Month: September 2007

Yesterday I broke the news to Margaret that Madeleine L’Engle had died. We had read many of her novels (Margaret more than I), and we had been part of her receiving an honorary degree from Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, where Margaret was working as the Dean’s secretary (back in the days that was called “secretary” and not one of the precisely descriptive titles now in use) (or perhaps, “secretary” accurately described that work once upon a time, before that title evolved to connote “stenographer” or “attractive living ornament for executive’s antechamber”).

When Ms. L’Engle came to Berkeley to receive the degree, she generously autographed Margaret’s worn copy of A Wrinkle In Time, inscribing it to Margaret and “to the one within,” indicating Nate (the unlinkable) who at that time was making his presence in utero increasingly obvious. Nate has returned the favor by reading L’Engle’s books repeatedly, most recently this past summer.

We give thanks for this extraordinarily alert and articulate story-teller, for her love and faith, for her wit and grace, and we pray for her and for her family. Ora pro nobis, Sancta Magdalena.

First, Pippa rediscovered the William Steig book C D B at the library yesterday.

And I discovered (through Typophile.com) this Italian cartoon, apparently from 1958, in which the animated speaker’s mouth forms the letters of the word he is speaking.

I’m turning now to writing a chapter for a college-level introductory textbook on religion. My chapter raises issues pertaining to “Technology and Religion.” I’m working with a swarm of ideas; I raise the topic here since readers of this blog include some who know more than I about both topics and many who know more than I about one or the other — I’m very interested in feedback.

I plan to point out that the present pace of technological innovation heightens our awareness of technology’s role in life — hence all the more acutely, its role in religious life, which genreally tends toward the traditional or the timeless — cultures have been dealing with technological change all along. Religions have been evaluating technologies for their spiritual implications for ages, and have simultaneously been devising specifically religious technologies. (Two cases in point: question of musical instruments in Christian worship, and role of prayer wheels in Tibetan Buddhism. More examples would vastly enrich the chapter, which will otherwise follow my idiosyncratic tendency to drift toward abstraction and theory.)

Other points I’ll try to work in:

• With specific reference to digital technology, if “code is law” (Lessig, citing William Mitchell), what account does one offer of spiritual “freedom”? (Does that make hackers into digital apostles?)
• Might technology reflect a sort of practical theology of mechanical culture?
• To the extent that technology entails a reallocation of power, to what extent is that reallocation consensual and benign, to what extent is it coercive and destructive?
• How do intuitions about the nature of the the self/soul intersect with technological prostheses? When I drive, I sense the car to be a semi-sensate extension of my being; many of us refer to our computers as “outboard brains,” and the feeling of devastating loss when a hard drive fails or a computer is stolen bespeak a more powerful connection than solely that to lost property.
• Many religious questions involve divergent assessments of material and non-material realities (along with divergent means of distinguishing them, etc.). Can we draw any conclusions relative to religious expressions that affirm the goodness of material creation and their assessments of technology, or religious expressions that deny the goodness of material creation and their assessments of technology?
• To the extent that technology involves amplifying convenience or comfort (hence removes its users from the labors attendant upon obtaining, producing, maintaining objects of our attention), does technology then constitute an interruption of our relation to our environment (and is that a bad thing)?
• What is the relation of religious expressions mediated by digital technology — say, in a “virtual” environemnt — to religious expressions in a physical environment, and on what basis does one make that evaluation?

I’m sure there’s more that ’s not occurring to me at the moment, and I don’t know how the chapter will flow, but these are the points that press on my authorial awareness this morning.

(Yes, I’ll make some bibliographic suggestions, including Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology,” Ray Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines, Albert Borgmann’s Power Failure. . . . Others?)
Continue reading “Questions Concerning Technology (And Religion)”

There are important topics rumbling around Blogaria — nuclear missile surprises, terrorist arrests, Tim Burke’s post “Angry at Academe” (with The Little Professor’s codicil about “Immobility”) — but let’s descend to the muck of consumer indulgence: what about the new iPods?

