotes from Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing on the struggles we often have with paying attention to and nourishing our spiritual lives. Rolheiser identifies three main things that work against what he calls a sense of “interiority,” and all three seem to pretty much hit the nail on the head: narcissism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness. Here’s a bit of what I read prior to heading out into another busy (!) day: Read more
Blogging can be a bit of a strange animal in that you hurl your words out into the wide (and wild) world of the web, where they can be read (or not) by a virtually limitless variety of people who come to them from a virtually limitless assortment of links, searches, recommendations, “likes,” etc. Of course, on one level this is no different from the publishing of books and articles. But the sheer volume of words out there in cyberspace makes it easy to imagine one’s own words just getting lost in the noise and clutter of the online world. Read more
Here in Canada, the news of the week has been dominated by the tragic death of NDP leader Jack Layton. It’s been remarkable to see the outpouring of grief, the pages of commentary, the rapturous eulogizing, and, regrettably, the vicious politicizing that has come in the wake of Mr. Layton’s passing. National Post columnist Christie Blatchford’s ill-timed and rather insensitive article in Monday’s issue, and the stream of vitriolic commets that followed it, stand as a rather embarrassing indictment of our inability to behave and converse civilly and sensitively online, even in the face of death. Read more
This morning, I noticed with interest that Holy Post, the National Post‘s religion blog, has decided to disable comments on their posts for a while due to the bad behaviour of commenters (curiously, comments are allowed on the post announcing that comments will no longer be allowed!). Read more
Over the last few weeks I have noticed a feeling of unsettledness and mild disorientation as I begin my morning ritual of coffee and a trip through my news reader/aggregator. At last count, I have over 130 subscriptions to various blogs and news sites, some of which are (incredibly) updated 3-4 times daily. I have no idea if this is a “normal” amount of information for the technologically-savvy to wade through on a daily basis in our brave new cyber-world, but the sheer volume of words I make some attempt, however minimal, to regularly keep up with is proving increasingly unwieldy. Read more
I spent a chunk of my day off yesterday in a dingy little tire shop waiting for winter tires with hordes of other Vancouver Islanders caught unprepared for our recent blast of winter. I passed the time, in part, by finishing off Douglas Coupland’s Player One: What is to Become of Us, a novel/lecture series characterized by Coupland’s customary mixture of bleakness, humour, and though-provoking storytelling around questions about the meaning of life and what it means to be human. Read more
Oct 21
Received this via a co-worker today. Hilarious commercial. Baffling message.
So let me see if I’ve got this straight. In order to save myself from obsessing over the mind-numbing amount and variety of trivial minutiae pouring out of my phone, and from all the addictive tendencies and relationship-destroying habits that these pieces of technology cultivate and capitalize upon, I should… get a different phone?!
Um… OK.
Sep 3
A couple of loosely connected thought, links, and quotes for a Friday morning…
A few weeks ago, I came across an excellent new collaborative blog called Wondering Fair (a number of contributors are alumni from Regent College). Interesting and engaging topics, good writing, nice accessible look and feel… definitely worth adding to your reader. Due to my ongoing interest in how technology shapes us as human beings, I was particularly drawn to David Benson’s post on why he doesn’t own a mobile phone. His summary hits the nail on the head, in my view: Read more
A lot of my reading for this week’s sermon has been focused on Sabbath—how to keep it, why it ought to be kept, what prevents us from keeping it, etc. Whatever else a consistent and deliberate observation of Sabbath might protect us from, I think that our societal addiction/enslavement to technology would be high on the list. A couple of articles I’ve come across over the last few days from the New York Times’s “Your Brain on Computers” series (see here and here, for example) have simply reinforced my sense that one of the things that the inhabitant of twenty-first century postmodernity is most desperately in need of is unplugging. Read more
Some of the bigger blogs I subscribe to typically have something like a weekend round-up type post which serves as an aggregator of the miscellaneous articles, video clips, and other assorted cyber-scraps that the author(s) happen to have come across over the course of the past week. I don’t usually spend much time on these posts because there are just too many links and rabbit trails and I can’t be bothered. I have occasionally found the odd gem in these laundry lists of links, but I’m increasingly finding that I just don’t have the patience for the random nature of these posts. Read more
Jul 9
My wife and I recently decided to cancel our cable TV. There were a variety of reasons for this, some principled, some just plain old pragmatic (we don’t watch much, and we can’t afford it). I thought that we would still pick up the odd station even after we got rid of cable, but it turns out that we now get precisely zero channels. ZERO. It’s very strange. I have been watching CBC’s coverage of the World Cup on my laptop, so I am surviving thus far, but I wonder what will happen once fall rolls around and hockey season starts. My resolve will certainly be tested…
Anyway, given my new television-less reality, I got a kick out of this when it came through the inbox the other day (Calvin’s family has just had their television stolen).
On the off-chance that anyone out there is looking for further evidence that our cultural discourse is being seriously degraded and trivialized by the proliferation of technology, an article in yesterday’s New York Times alerted readers to the availability of iPhone apps to help believers and non believers arm themselves for war. There are anti-Darwin apps for Christians, “Bible Thumper” apps for atheists, and others, no doubt, each doing what all apps are designed to do: provide entertainment, “illumination,” and diversion as quickly, and with as little demand to think for oneself, as possible. Read more
Jun 23
Due to my constant whining and complaining about the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter and whatever other social networking phenomenon is currently dominating and distracting us, I am becoming known as something of a Luddite around the office here. Which is why this little video found its way into my inbox today. Read more
The disconnection, distractedness, triviality, and loneliness that are increasingly becoming a part of a hyper-technified age has been a source of interest (and concern) for me for a while now. Increasingly, our lives are lived online. Facebook and Twitter (or the blogosphere!) are substituted for the cafe and the living room. Status updates and text messages take the place of conversation. There are certainly many good things about the brave new communication world we have created, but there are costs as well. Read more
Well, we’re sitting here in the Calgary airport waiting to catch a plane back home and I’m continuing to make my way through Douglas Coupland’s JPod. I’ve been meaning to get acquainted with Coupland’s work for some time now and the Christmas holidays have provided the perfect opportunity. JPod follows the (fairly pathetic) lives of a bunch of twenty-something computer programmers who work for a gaming company as they traverse the dreary landscape of postmodernity. So far, it’s been an interesting read full of memorable passages. Read more
The use and abuse of technology has been a subject that has interested me for a while now. In our technologically (over) saturated environment the question of how we relate to our tools and what our ability (or inability) to do so in healthy ways says about us as human beings is an important one. What is our cultural addiction to the internet doing to us as people? How is it affecting our ability to think, to concentrate, to devote sustained periods of attention to a task? What will children raised in a technified society be like as adults? These are all live questions, from my perspective, and the signs don’t look so good. Read more
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