Christine Rosen is one of our most important social critics, a keen observer of technology and culture. I urge you to read every word she writes, especially this essay. I could hardly decide which section to excerpt, but this observation on Amazon's Kindle (which I am warily eyeing, and may well purchase when it comes out in version 2.0) is typically incisive. I often find myself several degrees more optimistic than Rosen about our technological follies, but her critiques are worth pondering.

books, horizons of the possible, kindle, literature, reading, technology and change

Andy

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When you use a Kindle, you are not merely a reader—you are also a consumer. Indeed, everything about the device is intended to keep you in a posture of consumption. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has admitted, the Kindle “isn’t a device, it’s a service.”

In this sense it is a metaphor for the experience of reading in the twenty-first century. Like so many things we idolize today, it is extraordinarily convenient, technologically sophisticated, consumption-oriented, sterile, and distracting. The Kindle also encourages a kind of utopianism about instant gratification, and a confusion of needs and wants. Do we really need Dickens on demand? Part of the gratification for first readers of Dickens was rooted in the very anticipation they felt waiting for the next installment of his serialized novels—as illustrated by the story of Americans lining up at the docks in New York to learn the fate of Little Nell. The wait served a purpose: in the interval between finishing one installment and getting the next, readers had time to think about the characters and ponder their motives and actions. They had time to connect to the story.

A fascinating interview on using new technology (internet video) to teach traditional home repair and preservation.

craft, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, internet, preservation, tradition, video, work

Nate

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JU: Now there are certainly many people who will feel that these methods they get paid to practice are proprietary knowledge they wouldn’t want to reveal. My argument is that in a lot of cases, by demonstrating expertise you’ll attract more work than you lose, and that it’ll often be more interesting and rewarding work. What’s your experience?

JL: Both of those ideas do play strongly in the building trades. It’s a real tradition to keep secrets. Going back hundreds and hundreds of years, with the guild systems, there were ways to control the sharing of that kind of knowledge. And it’s still the case. Not every plasterer who can do those decorative Ionic capitals wants everybody to know exactly how they do it. But they do want everybody to know that it can be done.

You’re right, this is how artisans can do good marketing — by letting people know what is involved, by showing some of these methods, and they don’t have to give up all their secrets in order to do that. But you can help people to understand that it’s not just a machine spitting out product, it’s people making stuff with their minds and their hands and their hearts.

Let us concede—as Rusty Reno does elsewhere in this essay—that some conservatives are every bit as dedicated to the suppression of dissent as some liberals. Still his argument rings true, not least in the wake of Newsweek's scurrilously slanted piece on religion and gay marriage this past weekend. (My fellow editors wrote a perceptive response to it on Tuesday.) I tend to resist the language of "culture war" for all sorts of reasons . . . and yet very visible actors on the left and right make it hard for me to keep up my hope that there is another way. And while the visible actors on the right are very far to the right indeed, the visible actors on the left are, like Newsweek, often pleased to be considered the "center."

conservatism, culture wars, politics

Andy

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Barack Obama won in November largely because he convincingly represents stability in economic affairs and foreign policy. On questions of culture, however, he will have a very difficult time. The progressive ideal of liberated desire—like all progressive ideals—requires us to fundamentally remake culture. This means aggressively intervening into education and the family in order to destroy the sources of traditional sentiments about sex, gender, and religion. . . .

Yet, because conservatism is based in traditional realities rather than progressive ideals, it need not revolutionize culture and suppress dissent. Put concretely, nobody who wants to change our laws about abortion needs to censor the pro-choice idea. Nobody who wishes to prohibit gay marriage wants to prevent anyone from feeling offended or oppressed by the opinions of those who think otherwise.

Because conservative political goals are limited, they don’t require trying to take control of the San Francisco school system. . . . The conservative has no need to gain control of the state in order to remake culture—a shockingly arrogant, willful, and invariably tyrannical project. He already has one.

The same issue of Nature Nanotechnology has two additional articles about public perceptions of the field's promises and pitfalls, including one that correlates religious belief with skepticism about all things nano—because, reports the BBC, of its "potential to create life at a nano scale without divine intervention." Which better fits the typical science-journalism narrative than peopling being skeptical because they're worried about, say, economic inequality or justice issues.

cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, nano, religion, science, skepticism, technology

Nate

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Rather than infer that nanotechnology is safe, members of the public who learn about this novel science tend to become sharply polarized along cultural lines, according to a study conducted by the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School in collaboration with the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. The report is published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

These findings have important implications for garnering support of the new technology, say the researchers.

The experiment involved a diverse sample of 1,500 Americans, the vast majority of whom were unfamiliar with nanotechnology, a relatively new science that involves the manipulation of particles the size of atoms and that has numerous commercial applications. When shown balanced information about the risks and benefits of nanotechnology, study participants became highly divided on its safety compared to a group not shown such information.

The determining factor in how people responded was their cultural values, according to Dan Kahan, the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor at Yale Law School and lead author of the study. “People who had more individualistic, pro-commerce values, tended to infer that nanotechnology is safe,” said Kahan, “while people who are more worried about economic inequality read the same information as implying that nanotechnology is likely to be dangerous.”

According to Kahan, this pattern is consistent with studies examining how people’s cultural values influence their perceptions of environmental and technological risks generally. “In sum, when they learned about a new technology, people formed reactions to it that matched their views of risks like climate change and nuclear waste disposal,” he said.