By and large, Apple seems to be developing the product lines in telligible ways. I don’t recoil in horror at the wide-body Nanos, since they come with video capability. $200 for 8GB and the capacity to watch The Office (oops, no NBC series) LOST on a two-inch screen seems fair, though a mild bump in storage would have been nice. The storage/screen combination for the iPod Classic sound plausible. The lure of a portable 160 GB, or even an 80GB hard drive that plays tunes and video will be hard for some folks to resist. Lower-priced iPhones make sense to me, and should accelerate the market for that device. Heck, I’m doing the math on our Princeton landline and wondering whether we might not be better off in the long run if we got an iPhone and a pay-as-you-go option from the traitor-to-civil-rights AT&T. At the end of a year with a landline we’re out $300 plus miscellaneous per-call charges, with nothing else to show for it; after a year with an iPhone, we’d be out $400 plus miscellaneous per-call charges, but we’d have a portable wifi-enabled phone/camera/video/audio player.

The spotlight gadget yesterday, though, was the iPod Touch, the iPhone without phone that we had been wondering about since the iPhone was introduced. Only it’s not exactly iPhone sans-a-phone; it’s iPhone sans phone, camera, Bluetooth, and various other bells and whistles (which only add $100, plus activation and call charges, to the “iPod Touch” price). It’s clearly the hottest item in the line, but it’s harder for me to get excited about it without either the non-phone extras or more storage (either would have amped up the value proposition for this device).

They’re all impressive gadgets for entertainment, and my 2G iPod is beginning to show signs of age, so I’m keeping a close eye on them. But no single contender separated itself from the pack this time.

Tom Coates gets Andrew Keen just right.

Good coverage of the economics of digital music files in C-ville and the New York Times Magazine’s portrait of Rick Rubin. Rubin is wrong about subscriptions — I don’t want to pay for someone else’s selection of what I might like, thank you very much — but at least he understands that the industry as it has known itself has passed its sell-by date.

Message: changing the economics away from the corporate industrial model doesn’t mean abolishing music (any more than adopting the corporate industrial model meant inventing music).

I’m checking out Colorate, the donationware application for suggesting color schemes. Since I’m already equipped with Pippaware, I probably wouldn’t rely on a digital color generator, but it may be useful in circumstances when Pippa’s not available (as, for example, to some of you).

Yesterday Pippa and I walked to Princeton from our sub-boro-ban home, three miles up and down some mild hills. The temperature fell on the warm side of “lovely,” and the company was nonpareil. It’s a good walk, long enough to extend your patience but not interminable.

The difficulty arose when we needed to get back home — the same three miles, only in warmer afternoon sun, with sorer feet. We concur that at least for now, it’s a one-way walk. Next time, we may just opt to take the bus one direction.

Back when I wrote an article about what theoloogical educators should learn from Napster, I noted the music oligopolists’ efforts to suppress the file-sharing network. Even back then (while the original Napster was still going strong) it seemed clear that if someone shut down Napster, other modes of file-sharing would supplant it. First was Napster; after that we got Kazaa; now we have torrents; if someone suppresses torrents, coders will write something else.

The same applies mutatis mutandis to online music sales. The captains of industry have deployed their masterminds against iTunes (“We don’t need you, Steve!”) and their phalanxes of lawyers against grey-market Russian online music store Allofmp3.com. At their behest, various online payment agencies have refused to transfer payments to Allofmp3, so that would-be users have to work out arcane contortions to buy music from the Russian source (if it can be done at all). At the insistence of music inndustriallists, Russian entry into the G8 was contingent (in part) on the Moscow government shutting down Allofmp3.com. Sure enough, the music service was declared illegal, Russia joined the free market, and everyone but Allofmp3 subscribers were happy.

