Sunday, February 13, 2011
Egypt
MSNBC, newspapers and other news sources are headlining the Egyptian shouts of We are free! We know that the crowds in the square believe this, but how does the rest of the population feel? Many are more worried today than they have been in decades. Just how free are the people? At one moment they were fairly free from outside influences, sources that would turn them into an Islamic state and then turn their aim towards Israel. That freedom is considerably lessened. There was some freedom for other faiths to worship but that may erode quickly. They were free to struggle along with the rest of the world during this economic upheaval but they may eventually wish they could turn back the hands of the clock and their young men may wind up dying on battlefields. Freedom comes at a price and the crowds demanded freedom right then without even looking at the price tag. As for our involvement, we abandoned yet another ally and endangered a second and what did we get for it... favorable headlines, the holy grail of the political animal. The Muslim Brotherhood will play Egypt like they played our White House and are now in a better position to win, for they are patient and brutal. The Russian Revolution of February, 1917 had similarities to today's Egypt. Wages were down and food prices were rising. Mass demonstrations erupted. The Tsar, Nicholas II, abdicated in March. The provisional government was moderate in many ways but Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia in April and the minority Bolsheviks rallied. The Bolshevik Revolution would follow. The headlines of the New York Times on November 9, 1917 were Revolutionists seize Petrograd; Kerensky flees. A pledge was given by the Bolsheviks to seek an immediate democratic peace with Germany in the then current world war. The Bolsheviks were unpopular and as the New York Times reported from those fleeing Russia, they were "not 1%, of the total population in Moscow, and all Russia outside of Petrograd, would stand together (against the Bolsheviks.)" Another quote from the same paper described the fleeing provisional leader this way "the excellence of Kerensky's motives and ideals is recognized, but he is too gentle a man...it has been shown that the policy of mildness with the Bolsheviks does not pay." In my blog of March 3, 2009 I related how I happened to be in Paraguay one week after a revolution occurred there and that the following year (1989) was one of one revolution and reform movement after another, some for good and some not. I wrote that "people's emotions spread like the wave at a sports stadium." The blog was a critique of the Obama's administration and its refusal to consider consequences or look beyond political implications. There is euphoria in our media today... and Lady Gaga showed up at the Grammy's in an egg, presumably to hatch before the show.....life is good. Biblical end-times prophesy took off like a rocket in the early 70s with Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth and continued into this century with Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series. Events in Israel were so astounding, particularly the capture of Jerusalem in 1967, that this was bound to happen, and the church became inundated with date-setters and detailed military logistics of what was just ahead. Much of the church reacted to this by treating biblical prophesy as leprous but I suspect that today, many see what is happening around the world, in the push for a one-world government needing only a crisis for fulfillment, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to volatile states run by madmen, in the new paradigm of truths being relative and in ominous power of the Internet on the passions of man, not to mention what science reveals to us about our changing earth and of cosmic influences, and find themselves meditating deeply, more and more, upon biblical prophesy and at least wonder ...what if. Maybe this is the way that it should be. That Jesus would be at the very doorstep of His return, and believers would be oblivious to what was ahead is untenable from what the Bible says. That we would have an advance itinerary and a time frame is also untenable. An extreme soberness is what is called for today, in fact at all times, for we know not what a day will bring. Martin Luther said that he would plant a tree if he knew for certain that Jesus was returning the next day. My tree is a hope that God would commission His Holy Spirit to move across the American landscape one more time, for no ideology, no scientific evidence to refute His existence, no madman or postmodern paradigm of intellectual chaos can, should God will to constrain it, deny a people returning to Him. Last days prophesy is not leprous, in fact it is a blessing as Revelation 1:3 states "Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophesy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near." but it is toxic if abused. If not abused it is a shining ray of glory into God's majesty, a source of strength, and it overflows with hope, for God truly is in control! There is not a day that passes where newspapers do not relate the pain and suffering undergone by people all over this world, and these stories pain those readers who also know that all suffering will end only after Christ returns in judgement to a violent world. His Second Coming should be our hope along with confidence that it will be, sooner or later, in His perfect timing. True freedom comes when one has been ripped, not out of the clutches of a dictator, but of Satan's, and but for the embattled Christian in Egypt who may be looking for Christ's coming more than we do, there may be more freedom as the world sees it, but far less security.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Mouse That Roared
Disturbing portrait of the future is one of the blurb descriptions on the back cover of Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Turkle is an M.I.T. professor and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her latest book is, in effect, the third of a trilogy and she has researched this subject for twenty years. She writes that we are living parallel lives in a virtual world and that her research shows that too many people find their online life more satisfying than their actual lives and this might be leading to fully networked lives.
