In 2006, AOL made an epic misjudgment. As part of a research project headed by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, AOL made available to the public a massive amount of search data, releasing the search history of 650,000 users over a 3-month period. That totaled some twenty one million searches. Before releasing the data they anonymized it, stripping away user names and replacing them with numbers. Yet because of the nature of the data, people very quickly linked real people to abstract numbers—a massive violation of privacy and confidentiality. Within days AOL realized its mistake and withdrew the data. But already it had been copied and posted elsewhere on the internet where today it lives on in infamy.

Some searches were dark and disturbing, others unremarkable in every way, and still others strangely amusing. Often you could reconstruct a person’s life, at least in part, from what they searched for over a period of time. Consider this user:

This week I read Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget. Though often quite obscure, the book does offer a lot of opportunity for reflection on the way technology is impacting our lives. He has written what is probably the cleverest Preface to a book I’ve ever read (and, if I do say so myself, I’ve read a lot of prefaces. Or is that prefi?). He offers a unique perspective on the harsh reality of just how his book will be consumed. I thought you’d enjoy it.

*****

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons—automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computer facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams.

Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.

The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

Yesterday I wrote about my desire to be a doer when it comes to the convergence of technology and theology, media and Christian living. I do not want to write a book full of prescriptions that I choose to ignore. And so, as I’ve dedicated increasing amounts of time to research, I’ve begun to examine my own life, my own use of technology and ultimately, its use of me.

Today I’d like to give three quick examples of the ways I’ve had to change my own life as I’ve thought about what it means for me to live in a distinctly Christian way in this media-saturated world. Maybe in the book I’ll write about some of these in greater detail. For now, I will be brief. Each of these is simply a way I’ve found that I can step just a little bit outside the torrent of media and information that always seems so close to overwhelming me.

I recently came to the realization that email owns me. A good technology that should be at my disposal has instead taken over and put me at its disposal. And if you’ve read Postman you’ll know that technology is very good at this. No sooner do we put a technology in our service than we find that it has so changed our lives that suddenly we have become enslaved to it.

When I find myself compulsively glancing at my screen every time I walk by, hoping to see an icon telling me I’ve got a new message, when I unthinkingly pull out my iPhone to check to see if I’ve got any new email, I realize I’ve got a problem. When I sit in meetings with email open, glancing as often to the screen as to the person speaking, I understand that something has gone wrong. Somehow I’ve given email more than it deserves. In my mind I’ve made it into something it is not and something it should never be. Email was never meant to be the first thing I look at in the morning or the last thing I look at before bed.

Hear me when I say that email is not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing either, really; it’s just a thing. I wouldn’t want to say that email is somehow innately destructive. It is an excellent medium for communication and one that serves many purposes very well. It is exceptionally efficient, at least when at its best, and gives us amazing levels of instantaneous access to one another. I wouldn’t want to cut it out of my life and certainly do not intend to.

But email is demanding, especially when given the reins. Recent scientific studies show that there may well be some kind of a correlation between the psychology of email and the psychology of slot machines. A variable interval schedule, as psychologists might know it, draws us back time and again, hoping for the occasional payout. Though most of the time there is no payout when checking email, just like there is usually all cost and no payout when playing slots, there is always the promise of something great. Occasionally we may win a jackpot and occasionally we may get a bit of very good news by email. But most of the time there is no payout at all. Yet our brains seem hard-wired to keep searching, to keep driving us back to the inbox, hoping against hope.

So what have I done? I’ve made email something that I’ve scheduled into my life. Let me back up just a little bit. Thinking about the nature of email and the kind of messages I receive via email, I realized that my mind had been tricking me. Really there was only very, very rarely any exceptional good that could come to me via email—the news that my book proposal had been accepted, the news that a friend had safely delivered her child. Far more often than not my email varies between junk and normal—spam and interesting yet ultimately non-urgent and non-life-changing communiques from friends and family. Such emails are easy to schedule into certain times of day; there is no reason to monitor them on a constant basis. And so I now check email only occasionally—two or three times a day seems to be sufficient. So far I don’t see that it’s had even the smallest amount of negative impact. I do not access email at all in the evenings and have cut far back on the weekends (by way of example, I checked once this past Saturday and not at all on Sunday).

It has shocked me to see that the world keeps turning even when I don’t constantly monitor email. Who would have thought it could be possible? Life goes on.

