The Web We Lost

Saw this article about The Web We Lost.

It underscores that the technology we design comes with assumptions.  The World Wide Web was built around certain assumptions that our current crop of social media services don't always share.  There's good and bad to that, but more essentially the underlying philosophy will come out.

Moral dimensions of technology companies

Yes, I'm resurrecting this blog. Here are two articles/posts regarding the moral dimensions of a technology company.
Travis Shrugged

No I still don't want to work for Google

 Take the time to read them and think about the goals and philosophy of the companies making all these techie-gadget-doodads and how that will inevitably be infused into their products.

More Universal Church Tech Trends

As a follow-up to a recent post on technology trends in church, I saw this list of top 5 technologies that will shape the church by John Dyer. I like this one better as he gets at more universal technologies and asks questions about how they impact our life and/or worship.

Thoughtful Points on Tech from Turkle

The Perils of Digital Technology. Go have a read - some good thoughts on the nature of digital technology and how we (don't) thoughtfully approach it.

Non-Universal Church Tech Trends

Take a look at this list of technology trends for churches in the coming year. Some thoughts. First, there's a focus on making more effective use of digital media for higher quality presentation. Well and good as I'm all for excellence in our labors, both in and outside the church. But where is the discussion of how this makes the mission of the church (making disciples) more effective? I'm not saying it does or doesn't, but the author assumes it without making the connection here. A second thought: this list seems more focused on fairly large churches. Item 3 mentions "media departments" at churches; item 7 referring to digital signage leans this way as well. I've been a member at four churches since I've been married. I suppose one of those had a media department - it consisted of a computer geek that ran the website and another guy that did most of the A/V work. The other three are too small to even need such a thing. I've never been in a church that needed digital signage as the buildings are just too small to even need it. Perhaps the author's blog is targeted to these larger churches, but some mention of trends for smaller churches would be helpful. Certainly some points are helpful for all churches, but there are a wide variety of sizes and keeping that in mind could have made a more universally applicable list. (HT: The Aquilla Report)

Texting Culture

A picture may be worth a thousand words. Here's a thought on our texting culture that is both funny and...perhaps close to reality?

If you know the original source, let me know and I'll give credit.

Christmas Technology

Greetings and welcome back. I hope all both of you readers had a great Christmas and New Year's celebration. One thing this blog helps me with is to think through the implications of technology from a Christian worldview. This came up in my mind as I was in Toys R Us a few days before Christmas. Besides the obvious foolishness of even being there, something stood out to me: how much electronics are built in to toys. There was a whole aisle called something like "preschool learning" that was basically a bunch of simple computers. The whole thing was screens and buttons. And it didn't end there. So many other toys for toddlers make sounds & music, and some even start making noise after they've been ignored for a short period of time. On the one hand, we do live in a technology saturated culture and helping children navigate that at an early age is good. On the other, I fear teaching them (and wiring their brains) so that they expect to be entertained and have stimulation come to them rather than develop their own creative play. Lydia's favorite toys so far this year are her My Little Pony figures. We can have all sorts of adventures we just make up, and they don't chirp or buzz at us to get our attention. Stephen has some new Lego sets, obviously a good creative outlet. I'm not against computer games (and may get Stephen one of his own soon) but I believe it's something to be thoughtful about; at least making sure they're not just getting passive entertainment devices.