Skye Jethani argues that a church built only on "leisure time" is missing most of its members' lives—and may not be sustainable if leisure time is squeezed. But what if churches helped people see their "core time" as essential to their Christian life? Preach it, brother Skye.

churches, leisure, work

Andy

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A church with 100 adults would be considered truly remarkable if 40 members each give 5 hours per week of leisure time to the institution’s mission. That would be double what most churches experience, and many pastors would be thrilled to see similar stats in their congregation. But even this would represent less than 2 percent of the church members’ total available time. Is this being missional (however you define the word)? Is that loving God will all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength? . . .

Pastors should be asking what would happen if we built our mission on people’s core time rather than leisure time. What if we could tap into the 80+ hours people spend every week on the job, with their families, and engaging in life’s ordinary responsibilities? Of course, this would require a fundamental shift in the way we think about mission and institution. Here are a few implications:

1. It would mean helping people see the missional dignity of ordinary work; communicating that their jobs matter to Christ and his kingdom, not just what happens within the walls of the church.

2. It would mean elevating the role of family and household relationships as vehicles for spiritual growth and missional engagement. Yes, raising children and caring for aging parents honors God and advances his kingdom just as, if not more, than institutional church programs.

3. It would mean not extracting people from their lives and communities to engage in church programming or committees unless absolutely necessary, but equipping them to live in communion with Christ within the context he has placed them.

4. It would shift the focus of Sunday worship away from mission and outreach to a time of celebration and encouragement for Christians who are engaged in mission the other six days of the week.

5. It would mean deploying church leaders outside the institution to engage members in their native contexts; mentoring and coaching on their turf rather than ours.

6. It would mean a radical adjustment in what the church celebrates—not institutional expansion or programmatic growth, but stories of ordinary people incarnating Christ at home, at work, at school . . . everywhere life happens.

Graffiti (whether the restroom kind or others) sits on this weird junction between creation and vandalism, between anonymity and community. In this particular case, something undertaken primarily to reduce business expenses wound up making a space not just for alternative cultural expression, but for better—and self-improving—forms of community: "the clerk also told me that the men had cleaned up their language quite a bit in five years. The tone of their scribbles had changed from gross and inappropriate to polite and sincere."

business, community, cultivation and creation, graffiti, horizons of the possible, profanity

Nate

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During a long road trip between California and Missouri, I stumbled on a gas station on Interstate 40 in Adrian, Texas, that had come up with an ingenious way of protecting the walls of their restrooms. In an effort to reduce the number of times the restrooms needed to be painted, someone came up with the idea to tape sheets of butcher block paper to the walls. The sheets were inside every stall and on the walls in both the men and women’s restrooms. On the top of each piece of torn white paper was written “Please tell us about your trip”. What followed on every sheet were stories about why people were traveling across the country. Some stories were sad, some were happy, some were angry. The whole gamut of emotions was posted on these sheets. (I wish I had a picture.)

The amazing thing was that the real white walls of the restroom were not defaced in any manner, not one piece of graffiti.  After asking at the checkout who came up with the idea, the clerk told me that, to clean up graffiti, the owners had been stuck with a painting the walls of the restrooms twice a year. Since they had put the butcher block paper up five years ago, they had never painted the restrooms.Yet they remained clean and sparkling white. Obviously, the management nudged the public for everyone’s benefit.

By the standards of Internet time, this op-ed was written ages ago (14 November), and critiquing it now is like a late hit in football. But there is a fundamental fallacy here that is, if not timeless, then enduringly relevant. Why is it that the only ways Michael Kinsley—by all accounts a talented and creative man—can imagine to get out of the economic crisis are more spending or more saving? Why does he completely omit any reference to the most deeply human, and also the most economically productive, thing we can do? We don't have to define our lives either by how much we save or how much we spend. We can embrace the call to collaborate with others to create something new that adds economic value, among other kinds of value, to the world. That is what will bring us out of the current slump into real prosperity: people who aren't shoppers or hoarders but creators. It is a measure of the power of consumer culture that Kinsley doesn't even mention that as an option.

consumerism, cultivation and creation, economics

Andy

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Without consumers to lead the charge, an economic recovery will be hard to achieve. And yet everyone agrees that we need to start saving more. So should I buy that coffee maker to stimulate the economy? Or should I save the money in order to “grow” the economy and provide for my own old age? I can’t do both. . . .

So what do we do? The nearest thing to an actual plan seems to be something like this: stimulate first, to avert various short-term disasters, and then — at some signal from the Treasury Department — turn around and start saving like mad, to avert various long-term disasters. In other words, we need to get back our consumer confidence, and then lose it again.

This lovely opening to the Turkish Nobel laureate's memoir of a lifetime of reading calls to mind the dialogue from C.S. Lewis's God in the Dock, about how our libraries in heaven will likely only contain the books we've given away or lent. But such books they'll be!

books, horizons of the possible, libraries, literature, new jerusalem, turkey

Nate

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At the heart of my library is my father’s library. When I was seventeen or eighteen and began to devote most of my time to reading, I devoured the volumes my father kept in our sitting room as well as the ones I found in Istanbul’s bookshops. These were the days when, if I read a book from my father’s library and liked it, I would take it into my room and place it among my own books. My father, who was pleased to see his son reading, was also glad to see some of his books migrating to my library, and whenever he saw one of his old books on my bookshelf, he would tease me by saying, “Aha, I see this volume has been promoted to the upper echelons!”