So much for email. I’ve also stopped gratifying my urge to instantly search for anything that interests me. Very often I find my mind wandering to a person or a topic and before I know it, I’m sitting at a computer and typing the search into Google. Just this evening I had the urge to search for information on Elizabeth Edwards, a book titled How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read and feedback on the new Facebook upgrade. I would then have blown fifteen minutes satisfying these impulses. I have seen that in this wired world knowledge about has become far more important than knowledge of, that the great virtue is in instant access to information. I’m going to try to stop catering to that desire. Instead, I’ll scratch things down in a notebook and look them up later. Or, more often than not, I’ll forget to look them up at all and be no worse off for it. I want to spend far less time searching out new information and more time reflecting on the information I’ve already got.

And this feeds into the third change I am making. Yesterday I went looking for books dealing with distraction. As I did so, I had a video clip playing in a different window and found that I was constantly flipping back and forth between them. The irony was not lost on me. For a long time I’ve been conflicted about A La Carte. It is a feature of this blog that has become quite popular—when people talk to me about what they like about the blog, it is probably second from the top of the list (immediately after book reviews). When I began it, some 1050 posts ago (the first one was in the summer of 2005 and I’ve been quite regularly updating it five times a week since then) I saw it as an opportunity to share a few of the things that had caught my attention the day before. To be honest, it did not evolve much beyond that. It continues to be a bit of a brain dump, or a link dump, if you prefer.

Two things have come to bother me about it. The first is the regular juxtaposition of information. Here I’ll have a story about a terrible natural tragedy that brought about massive loss of life, and right below it I’ll have a link to a silly video parody of something completely unrelated. Somehow that doesn’t seem right to me. The second thing that bothers me is the way it has become a force for distraction. I don’t think any of us really need most of the information we can find through A La Carte. It’s mostly just mindless entertainment, even the best of it. The messages implicit in A La Carte are that we can skim lots of things, but really read nothing; that all news is really just a form of entertainment. It downplays thought and reflection at the expense of immediacy and variety. The messages get lost in the medium.

So here is the plan for A La Carte. It is not going away; it is just changing. What I want to try is to post a single link every day through A La Carte. Rather than posting a list of links that caught my eye, I’ll post a link to a single story along with an assessment of why it is important. If I haven’t found anything particularly important, I won’t post at all. I do not want to be another force of distraction. I want you to know that if I link to something, it is worth your time and attention. Stay tuned tomorrow for the first iteration of the new A La Carte. We’ll see how it goes.

So those are the three changes I’ve already made. They are small things, I’m sure, but they are not without significance. Like so many people, I feel as if technology owns me as much as I own technology. More so, even. I’ve got amazing gadgets and gizmos available to me and each of them plays its own role in my life. I just need to make sure that they are in my control, rather than handing them the reins and following blindly behind them. I think I’ve done far too much of that already.

I graduated from college in 1997 (Or so. To be honest, I don’t even remember exactly what year it was and didn’t bother attending the graduation ceremony or picking up my diploma which undoubtedly recorded the date). My history degree did not open up the world of possibilities I had obviously thought it might when I first chose history as my major three years before. With few options available to me, and suffering from a lack of motivation, I decided I had better find some kind of employment, even if it did not incorporate my training. I learned that a new Starbucks was opening nearby and quickly made my way through the interview process. The day the store opened I was there, and I stayed at that job, putting in my forty hours a week, for what must have been a year—possibly more.

I’m not sure if this is still the case, but back then every store was required to select one “Coffee Expert,” the one person on staff who would receive a bit of extra training in the world of coffee and who was required to know more about the various flavors of coffee than anyone else. This person had to be able to identify the differences between the types and to teach others how to do the same. He was responsible for brewing different kinds of coffees in order to educate both the employees and the customers. Through some strange twist of fate I was appointed to this position by the manager.

There was just one small problem. I hated coffee. I still do. I am convinced that it is a vile, evil concoction and one that has cruelly enslaved much of the human race. I despise the stuff, even in what I am assured is its finest form by the hoards of brainwashed Starbucks robots. I can barely stand even the smallest taste of it. It curdles my tongue, makes my eyes water, and leaves me gagging. I find it utterly revolting.

