I got a solicitation from Jim Rafferty, a friend of mine who’s helping organize a conference on teaching, religion, and technology in a few weeks; Jim’s looking for pithy quotations to use as thought-provokers to stimulate theological pedagogues to imagine broadly the possibilities and practicalities of the relation between our work as teachers and the applications of internet technology. I’m passing along to him Dr. Weinberger’s “writing ourselves into existence” and Tfute’s “PowerPoint corrupts absolutely” (I had the sense someone else said it first and Prof. Tufte quoted it, but I can’t find an earlier source), but I was looking for some distilled wisdom from Searls, Lessig, Doctorow, Locke, and others to propose for him — and I’m having a hard time isolating gems from generally-useful observations. Does anyone have other suggestions?
Posted by AKMA at July 27, 2004 12:22 PM | TrackBackGosh, it sounds like you only want stuff from men, huh? ;)
Just in case you decide to include anything from women, I've always liked the title of one of Sherry Turkle's seminal articles, "Computer as Rorschach." She also said "Our lives on the screen are changing the way we think." (http://www.cybergrrl.com/fs.jhtml?/tech/ttopic/art981/)
Also Laurie Andersen: "Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories."
Brenda Laurel, in an interview for Syllabus, said "We've usually thought of computers as environments for humans. ...[T]urn that around and see the human as the environment for the computer."
Posted by: Liz Lawley at July 27, 2004 02:14 PM“Why, Liz, if that bothers you it must be your problem” -- ouch, my hasty lack of deliberation. Mea maxima culpa! It just illustrates how precarious a well-meaning guy’s awareness can be.
(On a somewhat related note, a summer-school camera crew happened to grab me last week and pose to me the question, “Do you consider yourself a Black feminist?” Only a Steve Himmer could make so improbable an event up — except if Steve had written it, there would have been a lobster in it somewhere.)
Thanks for these suggestions; I’ll include them all.
Posted by: AKMA at July 27, 2004 02:59 PMCan you post a link to the conference, if there is one? I'd be interested in the discussion.
A few quotes that spring to mind from my teaching and research on technology and religion/Christianity.
"We tend to see God reflected in nature, but my bet is that technology is the better mirror of God" (Kevin Kelly, "Nerd Theology," Technology in Society 21, no. 4 (1999): 392.)
"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it." (In Kim Stanley Robinson's anthology "The Martians").
“It [technology] has become the matrix of our ordinary living.” (Susan J. White, Christian Worship and Technological Change (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 14.)
"Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert." (Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), 293-294.)
Liz has beaten me to citing Sherry Turkle but her work abounds with though provoking quotes.
Posted by: Stephen Garner at July 27, 2004 04:30 PMDave Winer: "People just like to jump up and down."
Posted by: Jonathon Delacour at July 27, 2004 08:03 PM