Theoblogical

About 2 and a half years ago, when I learned that I had only 3 months
more at my position as Web developer with United Methodist Communications,
I applied with another UMC agency for a “Social Media Director” position.
Despite my packed resume dating back to 1991  – focusing on everything
from which Social Media is derived today, back to its roots (like pre-
Web, online communities such as Ecunet, an ecumenical, 1980′s -founded
conferencing system accessed by dial up), Web work in e-commerce, content
management, online community evangelization (meaning attempting to run
“PR” for the idea that church organizations can and should always be
building an ecosystem of Web communities around EVERYTHING (“Social Media
predecessors” or early evolutionary incarnations of Social Media), and
constant immersion in the constant flow of new Web standards, tools, and
possibilities – despite all that,  I never even received a call or an indicator
that there was an interest in what my experience meant for them.

Despite this 20 years of experience, and despite that it was all in the
context of and BECAUSE of the church that I was constantly engaged in
looking at the present and possible future of the Web and its tools, Web
shops in denominational agencies seem to be of the mind that “Development
is development” and unrelated to theological issues or in need of
theological forethought or “theology of databases”. Data , for the
church, should and MUST BE deeply theological. It goes back to the
concept of “Social Graph” introduced by Facebook. For Facebook, the
“graph” seems to be giving a layman’s perspective of the relational
database. One set of data is linked together sets of data by keys. It’s
all ONE database, linked together by users, types of users, their
“interests” and “locations” and “Likes”. The latest iteration “Social
Search” (to which I have still not been granted access), is a further
opening of that data to users to selective filters by user.

I’ve been writing about this for three or four years, and I’ve had
exactly ONE person exhibit any kind of technical or faint theological
interest. Nobody in church communications, nobody in IT; all I hear is
just “crickets”.

Where does the “old” come in here? Well, its that problem with how
“Social Media” is taken to mean  “Young people are going to be the best at this”. That itself is WRONG. While its true that this is true of the overall population,  it is NOT true than any given young person will understand and converse with social media as well as any given “older person”.  And this is even more of a problem when it comes to theologically aware institutions/organizations,  since theological institutions are supposedly making  conscious efforts to be a communal effort;  open to the knowledge carried about by its experienced members,  as well as to the insights of the young.  Even more crucial is the insight of the development of the “hyperconnected” expectations of the human mind as a result of new communications technologies.  Those who have been paying attention,  and being simultaneously affected by those changes as well,  and seeing “changes” through lenses “fine tuned” to see the spiritual/social/psychological/cultural affects and effects will have invaluable insight into what tools show most promise in leveraging our ecclesial maturing.  In other words,  it is a grievous oversight and naivete to miss ANY of this.  Why is it that church organizations don’t think it is even an issue that its development visions for the Web and Social Media would need theological insight?

Reading a few Jeff Jarvis articles in Medium.com.   Heard him talk about this on This Week in Google yesterday.  Really good show yesterday.  They talked about Google Glasses, too.

The article about Googley Restaurants was fun.  The quote below was one that was an idea also put  forward by Rheingold in Net Smart.

Serve your niche instead of the mass. Do what you do best.

The Googley restaurant — The 21st Century Restaurant — Medium

(BTW, I just clicked on my Windows Live Writer bookmarklet for the first time in ages.  They don’t seem to have updated this lately.  I should go look.)

Listening to some radio Group of DJs talk about their blogging and lack of it,  and how “Facebook has taken over” ,  and just shaking my head.  Fist ,  it isnt Facebook ,  but Twitter (for me).  Which is frustrating,  because I am well aware of how far Twitter falls short of providing the same value that blogging has.  But what makes this frustration worse is that I myslef have allowed my “other Social Media” to bring my blogging to a slow drip.  The complaints I have just go out over Twitter and Facebook,  and assuage my need to rant for which blogging formerly provided the channel.   I’ve got to find a means of discipline to keep my blogging channel alive and passionate.  I don’t want to get myself accustomed to posting all shorter, and oftentimes inevitably pithier stuff.  I enjoy writing,  and don’t want my skills to atrophy.

I also have a Tumblr blog,  which also works as a channel to post the reactions that I can’t fit into  a Twitter post.  I should look at some tools to jump over  to WordPress as easily as I can to Tumblr.  That “ShareAHolic bookmark is what I had been using to sling a post over onto Tumblr,  and the WordPress connector there has some problems I need to address.

I put that in quotes,  because the ecosystem which blogging essentially launched (which has come to be known as “Social Media”),  has garnered the lion’s share of my attention and energy.  Thus,  I have now over 13,000 tweets,  which I have begun to seek “import” methods to suck all those back out of Twitter into data which I control better (aka WordPress Data).  Twitter Tools latest version uses Custom Post Types (creates a “Tweets” type),  and I ran the “Download Tweets” function there,  which had been doing some downloading,  but I had not become aware of where those tweets were going.  I now know they were collected into “Tweets” Custom post types.  But thus far,  it seems to be stuck at just over half way (7177) of my now 13,004.  I am still investigating that.  I understand that it is supposed to do downloading in the background very slowly,  but nothing has changed in the past week.