And yet I was the coffee expert. When customers wanted to know about the different kinds of coffee we offered, it was my job to lead them through the various options available to them and to help them select the coffee that was suited to their tastes. A customer would choose a package from the counter and I would say, “Oh, now that’s a great choice. It’s a delicious, full-bodied roast that you can taste all over your tongue. Look for the flavors of oak and a subtle hint of the spring flowers that grow in the mountains of Peru.” I had the routine down pat and helped sell a lot of coffee—more than anyone else in the store, I’m sure. The facts were all true; it’s not like I was some kind of used car dealer covering up a vehicle’s flaws and hoping to make a sell to some poor sap who would be stuck with a useless hulk. I simply relayed information I knew was true. But I hated the product. Had I been entirely forthcoming I would have said this: “It mostly tastes like cigarettes. When I drink it I detect mostly the flavor of charcoal mixed with dirt—and not the nice dirt I used to eat as a kid, either. It tastes like burned, charred, nasty, ugly hot dirt. It’s loaded with caffeine and I’m sure it’s going to shorten your life. If you enjoy the smell or taste of manure, I’m sure you’ll love it. Would you like me to grind it for you?” It always struck me as just a little bit odd that I would champion something I disliked so much.

Since I wrote my first book I had quite a few people ask when I would begin a second one. My response was that I’d write another book when I had lived another book. When it comes to writing it is always a temptation to relay information I know is true, even if I have not incorporated it into my life. I’ve had to confess that I’ve done this in the past right here on this blog. I can sometimes content myself with knowing that something I am writing is true and biblical, even if it has little resonance in my life.

When I worked at Starbucks I had absolutely no passion for coffee. Though I could talk a good line, I always felt a bit like I was lying. Customers would ask, “What’s your favorite?” and I would just blurt out a flavor based on my favorite packaging. I had no favorite coffee anymore than I had a favorite flavor of cough syrup or a favorite kind of kick in the teeth. I don’t want my life to be like this. I want what I say and what I write to be a reflection of who I really am—or who I really want to be through the power of the Spirit.

I want to be a Christian who doesn’t just do a smooth job of selling the Christian life. I could probably sit down and write a book that would say all the right things and make me feel very happy when I had typed out the last word. But it wouldn’t satisfy because it wouldn’t be genuine.

Recently I read through a part of Michael Emlet’s book Cross Talk and came across these words. Though targeted specifically at ministers, I think they are applicable to any of us.

A temptation in ministry is to think that just because we prepared a Bible study, a sermon, or a discipleship appointment (or wrote a book like this!), we are deeply engaging with the God of the universe. But that’s not necessarily true. It’s easy in ministry to live more as a ‘pipe’ than a ‘reservoir.’ That is, it’s easy to live merely as a conduit to others of the transforming truths of God’s Word, rather than as a changed and transformed reservoir who overflows with lived-out gospel truth. You wouldn’t imagine cooking meal after meal for your family without sitting down to enjoy that nourishment, would you? To paraphrase James 1:22, let’s not merely be hearers or speakers or counselors of the Word, but doers, first and foremost.

I know that in writing a book I could easily be a hearer and speaker but not a doer. But that isn’t who and what I want to be. As you know, I’ve begun work on The Next Story. And already I’m seeing how I have to make changes to my life based on what I am learning. Some of these will be experimental, trying to live out different ideas on a trial basis. Though totally unrelated to the book, I did this with vegetarianism recently, going two weeks without meat just to try it out and to see what life is like with a whole new set of tastes and flavors. There are things I will try out just for the sake of the book, with no intention of maintaining them long-term. But other changes are going to be permanent, coming on the heels of necessity or conviction. I will introduce you to a couple of these in the days to come. (Hint: you may have noticed I didn’t post an A La Carte today…)

Yesterday I sat and watched liveblog coverage of the long-awaited announcement from Apple. To no one’s great surprise, they unveiled their newest device, the iPad. While everyone knew this tablet device was coming, everyone had wondered exactly what it would be. Apple has high standards when it comes to devices like this one and I, for one, was prepared to be amazed. Alas, I was disappointed. iDisappointed, even. I’m ready to declare that the iPad is the greatest disappointment in all of human history (at least since The Phantom Menace).

Yesterday, as an aspect of researching the book I’m working on, I read (re-read, actually) Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. The timing was interesting, coming as it did just one day after the horrifying earthquake in Haiti. Postman’s book deals with media in an age of entertainment and I found many of the lessons he teaches in the book immediately applicable to the situation in Haiti. Let me summarize some of them.

Our television culture grew out of the age of telegraphy. The great idea in the age of the telegraph was “that transportation and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information.” While there was a time when only Haitians would have known about the disaster, today, in our rapidly-shrinking world, it is immediately visible from pole-to-pole. But telegraphy did more than make the world much smaller. It unexpectedly “destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse.”