She explores two avenues in the book. The first being personal robotics and the second social networking. Kevin Kelly, in his book What Technology Wants, recently reviewed here, alluded to technology as being a living organism in itself. Turkle adds the descriptive seductive. We are fearful of intimacy, she writes, in a way that keeps us just far enough away from others to keep us comfortable.
My interest in this book is in the social networking aspect of it. My concern is that a nation, America, about to collapse from ignorance within and enemies without, increases the former and motivates the latter through its inane fascination with Facebook and its equally narcissism inducing cousins. Turkle feels that it is necessary to begin with personal robotics. As did Kelly, Turkle reveres Charles Darwin but its probably better that such a book as this comes from a member of Higher Education and Psychology, for Christian books have been giving this caveat on the computer age for decades but their message seldom reaches any further than the customers of a Christian book store or the listeners to Christian radio.
As I read Turkle's comments on her trip to the Galapagos, I smiled and glanced over at my CD player where the soundtrack from Master And Commander, a movie where the Galapagos played no small part, was playing. Half of this book was read in the lobby of a Hilton Hotel as my wife was busy with her own volunteer work for our society while I tag along every January to read. Why is it that urban areas are so...liberal? After four hours of turnpike driving without seeing an Obama bumper sticker, I only had to walk past three cars in the parking garage to see one, and there were two more before I got to the elevators. I sat and watched with fascination, both the lobby dwellers and the street race walkers with phones constantly positioned by the ear. The further one gets from the hustle...and the hustle-bustle of the city, and the closer one gets to the land of Bonanza Steakhouses and Harley Davidson dealerships, the more neurons cease to oscillate in abnormal patterns. People walk faster in the city, smile less, do not make eye contact as often, pat their back pocket for a wallet or look to see that their purse is closed every few minutes and generally try to stay as far away from others as possible. Their magazines tend to be on health, fitness, sport cars, money and astrology whereas the closer one lives to the cornfields, the magazines tend to be on woodworking, sports, quilting, the auto-trader and fraternal veterans organizations. Women's glasses in the city tend to be large and round, magnifying the iris while on state route whatever they.... well just look at a picture of Sarah Palin and you'll see them. City dwellers tend to look out of their work windows and down upon the race walkers on the streets below while in suburbia they look out of their windows up to birds flying in the sky. But enough of my own observations. Have our smart phones become a phantom limb, as the book states, when we don't have them in our possession? I know that mine was and that is part of the reason for the self-imposed six-week moratorium I subjected myself to a few months ago.
Sherry Turkle's research on robots begins with those toys that Americans bought their children beginning in the 90s. Names such as Tamagotchi and Furbie were still in the recesses of my memory. She moves on to robotic dogs for companionship, robotic babies for teaching, and even robotic adults that can serve mankind in everything from babysitting, to care for the elderly, to therapeutics for everyone. "People disappoint, robots do not," she writes. Her research involved children, adolescents and adults while her personal interviews brought her into contact with 250 individuals who opened up to her on their computer usage. One man wants to know why he cannot marry his "female" robot and Turkle supplies a little bit more information than we need on just how these robots can serve.
Turkle is right in that the future is unfolding before us. We have lost the ability to look ahead and to see consequences. She fears for the children who are being weaned on technologies that confuse the virtual with the real. She uses the phrase fully tethered life, and writes that we are too often shattered when unplugged. She sees social networking as our future and I sincerely hope that she is wrong on this. Much of her focus was on Facebook where her first concern is whether our profiles are really who we are or who we want to project ourselves to be. "We can always be elsewhere" through social networking, and "we tend to the net and the net teaches us to need it" she writes. Do we really collect friends or do we simply access others, and only the parts of them we find fulfilling, comforting or amusing.