Allofmp3 kept up their fight, but apparently transferred all their assets (site design, tracks, user accounts) to a new address, mp3sparks.com. The address is different, but the essential look-and-feel are the same. I reckon the RIAA and their pals are working to shut down Sparks, too. Meanwhile, though, the Russian courts have shown a degree of independence from their trade negotiators and ruled that Allofmp3 complies with all relevant Russian laws, so the original site has announced that it will resume operations — assuming customers can figure out some way to pay them.

All this time, of course, P2P networks and torrents have been going strong.

What of it? Several things. First, the fact that people will persist in trying to get through to Allofmp3 demonstrates that a great market segment would rather pay for music downloads than seek them from the dark net. iTunes overcharges; P2P involves some infection risks and general nuisances. The Allofmp3 business model actually works, offering users reasonably-priced downloads in their choice of quality, without DRM. And instead of learning from and emulating the operation of the free market, the music industry allots its resources to criminalizing potential (and actual) customers, lobbying policy-makers, and concocting outlandish advertisements to dissuade impressionable youth from downloading from any questionable source.

What if, instead of this losing effort to keep the tide of technology from rising and falling, the industry cooperated with Allofmp3, treating it as a sort of marketing lab?

This is on my mind because we left our CDs — the digital recordings we wanted most and bought first — back in Illinois, and I didn’t spend hours ripping every one of them, of course, so now when I think it would be great to listen to “Born to Run,” I remember that it’s back home and I don’t have access to it. If digital downloads were intelligently priced, I might just say “Oh, forget it,” and buy downloads of selections I miss. It’s a different business model, but time will show that it’s a viable model. In the meantime, the Princeton Public Library has a large collection of CDs; and the record companies don’t profit a cent when I borrow them.

Tim Bray, on an oversimplified analysis of differences between men and women:

Statistics are useful; essential, even, to understanding. But everybody is an exception, in at least one statistical minority, and the human mind is so prone to overaggressive pattern-matching.

I know I’ll use the phrase “prone to overaggressive pattern-matching” sometime, so I want to quote Tim here now, so I’ll be able to find the source anon.

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In the age of the proto-semantic Web, here’s a question for mark-up mavens: If somebody writes such-and-such a thing on their web page, and I quote them on mine — am I obligated to replicate their mark-up as well as the visual appearance of their prose? Tim used 〈em〉 tags on his “useful” (no surprise that he’s conscientious about mark-up), but a casual reader might quote him with just 〈i〉 tags. Or a casual blogger might set a title in italics through a blogging engine that defaults to 〈em〉 tags; should I follow their imprecision for the sake of precise quotation? Do we need a 〈sic〉 tag?

Margaret prodded me into reading Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts this latesummer, and it serves as a wonderful reminder of how well she knows me. Raw Shark mingles romance, semiotics, conspiracy, and conceptual ichthyology in an engrossing plot that oscillates from supernatural adventure to elegiac descent into madness, and back, and from there to genre-challenging reflection on meaning, identity, and narrative closure — all with so deftly light a hand that it never succumbs to ponderous self-importance. No Matrix here, though it touches some of the points that the Wachowskis skimmed from the surface of Baudrillard; no self-congratulatory deconstruction of the novel; no elaborate joke at the reader’s expense, and although the ending remains open in certain regards, it offers knit-things-up conclusion to satisfy a reader who simply will not tolerate loose ends.

The gentleness with which Hall evokes the various dimensions of this meditative adventure remind me of Mark Tansey or René Magritte more than Derrida or Keanu Reeves. Hall demonstrates alert awareness of the visual, aural, and emotional coloration of “knowing” — and, arguably, intimates a sense of the spiritual and parabolic as well.

I recommend the novel highly, but particularly emphatically for readers with interests that touch on the topics I’ve sketched in Beautiful Theology and in some of the essays in Faithful Interpretation and in “Poaching on Zion.” While it’s always a mistake to judge one work by the standard of all that it might be, The Raw Shark Texts attains distinction in so many different ways that it would be curmudgeonly (even for me!) to scold it for not reaching all the way to transcendence.