We now have context-free information; “that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.” And this is exactly what we are seeing today. News of the disaster is a valuable commodity which is why the top reporters from the top networks have all hustled to Haiti to gather information and, even more importantly, to show themselves within the disaster zone. The value of the information being sent to us is not in action but in the information itself.

We cannot overrate the importance of the images we are seeing on the screens before us (and truly they are both moving and horrifying). “In a peculiar way, the photograph was the perfect complement to the flood of telegraphic news-from-nowhere that threatened to submerge readers in a sea of facts from unknown places about strangers with unknown faces. For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to unknown names. Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that ‘the news’ had a connection to something within one’s sensory experience. It created an apparent context for the ‘news of the day.’ And the ‘news of the day’ created a context for the photograph. … But the sense of the context created by the partnership of photograph and headline was, of course, entirely illusory.” These photographs arouse our sympathy and somehow make us feel like we have more of a context to understand the disaster. It is not just an earthquake now, but a true disaster for the sad and terrified faces we see in photographs. We now feel like we are somehow attached to the information we are receiving, at least in a way we would not be were we only to read about it.

Yet what do we really know? “Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them. … The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had startling characteristics: Its language was the language of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal.” Looking at photographs and reading a few headlines is knowledge of but not knowledge about.

“Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principle legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the ‘information-action ratio.’” “In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action.” As we moved away from a typographic world into a telegraphic and television world (and now into a digital world), information became separated from action. “For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.” This is a kind of information glut that makes us unable to react to all the information available to us or to do anything about most of it. Were we to actively respond to every situation and disaster that we learn about, we would be constantly in motion and constantly bankrupt. “For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.” We have become impotent to react in a meaningful way to the information we consume. “We have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.” What do you intend to do about the disaster in Haiti?

Three days from now we will have moved on. Maybe it will take four or five. But honestly, after the weekend, few of us will ever think of Haiti again. The next news story will come along and Haiti will be relegated to history. But three days from now and a week from now, the situation in Haiti will be far worse than it is today. The devastation will be more complete. The pain will be greater. The country has been devastated and it will take years to recover. At the end of the year when the best photographs of 2010 are revealed, the photos of Haiti, that make us weep today, will be nearly forgotten. By then they will be old news, eleven and a half months removed from the headlines. We’ll think, “Oh right, I remember that.” And then we will scroll down to the next photo.

Postman calls the world brought about and fostered by television a “peek-a-boo world” “where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.”

And isn’t that what the Haiti earthquake is for most of us? It is entertainment. That sounds cold but it is exactly the case. If we turn on the television and watch those images and do nothing about it before moving on to the next news item, have we not merely been entertained?

In one regard I have to turn from Postman. Postman, though he knew his Bible well, was not a Christian and did not understand the power of prayer. Though we may be impotent to act, to actually go to Haiti and give aid, we can ask God to accomplish his purposes, even through so devastating a situation. We can pray for the nation and its people. We should pray for them, even, and especially for brothers in sisters in Christ who live in that country. We should pray that as people from around the world head to Haiti to feed the hungry and heal the sick, that they would take the gospel with them. And we can consider giving financially to credible organizations that will be involved in relief efforts (such as Compassion). It turns out that we are not entirely impotent in the aftermath of this great disaster.

If I ever attain any meaningful level of success in this bizarre, online world, I’m quite sure I’ll owe it all to LeechBlock. It’s a little tool I found about six months ago and I can say without a trace of exaggeration that it changed my life. There was a time that I was unable to keep myself from wasting vast amounts of time on the internet. Often it was subconscious; I would suddenly become aware that I had stopped working and started surfing. I had inadvertently left behind what I had been doing and was checking in at Facebook or Twitter or any one of these other time-sucking distractions. Thanks to LeechBlock, those days are over.

LeechBlock is an add-on for Firefox (which is the most commonly-used web browser after Internet Explorer and one that is superior to it in almost every way). Firefox allows anybody to create extensions for their browser—extensions that will in some way extend and expand its functionality. LeechBlock is just such a tool. It is the brainchild of James Anderson who just happens to be an assistant professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte.