The author paints a panorama of today's networking and begins with the Internet game Second Life, if you can call it a game. In Second Life one creates one's own avatar and lives a virtual life through it. You don't like the house you live in now? Create your dream home and live there in cyberspace! Work in the profession that you have always wanted to and the best news of all is that there is most likely a female avatar out their looking for a little romance! One problem here is that one is never really sure the gender of the one who they are romancing. Turkle provides case study after case study in many areas of virtual life in cyberspace.
One story that I found very interesting was that of two young women, Robin and Joanne, who had a wonderful friendship in college. Joanne finished her schooling in anthropology and went off to Thailand. She wrote long, detailed emails to Robin every two weeks on her experiences. Robin treasured them and would read and reread them for they were "elegant, detailed, poetic." Joanne returns home only to leave for Thailand again a few years later only this time she puts her experiences online for everyone to see for it is more "efficient." This devastated Robin for this close friendship was now to be shared with anyone who had access to Robin's Facebook page. I have felt this before upon receiving Christmas newsletters. You are happy to hear from a friend but at the same time, removed from being part of a close friendship.Turkle laments that the young view the telephone call as something that does not have to be answered, but the text does; and to one young person, at least, teaching her parents how to text was a big mistake. Turkle writes that people can be "processed" easily on the net. Texting is fast but a voice can only slow you down, and it is harder to live up to your profile in a telephone conversation.
Her warnings though are too mild for she gives far too much credit to the good things social networking can provide. This same distorted tolerance is on display in the media's reporting on the Facebook revolution in Egypt. There may be wars ahead with hundreds of thousands if not millions dead but...democracy must be embraced, and right now! Democracy is a worthy pursuit, a pursuit I have lauded many times. Freedom and liberty are essentials for a healthy society and I have filled these pages with this thought but it is hard to take it serious from those pressuring Egypt to lay bare their defenses against the radical fundamentalist in the name of democracy when they found it hard to rejoice in the Iraqi elections or in the Tea Parties for that matter. Coincidentally, The Drudge Report has, as I write, a report titled Generation Net: The youngsters who prefer their virtual lives to the real world. Sherry Turkle's book is not even mentioned here but the results were the same. "Children are happier online" and "they can be exactly who they want to be." The phrase "divorced from reality" is used.
This nation is running, not to the sound of the trumpet that calls us, but to the roar of the mouse. Whereas it was once said that the pen is mightier than the sword, it may soon be replaced with the logarithm is mightier than the pen.
She explores two avenues in the book. The first being personal robotics and the second social networking. Kevin Kelly, in his book What Technology Wants, recently reviewed here, alluded to technology as being a living organism in itself. Turkle adds the descriptive seductive. We are fearful of intimacy, she writes, in a way that keeps us just far enough away from others to keep us comfortable.
My interest in this book is in the social networking aspect of it. My concern is that a nation, America, about to collapse from ignorance within and enemies without, increases the former and motivates the latter through its inane fascination with Facebook and its equally narcissism inducing cousins. Turkle feels that it is necessary to begin with personal robotics. As did Kelly, Turkle reveres Charles Darwin but its probably better that such a book as this comes from a member of Higher Education and Psychology, for Christian books have been giving this caveat on the computer age for decades but their message seldom reaches any further than the customers of a Christian book store or the listeners to Christian radio.