I am intrigued with this “recovery” of my Tweet data.  I am also keenly aware that I want all the “incoming tweets” like @mentions and Direct Messages.  I am keenly interested in capturing tweets not only for my own pursuits,  but also for the Social Media job I have for which  I am in the process of proposing new projects that will increase my development hours. Having my creative juices being beckoned once again is obviously a very healthy thing to have happen to my work career.

Since I have long been an evangelist for the Blogging format,  and have frequently bemoaned some of the perceived effects of Twitter and “micro-bllogging” platforms (like less writing of lengthier  articulations of ideas),  I hope to feed the Micro-blogging energy of Twitter back into the mix and generate more thinking (and the exercise of writing about that thinking)  via the blog medium – specifically WordPress,  and to some extent,  a more extensive use of Tumblr,  which is easily invoked from the various “Share” bookmarklets.

And in blogging,  I invariably end up ranting (hopefully, in a good way)  about my sense of where the church is in regards to its fullest and most effective use of Social Media,  and its theological attentiveness to the tools and their effects.

Watching a History Channel documentary “Mankind: the Story of All of Us”,  I was attracted because it was giving a major place (as most histories do)  to religion.  But the voice they chose to “describe” for us “what Christians believe” was someone I had to look up.  It wasn’t anyone who is a scholar of Christianity that I could see.

She describes Christianity as a religion that says that evil will get what it deserves in an afterlife.  Wow.  My favorite emphasis in theology (sarcasm, rolling eyes) And this is the religion that Empires saw as a threat?  This is an inane description of those attempting to describe it,  and it seems inconceivable that so many smart people can really believe that this is what really threatened empires.  No,  what threatened them was the striving for better living that called into question the ideology and ultimate values of the state and of the “ways of the world”;  of the drive to conquer and dominate and the strategies of the powerful to control the rest.

*I was later to find it was Kara Cooney,  who is described as an “Egyptologist”,  and whose studies are dominated by studies of the Egyptian death rituals.   This helped explain why she chose to focus on the “Christian belief” in the afterlife.  But it has long been an irritation to me that this is perceived  to be a central Christian belief.

Why don’t they get any theologians of any sort  to help them see that these people don’t go to their deaths “for an idea”,  but on behalf of a way of life; a striving for a better life not in som abstract “hereafter”.but in the now,  or in the forseeable future.  Cooney,  it turns out,  is an Egyptologist.   Doesn’t seem  to have any background at all in history /sociology/philosophy/theology to enable her to have credible reasons for “what they believe” or “why they believe it”.  I’m so  tired of the focus on  “life after death thing” as a defining theology.

The idea  that this religion of Christianity spread as “an idea” is a typical dismissal of those unaware of its significance as a way of life that is in contrast to the conquest, domination, materialism, violence-defended empire that forwards its own “religion/theology/ideology” and gleefully accepts “otherworldly” faiths  that can easily be convinced to heed the values of the empire and “keep ideas” as “inward treasures” and “perspectives” that do not challenge them to stand or live in opposition to competing “ways of life”.

I first noticed this in the movie “Peter and Paul”,  which was well done,  but lacked a convincing analaysis of why Paul was seen as a threat.  Their answer was that Caesar was jealous that Paul had a following.  What made him go from “let them have him”  to having him put to death?  We’re never given any credible POLITICAL reason for the perceived threat.  Rome would not care about some sect that harbored “ideas” about “afterlife” and some abstract “challenge” to the might of Rome.   No,  it wasn’t a philosophical/mind challenge of IDEAS,  but a challenge to ways of life.  Challenges to oppression that was “required” by the ruling elite. To question that domination ideology as a “greater good”  was to invite violent reprisal.

So many “scholars of religion” make the mistake of projecting their image of religion gained from “domesticated faiths of established empires”  onto the faith utterings and stories of people who found a way of life that overcame and challenged oppression,  and interpret them as “otherwordly” because this is what empires want them to be;  non-threatening, gnostic opiates of the mind to quell the ambitions of those who want to be free.

Why is it always “AFTER-life” that is seen to be the thing to which we are striving?  Seems more likely that it is more like “OTHER-world”;  “OTHER-realities”;  the mystery.  Perhaps it  is the ultimacy of the experience  of  death;  that which  brings us  to the precipe of the ultimate  mysteries,  that associates death with the “OTHER” thing;  the “NEXT” or “AFTER” since it is at death’s door  that many visions are had.

These “wars or religion” are fought under the rubric of “ideas” and “theology” but are really those of conquest of ways of life.  In the case of the Crusades, the “Western/European” over that of “Nomad/NorthAfrican/Arab”.  It enables the theological demonization of the “foreign” “savage” way of life.

Religion wielded as a tool in the hands of empires has proven to be deadly.  But this is the empire’s toolbox.  It is not the faithful who take up the sword against the evil identified by the empire,  for that is where the empire wins.  The world has successfully forwarded the myth of fighting violence with violence.  Had Jesus raised up an army and fought violence with violence and “God took him to military victory”,  then it we don’t have what we have in the gospel: a rejection of the cycle;  we have yet another iteration of the myth that only endless violence will quell violence;  or that we will have “a war to end all wars” .

Afterthought:  Even with the above theological reflection,  the production and enactments are well done.  It was just some of the narrative assesments where I had some reactions.  I did like the stories of discoveries of various cures,  and the technological enabling of significant stories getting out (as in the Civil Rights movement being violently confronted in Selma)