The premise is simple. It is meant to be an external form of self-control for those of us who do not have sufficient self-control in and of ourselves. Here is what James says about it: “LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool: an extension for the Firefox web browser designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. (You know: the ones that rhyme with ‘Blue Cube’, ‘Pie Face’, ‘Space Hook’, ‘Hash Pot’, ‘Sticky Media’, and the like.) All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.”

It is not meant to replace tools that offer parental controls and will not keep you from stumbling across nasty sites on the Net. That is not its purpose. What it will do, though, is allow you to compile a list of the sites that suck away the minutes and hours of your day and choose the times during which you will be blocked from those sites. So in my case I listed Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Drudge Report and others like them and set the program to block these from 9 to noon and 1 to 5. That gives me a window to check in while I eat my lunch but otherwise I have no access to these sites during the working day. And that has proven a huge blessing.

I learned two things. First, I learned that I spent far more time on these sites than I would have thought. Or, perhaps more properly, I learned that I visited them many more times every day than I would have imagined. The amount of times LeechBlock had to intervene and scold me was both shocking and humiliating. Second, I learned that these sites really were sucking my time away from me. As soon as I installed LeechBlock it was like I added a couple of hours to my day. Not only did my productivity increase but so did my spirit. I had known that I was wasting vast amounts of time but had not had the self-control to stop myself; I found it very depressing and carried it like a great burden. It was a great relief to me to find that self-control, even if it took a Firefox add-on to do so.

One of the great features of LeechBlock is it allows you to create a custom message that appears when you attempt to visit one of the sites you’ve blocked. In my case I made one that reminded me of the value of time. You can see it here (though I shrank it a bit here—if you want it, let me know and I’ll email it to you):

Now I know that not everyone needs a tool like this one. But I can testify that there are others who do and I am among them. I’ve recommended LeechBlock to friends and they’ve told me how much they’ve benefited from it as well. So I’m not alone! If you are in need of an external source of self-control, consider it. It may just change your life too. You can learn more about it and download it here.

Earlier this year I was asked to prepare a talk on families and technology. I was to speak to a group of adults, mostly parents of teenagers, and address issues related to digital technology. I was pleased with the challenge and was reasonably happy with the final result. As I prepared that talk I began to think about the role of parents in the media consumption of their children. I turned to the Bible and found three biblical description that I found helpful in describing how they are to serve their children: teachers, watchmen and gatekeepers.

Teachers
You are familiar, I’m sure, with the words of Jesus in Matthew 23 where we find some of his strongest “woes.” “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” There is an exhortation here to the listeners to ensure that they do not fall into the temptation to be like those whitewashed tombs, sparkling and clean on the outside but actually full of death and decay. They are not to make a show of being clean on the outside while remaining a mess on the inside. An application for us today is that we are to know and remember that the eye of God is upon us at all times. Though new technologies give us unparalleled opportunities to do deeds in secret, we cannot ever escape the gaze of God.

These exhortations apply to those of us who are adults and parents. They apply to us especially in this role. We know the words of James 3:1: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” What applies to teachers applies to parents, the most important teachers our children will ever have. In our position of teaching and authority, we will be judged more harshly. We are responsible before God to ensure that we are modeling godly wisdom and discernment in our use of such technologies. How many fathers would be devastated to find their sons looking at Internet pornography even while dad knows that his computer is stuffed full of the same filth? How many mothers wish their children would stop spending so much time using the PlayStation even while mom spends the national average of 28 hours per week in front of the television (which means, mom, that by the time you are 65 you will have spent 9 years in front of the tube).

We are to be teachers, leading our children to greater wisdom through the wisdom that we have been given. We do not need to spend much time in Scripture to see how the Bible compares age with youth. Time and again the Bible tells us that youth is to be regarded with suspicion, age with respect. These verses are typical of Solomon’s proverbs: “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him (Proverbs 22:15).” Compare that with Proverbs 16:31 which tells us that “Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.” “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die (Proverbs 23:13).” “The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother (Proverbs 29:15).” Leviticus 19:32 says “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.” God even commanded that his people were to stand in the presence of the elderly to render to them the honor due. Perhaps one of the clearest endorsements of God’s commands towards the aged comes from Job 12:12. “Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days.”

The job of a parent comes into focus when we consider that the Bible tells us our children are foolish, in desperate need of discipline and in desperate need of both wisdom and discernment. If Proverbs does not teach us that, it teaches us nothing! Meanwhile, our task as parents is to lead and guide our child from foolishness into wisdom. Without our leading, our guidance, they will use technology foolishly and inevitably make foolish decisions about media.