As I read Turkle's comments on her trip to the Galapagos, I smiled and glanced over at my CD player where the soundtrack from Master And Commander, a movie where the Galapagos played no small part, was playing. Half of this book was read in the lobby of a Hilton Hotel as my wife was busy with her own volunteer work for our society while I tag along every January to read. Why is it that urban areas are so...liberal? After four hours of turnpike driving without seeing an Obama bumper sticker, I only had to walk past three cars in the parking garage to see one, and there were two more before I got to the elevators. I sat and watched with fascination, both the lobby dwellers and the street race walkers with phones constantly positioned by the ear. The further one gets from the hustle...and the hustle-bustle of the city, and the closer one gets to the land of Bonanza Steakhouses and Harley Davidson dealerships, the more neurons cease to oscillate in abnormal patterns. People walk faster in the city, smile less, do not make eye contact as often, pat their back pocket for a wallet or look to see that their purse is closed every few minutes and generally try to stay as far away from others as possible. Their magazines tend to be on health, fitness, sport cars, money and astrology whereas the closer one lives to the cornfields, the magazines tend to be on woodworking, sports, quilting, the auto-trader and fraternal veterans organizations. Women's glasses in the city tend to be large and round, magnifying the iris while on state route whatever they.... well just look at a picture of Sarah Palin and you'll see them. City dwellers tend to look out of their work windows and down upon the race walkers on the streets below while in suburbia they look out of their windows up to birds flying in the sky. But enough of my own observations. Have our smart phones become a phantom limb, as the book states, when we don't have them in our possession? I know that mine was and that is part of the reason for the self-imposed six-week moratorium I subjected myself to a few months ago.
Sherry Turkle's research on robots begins with those toys that Americans bought their children beginning in the 90s. Names such as Tamagotchi and Furbie were still in the recesses of my memory. She moves on to robotic dogs for companionship, robotic babies for teaching, and even robotic adults that can serve mankind in everything from babysitting, to care for the elderly, to therapeutics for everyone. "People disappoint, robots do not," she writes. Her research involved children, adolescents and adults while her personal interviews brought her into contact with 250 individuals who opened up to her on their computer usage. One man wants to know why he cannot marry his "female" robot and Turkle supplies a little bit more information than we need on just how these robots can serve.
Turkle is right in that the future is unfolding before us. We have lost the ability to look ahead and to see consequences. She fears for the children who are being weaned on technologies that confuse the virtual with the real. She uses the phrase fully tethered life, and writes that we are too often shattered when unplugged. She sees social networking as our future and I sincerely hope that she is wrong on this. Much of her focus was on Facebook where her first concern is whether our profiles are really who we are or who we want to project ourselves to be. "We can always be elsewhere" through social networking, and "we tend to the net and the net teaches us to need it" she writes. Do we really collect friends or do we simply access others, and only the parts of them we find fulfilling, comforting or amusing.
The author paints a panorama of today's networking and begins with the Internet game Second Life, if you can call it a game. In Second Life one creates one's own avatar and lives a virtual life through it. You don't like the house you live in now? Create your dream home and live there in cyberspace! Work in the profession that you have always wanted to and the best news of all is that there is most likely a female avatar out their looking for a little romance! One problem here is that one is never really sure the gender of the one who they are romancing. Turkle provides case study after case study in many areas of virtual life in cyberspace.
One story that I found very interesting was that of two young women, Robin and Joanne, who had a wonderful friendship in college. Joanne finished her schooling in anthropology and went off to Thailand. She wrote long, detailed emails to Robin every two weeks on her experiences. Robin treasured them and would read and reread them for they were "elegant, detailed, poetic." Joanne returns home only to leave for Thailand again a few years later only this time she puts her experiences online for everyone to see for it is more "efficient." This devastated Robin for this close friendship was now to be shared with anyone who had access to Robin's Facebook page. I have felt this before upon receiving Christmas newsletters. You are happy to hear from a friend but at the same time, removed from being part of a close friendship.Turkle laments that the young view the telephone call as something that does not have to be answered, but the text does; and to one young person, at least, teaching her parents how to text was a big mistake. Turkle writes that people can be "processed" easily on the net. Texting is fast but a voice can only slow you down, and it is harder to live up to your profile in a telephone conversation.
Her warnings though are too mild for she gives far too much credit to the good things social networking can provide. This same distorted tolerance is on display in the media's reporting on the Facebook revolution in Egypt. There may be wars ahead with hundreds of thousands if not millions dead but...democracy must be embraced, and right now! Democracy is a worthy pursuit, a pursuit I have lauded many times. Freedom and liberty are essentials for a healthy society and I have filled these pages with this thought but it is hard to take it serious from those pressuring Egypt to lay bare their defenses against the radical fundamentalist in the name of democracy when they found it hard to rejoice in the Iraqi elections or in the Tea Parties for that matter. Coincidentally, The Drudge Report has, as I write, a report titled Generation Net: The youngsters who prefer their virtual lives to the real world. Sherry Turkle's book is not even mentioned here but the results were the same. "Children are happier online" and "they can be exactly who they want to be." The phrase "divorced from reality" is used.