Watchmen
Ezekiel 33:6 offers an important warning: “But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.” While we have to grant that this is a specific law given at a specific time, it is applicable even to us today. As parents, God has appointed us as the watchmen of our families. We stand at the gates of the home and at the gates of our children’s hearts. Like watchmen, we need to be vigilant, knowing what to look for and where to look for it. It is our job, as watchmen, to be aware of what technology our children are encountering. It is our task to watch, to warn, to protect. And this is exactly what a watchman would do.

He would watch to see if an enemy was advancing against his city. He would be focused outward, looking for the approach of anything that posed a danger. As a watchman, he needed to be constantly vigilant, never sleeping at his watch, never growing tired or distracted or disinterested. And like this, we are responsible before God to be vigilant, looking out for the safety of the families we guard.

This is where Ezekiel’s warning gets especially serious. The watchman was not just to watch but was also to warn. If he saw that the enemy was coming, he could not simply watch the advance while resting his head on his hands. Neither would his lack of watchfulness serve as an excuse. His life was tied directly to the lives of the people he protected. If an enemy was able to sneak past the watchman, it is the watchman who would be held directly responsible. In the same way we, as parents, are responsible for warning our children against what might harm them. This may mean warning them against specific dangers such as the addictive quality of the pornography that is so easily shared and viewed on a cell phone, or it may mean warning them of the remarkable power and privilege that is theirs simply by virtue of having that phone.

Of course if an enemy was advancing against the city, the watchman would not run home and go to bed, content that his task was done. No, he was a soldier and would be involved in the battle. He had to protect his city. As a defender of the wall, he might be the first person to wade into the battle. He would watch, he would warn, but he would also protect his city and its people. Likewise, it is our task to protect our children—to fight for them (and yes, I know this often means fighting with them!).

Gatekeepers
Finally, we are the gatekeepers of the family. We read about gatekeepers often in the Old Testament and usually in relation to the temple. The gatekeepers were assigned to the entrances to the temple and their task was simple—they had to keep out whoever or whatever was unclean. Like the watchmen, they would assume at least some of the responsibility were they to allow into the temple a person or even an animal that was forbidden.

Our task as the families’ gatekeeper is to guard the entrance to our children’s hearts. There are more entrances to their hearts than ever before. We need to be aware of what is on the television screens they watch, what they are writing about and taking pictures of when they use their cell phones and what they are downloading while on the web. We stand between them and the world as a gatekeeper stands between the temple and the crowds.

The Bible tells us that our children are foolish! Today we give them incredibly powerful tools and often simply trust them to handle them in a responsible way. It’s like giving a baby a set of power tools to play with and trusting him not to cut off his hands! Our children need us to teach them to use technology wisely. Our children need us to shepherd them in their use of technology, teaching them to seek wisdom and apply discernment to their use of any technology.

I’ve been enjoying writing these little articles titled “Don’t Take Your iPod to Church.” I’ll be the first to admit that I am overstating my case a little bit and even being deliberately vague at times. But through it all I’m seeing some great discussion and am being asked lots of interesting questions. It may be frustrating to everyone else, but I’m enjoying it, at the very least! Let’s press on.

In a previous article I introduced Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and their contribution to my thinking on technology. From McLuhan we learn that we cannot neatly separate the medium from the message and from Postman, an interpreter of McLuhan, we learn that every medium carries with it some kind of a worldview—that every medium carries with it “a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing more than another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.” Also from Postman we learn the simple truth that “a technology does what it was created to do.” Over time we will learn what it is that a technology was created to do; rarely do we know in advance how a technology will play out. We tend to be immediately positive about technological innovation, but from these two men we learn that there ought to be a certain caution, a hesitation that causes us to look before we leap, to think before we wholeheartedly embrace a new technology—like reading the Bible on an iPod.

So let’s look today at why reading the Bible on an iPod is not the same as reading it in print. I want to look at just two points: linearity and distraction. I’ll grant that there is much more than could be said and that my thinking in this area is undoubtedly underdeveloped. I am thinking these things through as I write them. So take this for what it is.

There is a kind of linearity in a book that is not present in most other media. This is one of the greatest advantages of books and undoubtedly one of the reasons God had Scripture committed to books (and before that scrolls and before that memory). In a book, we read from beginning to end, progressing from introduction to conclusion, from thesis to the proving of that thesis, from explanation to application. We know this is the case with a book—a book amplifies this sense, this skill, of following and grasping a linear argument. This has been one of the most common arguments against using television as a learning medium; though it can display facts, it does so in a non-linear way. The worldview wrapped up in television is one that is non-logical, non-linear. The same is true of electronic media.

Hypertext, text in a digital format, is a double-edged sword. Text in a digital environment is inherently non-linear because it is inherently interactive. Simply compare a printed Encyclopedia Britannica of old to Wikipedia of today for a stark contrast. A person reading the encyclopedia reads an entry from beginning to end, undistracted, focused on just the topic at hand. A person reading Wikipedia is constantly faced with bright blue text. Not only is the color a distraction but the reader knows that each highlighted word links to a new article. Gone is the linearity of a book and gone is the lack of distraction. You, like me, undoubtedly read a few words or a few paragraphs, before being carried away by clicking one of those blue links that demands your attention.

Reading the Bible in electronic format makes it easy to chase down cross-references, to read notes related to the content, to find word definitions and so on. But all of this is at the cost of the natural, God-given flow of the text. As we use our iPods in place of our Bibles, we begin to understand Scripture as we do Wikipedia, a text suited more to browsing than deep study. We begin to feel the Bible is interactive, that it is more for skimming, for following trails from A to B to Z than for deep study or analysis. This is all wrapped up in the very worldview of the electronic device.

At the same time, the ease of accessing the Bible using hypertext causes us, I think, to view accessing information, rather than applying information, as the noble end (see part 1.5 for more on this).

All of this to say that a book is inherently a better medium for linear study of a linear text.

And this brings us to distraction.

An iPod or iPhone or Palm or Blackberry or whatever electronic device you use to read Scripture is not a devotional medium, it is not a medium used for study or deep reflection. It is an entertainment medium or a productivity medium (or both). When I use my phone, I use it partially for entertainment and partially for business (though I like to convince myself that it is more business than entertainment). My iPod is 95% entertainment with just a small amount of productivity involved if I need to use it to check emails while I’m out and about. So even if I read Scripture on my iPod, I am reading it using an entertainment medium. Thus I am reading it in the context of entertainment. I like to think that my mind can easily make this jump, that I can use it for entertainment in one moment and devotion in the next. But I may be giving my mind too much credit (at least if Postman and McLuhan are to be believed). Can my mind, then, focus and study the text as it does when I read from a book? Or am I inadvertently viewing reading Scripture as a form of business or entertainment?

Furthermore, iPods and iPhones and all the rest of these devices are inherently distracting. They are made to be distracting, tying into one small device a variety of functions that are in constant competition with one another. The iPhone commercials teach us as much, showing a person browsing the internet and then seamlessly receiving a phone call. Multifunction is their very function and we cannot expect to escape that by using ours for a different purpose. Even when reading the Bible, we might at any moment receive a text message or phone call or a calendar notification or some other kind of an audio or visual stimulus. All the while we have information about battery life and data reception and such on the screen before us, distracting us. We cannot sit back and relax and read using an iPhone because we know that, at any moment, we might (and probably will) be distracted. The medium contradicts the message.

My Bible never rings; it never buzzes or beeps or shows up with sudden calendar notifications. It simply shows me the words given by God in a medium that is inherently undistracting.

All of this to say that a book is inherently a better medium for undistracted study of a life-changing text.

I’m done for now. Have at it.

Last Friday I encouraged you not to take your iPod to church. Not surprisingly, this generated a bit of discussion both at the blog and across some other social media (Twitter, Facebook, and so on). It’s a good discussion to have, I think. I realize that I am probably overstating my case just a little bit, but this is deliberate. I want to get people thinking about this issue. I offer special thanks to people who offered such incisive, head-in-the-sand feedback as this: “Maybe @challies should worry about people who don’t bring any type of Bible to church instead of chiding technology” or “Why don’t we just go back to scrolls and the original languages, while we’re at it?” I guess it’s not worth responding to some comments.

I was quite far into a second article when I went found myself on a rather lengthy rabbit trail, writing about our love of information. Today we have unparalleled access to vast quantities of information to the point that we are nearly drowning in it. Yet we hoard it almost compulsively. So let’s call today’s article Don’t Take Your iPod to Church! (Part 1.5). It is a bit of an aside, but an important and relevant one, I think. We’ll start it this way…

I know a lot about my wife. I know what she likes to wear around the house, what she likes to wear to church and what she likes to wear when we go out for dinner. I know what she likes to eat and what she hates to eat. I know what books she likes to read, what movies she likes to watch, what web sites she likes to browse. I have all of this accumulated knowledge about my wife. But I think I could have this same level of knowledge about whoever the latest Hollywood heartthrob happens to be. This is exactly the kind of knowledge that you might find in those newspapers and magazines that clutter the checkouts at the grocery stores and it is the kind of knowledge that I might find on the hundreds of gossip blogs that pollute the internet.