This nation is running, not to the sound of the trumpet that calls us, but to the roar of the mouse. Whereas it was once said that the pen is mightier than the sword, it may soon be replaced with the logarithm is mightier than the pen.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Bleak House...or...McRevolution
This world, and its people, are very seldom passive for very long. The dynamic of human beings, living in various nations, ruled by one form of government or another, struggling to feed their families, dealing with famines and other natural disasters, not to mention wars, makes the status quo something that usually lasts only a few decades. This past century alone saw two world wars and various and sundry other wars around the globe. Now that we are in the Information Age people will not be content to plow the farm and raise children. We have seen Communism collapse and lay dormant for two decades and we are in the midst of the effort for a new paradigm for a new America. The formation of a New World Order may yet see its day. I wrote the following blog in December of 2008. In it I noted, very unscientifically, that much of the world, in modern times anyway, seems to move in cycles of approximately 49 years. I'm listening to the 50s on XM right now and as much as I enjoy the music of that period, it was a different world from what began at the beginning of the 60s. We seem to be entering another period right now. The differences? Well, for one we do not value thinking anymore. We simply process information. Quality of thought has been displaced by quantity of files to be accessed when needed. Using logic is like a slow computer, discarded for a Droid. America, previous to today, could be defined by liberty and individual freedoms, the Protestant work ethic and a pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality. Penny candy or a drive-in movie made us smile. Today our egos are obese. We demand to be served. Every material possession is an individual right bestowed on us by Madison Avenue. We offer up our country, our heritage and our future for a mess of pottage given to us by a mainstream media who are the least informed and discerning among us. It is a bleak house we build and only God can intervene to save us from ourselves.
December, 2008
I'm a "boomer," so you may have to try to see through my eyes on this. 1960 does not seem that far away to me. John Kennedy seemed to usher in a new "present age." We can talk about him today and it is not ancient history. Hollywood seemed to change in that year. One particular movie that sticks in my mind is "Strangers When We Meet" with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak. It dealt with suburbanites and marital infidelity. I haven't seen this movie, I'm sure, in 40 or more years but one scene still lingers in my mind. Kirk Douglas was washing his car in his driveway and a neighbor, (Walter Mathau I believe) gave him a critical look because it was a Sunday. The house was of a modern architecture that developed around the time and we still think of this type of house as an embryo of today's modern housing. Mr. Douglas drove around in what might have been a 1960 Thunderbird. Elvis changed dramatically after coming out of the army. Interestingly, the previous 48 years seems to me to have been unified in a similar way. The Titanic sunk in 1912 and world wars followed, a depression was experienced. It ended with the development of atomic bombs and a "cold war." Another 48 years backwards and the Civil War was ending. The goals and methods of the universities were changing. Ministers were not sought after to head institutions of higher learning. Curriculum's were changing. Another 48 years and the Napoleonic Age was coming to an end. I can go on but I'm not trying to present a firm theory. I'm sure that there are many holes in my examples here. What I'm concerned with is that we do seem to be coming to the end of what we grew up with. Something new seems to be coming and it is not good. Then again, maybe (even probably) everyone at the end of these ages said the same thing. This financial crisis appears to be far worse than most government leaders describe it to be. A struggle for total globalization is on right now. I don't mean, simply free markets that open up trade all over the world, but a whole new financial creation where everyone must acknowledge that we are all chained to one another. As I mentioned in a previous blog, it's hard to argue with the logic of those that believe that a "One World Government" is the only remedy, for we now have the threat of small nations, even small groups, using nuclear or biological weapons. There are two perspectives of looking at this coming "change" that I see; one discouraging and the other with a perpetual hope. Of the former, we cannot cling to a particular period, for history lays this fact out before us that times change. Of the latter, the mindset of the Christian is no different from Christians in any of the ages before us. We still have to deal with our fallen nature and sin, and with a world that will, at times, let us proclaim that only the imputed (not infused) righteousness of Jesus Christ can cover our sin but at other times will not let us speak. Alan Greenspan has been a believer in the "Objectivism" of Ayn Rand where man's happiness and productiveness, through reason, should be his goal. Greenspan, commenting on the catastrophic sequence of events in the financial crisis said "Everyone has (an ideology)... to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not." with astonishing insight he continued "Yes, I found a flaw (presumably in his own ideology)....I've been very distressed by that fact." What he hit on that he does not realize is that humanity is fallen and that philosophies that rely "solely" on the logic and reason of man, who is presumed to be fundamentally good, are doomed to disaster.