I also have knowledge of my wife, knowledge that goes far beyond the facts of preferences, likes, dislikes, hobbies. I have an intense and intimate knowledge of my wife—a kind of knowledge shared by no one else in the world. She and I enjoy intimacy that transcends mere bits of information.

A trend we see today through today’s digital technology is the exaltation of this kind of knowledge, cold facts, at the expense of more intimate knowledge. This is true, I’m convinced, when we take our iPods to church. Quentin Schultze says that we have become like tourists who are so enamored by our mode of transportation that we cruise through nation after nation largely indifferent to the people and the cultures around us. We have our passports filled with the little stamps telling people just how many places we’ve been, but what is the purpose of being in places if we have not experienced them? And what is the purpose of knowing people if we do not care to know them on anything more than a surface level? The trend today is toward these fleeting, surface-level interactions.

We see this in a technology like Facebook. It is why I may have 1600 Facebook friends but no real face-to-face friends. It is why Facebook measures friendships in quantity, not in quality. And this, I think, is why so many of us love Facebook. It is a conduit for seemingly endless knowledge of the facts of the lives of our friends and families. We can log on to Facebook and at any time access a myriad of facts about our friends: what they are doing at that moment and what they have done update-by-update since they first joined; we can see who their friends are, what movies they enjoy, what books they read (or don’t read), what blogs they like, where they were born, what networks and groups they belong to, and on and on. We learn all these facts about them, even if we do not know them. These facts bring us no closer to knowledge of them—of who they really are. We have hundreds of people flitting around on the edges of our lives, but perhaps fewer than ever with whom are intimately involved. After a while we find real friendship too much, too terrifying, too intimate. Instead we reveal private details to all who will listen, almost as if those private details need to be known by someone.

But the wise observer might ask, if I have 1600 friends, why am I so lonely? Shouldn’t at least one of those 1600 friends be available when I need help painting my living room?

This trend manifests itself in other ways. We are increasingly moving knowledge to the cloud and relying on knowledge that exists in the cloud. The cloud, of course, is that sum of knowledge, or is it information?, that exists “out there.” When you just need to know what is in that bottle of pills you left in the closet and type its name into Google, you are accessing the cloud. It is convenient, to be sure. But it is encouraging us to emphasize the skill of accessing in favor of the skills of knowing and understanding. Hence we are becoming people who have little knowledge in our minds but great knowledge available with a few taps of our thumbs. And then we might ask, if we have little knowledge in our minds, how much can we have in our hearts? What use is memorizing Scripture if we can access our favorite translation faster than we begin to recite it. Why expend effort in getting the Bible into our hearts and minds if we already have it in our pockets?

The trend thus causes us to care more about accessing information that will make our lives immediately easier, that will fix our little problems, than the morality of what we do with that information. The information we access thus has no moral purpose, but instead a purely practical purpose. I need to know what the lyric is for this song, but I am not concerned about the fact that I have downloaded it illegally. This technology allows us to manipulate the world so we can get what we want and when we want it. Students increasingly see study as a means to getting good grades and making parents and teachers happy, but not as a means of acquiring knowledge that will impact their lives and benefit society. So we download essays from the internet, caring nothing of the morality of doing so or of the missed opportunity to actually know something. Says Quentin Schulze, “To know is to leverage information to accomplish instrumental goals.” (Schultze 33) Heart knowledge is downplayed in favor of using information to get what we want, now. What happens when we regard our friends in such ways? Our spouses? Our God?

Today’s digital technology is unparalleled in history as a means of communicating with others and as a means of sharing information. For this we ought to be grateful. Yet at the same time it may just be changing how we understand, perceive and gather information. We must exercise great caution that we do not lose knowledge of with our newfound ability to find knowledge about. I don’t think I even need to tell you how today’s generation differs in regard to past generations when it comes to their level of knowledge of history, language, Scipture and just about everything else. We may know how to do more, but we do not necessarily know more.

In a future article (part 2.0) I’ll return more pointedly to issues regarding digital technology and Scripture.