Such is part of the problem we are facing in Egypt today. We are not dealing simply with a desire for democracy. There is a famine, so to speak, and any ideology that promises food and buying power will be embraced. Add to that an ideology of hate and brute force, and we do not have a recipe for freedom, but for disaster. This is also part of the change that is in the works. One big commercial for anything the techno-savvy can fashion can reach even the smallest hamlet. McRevolution rules.
December, 2008
I'm a "boomer," so you may have to try to see through my eyes on this. 1960 does not seem that far away to me. John Kennedy seemed to usher in a new "present age." We can talk about him today and it is not ancient history. Hollywood seemed to change in that year. One particular movie that sticks in my mind is "Strangers When We Meet" with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak. It dealt with suburbanites and marital infidelity. I haven't seen this movie, I'm sure, in 40 or more years but one scene still lingers in my mind. Kirk Douglas was washing his car in his driveway and a neighbor, (Walter Mathau I believe) gave him a critical look because it was a Sunday. The house was of a modern architecture that developed around the time and we still think of this type of house as an embryo of today's modern housing. Mr. Douglas drove around in what might have been a 1960 Thunderbird. Elvis changed dramatically after coming out of the army. Interestingly, the previous 48 years seems to me to have been unified in a similar way. The Titanic sunk in 1912 and world wars followed, a depression was experienced. It ended with the development of atomic bombs and a "cold war." Another 48 years backwards and the Civil War was ending. The goals and methods of the universities were changing. Ministers were not sought after to head institutions of higher learning. Curriculum's were changing. Another 48 years and the Napoleonic Age was coming to an end. I can go on but I'm not trying to present a firm theory. I'm sure that there are many holes in my examples here. What I'm concerned with is that we do seem to be coming to the end of what we grew up with. Something new seems to be coming and it is not good. Then again, maybe (even probably) everyone at the end of these ages said the same thing. This financial crisis appears to be far worse than most government leaders describe it to be. A struggle for total globalization is on right now. I don't mean, simply free markets that open up trade all over the world, but a whole new financial creation where everyone must acknowledge that we are all chained to one another. As I mentioned in a previous blog, it's hard to argue with the logic of those that believe that a "One World Government" is the only remedy, for we now have the threat of small nations, even small groups, using nuclear or biological weapons. There are two perspectives of looking at this coming "change" that I see; one discouraging and the other with a perpetual hope. Of the former, we cannot cling to a particular period, for history lays this fact out before us that times change. Of the latter, the mindset of the Christian is no different from Christians in any of the ages before us. We still have to deal with our fallen nature and sin, and with a world that will, at times, let us proclaim that only the imputed (not infused) righteousness of Jesus Christ can cover our sin but at other times will not let us speak. Alan Greenspan has been a believer in the "Objectivism" of Ayn Rand where man's happiness and productiveness, through reason, should be his goal. Greenspan, commenting on the catastrophic sequence of events in the financial crisis said "Everyone has (an ideology)... to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not." with astonishing insight he continued "Yes, I found a flaw (presumably in his own ideology)....I've been very distressed by that fact." What he hit on that he does not realize is that humanity is fallen and that philosophies that rely "solely" on the logic and reason of man, who is presumed to be fundamentally good, are doomed to disaster.
Such is part of the problem we are facing in Egypt today. We are not dealing simply with a desire for democracy. There is a famine, so to speak, and any ideology that promises food and buying power will be embraced. Add to that an ideology of hate and brute force, and we do not have a recipe for freedom, but for disaster. This is also part of the change that is in the works. One big commercial for anything the techno-savvy can fashion can reach even the smallest hamlet. McRevolution rules.
Labels:
McRevolution
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
