Category: Casual observations

Media

I’ve been reading & loving the blog “Communicate Jesus.”

Steve has posted a fair chunk of stuff on bits & pieces of Christian media. It makes me wonder if I use media enough at our church? Truth be told, I don’t know if our church could get both a powerpoint & sound happening at the same time at the moment.

Should churches be embarrassed by the fact that we can’t engage in this medium?

Is it a sign that we’re falling behind the times & failing to engage in the language of our generation?

Or are we right to say that we’re really more about “authentic connection” and person-to-person contact, not “plastic” videos that are produced my some third party & then sold to everyone?

I’m torn. There is a part of me that wonders how much these vids really connect & challenge people, but there is another big part of me that thinks I’ve just been too cheap to shell out $10 for something that’s going to grab & challenge people.

This video is a great example. I DARE you to watch it! I think I might buy it…

Life with God from DanStevers.com on Vimeo.

Bypassing the filter


Ashton Kutcher, the first man to have a million followers on twitter is taking a break, not because he is “over it” or moving on, but because of a massive mistake he made tweeting how annoyed he was about a Penn State football coach being fired, before finding out that the coach wasnt fired because of his age or performance, but because he was aware of a staff member being engaged in child abuse & did nothing about it.

As soon as Kutcher found out he tweeted an apology & noted that the dismissal was entirely appropriate, but it was all too late. His instant media hit an instant chord with millions of followers & also with the press.

It gets me thinking.

As we hardwire ourselves into 24/7-365 access, are we unwiring our filters? Where once upon a time, the passage of time between writing a letter & posting it the next day would be enough to rethink if we should send it, now you press the send button and it is gone, it’s out there, you’re on record!

I wonder if anyone’s ever thought of creating a 30 minute “filter” for instant communication. You write something, press send, and it waits half an hour before committing your thoughts to the world (allowing, of course, for an override for important stuff).

Do we maybe need to set our own filters in life?

Have you ever received good advice for how you might filter what you say?

Post Script

You spend hours neatly writing by hand.

If you like the swanky paper, you may even need one of those lined pages you put behind the page, so you keep your writing straight.

You get to the end of your letter, a masterpiece, and realise that there really is one more thing you need to say.

“No worries” you say, “that is why those two little letters P.S. exist,” and in they go.

But we don’t live in a handwritten age any more. Now I type the vast majority of my letters out to people. If I have another thought, I could just click the cursor & insert it wherever I would like. But I still find myself using postscript. It hit me this morning how silly this is. Why do I do that? I’ve decided it’s one of two things. Either a) there is something about it that harkens back to the old days, in seeing this P.S. in the letter, it looks like a REAL letter & that appeals to someone who certainly remembers having to handwrite everything! b) Maybe I’m just lazy. Maybe some conventions get dragged through from one world to another just because I don’t want to lift my hand to the mouse, click the cursor & insert my sentence somewhere more useful.

That does that say about me?

Does “Postscript” have any place in the virtual world?

Bleh!

I remember being at Bible college & having a discussion in an ethics lecture where it felt like it was me versus 50 on the question on whether gambling was wrong. I maintained that it was like many things in life, where the act itself isn’t bad, but it has to be enjoyed within an appropriate context. Take sex for example: sex causes more fights in this world than anything (even religion!) there are scary statistics on abuse, on violence & on the psychological effects of bad relationships, yet we don’t give up on it. We know we just need to make sure that we maintain healthy & appropriate relationships.
Likewise with gambling, I am more than happy to play a little poker with old friends, where the maximum anyone lost on any given night was about $5, half the price of going to a movie, and twice the fun, but at the same time, I know that if I “needed” the high, or if I found myself taking unacceptable risks with money I couldn’t afford, then maybe it has become something that I ought to walk away from.

This is all my way of saying that I’m not against gambling per se.

That said, gambling is starting to bother me. I can live with the fact that the Melbourne Cup is “the race that stops the nation” even if I don’t really care for it. But it does bug me that gambling & gambling lingo is being normalised in our society. I couldn’t watch the Rugby World Cup without seeing incessant gambling ads. Players are trained to talk about how they are or aren’t the “odds on favourites” and now in league, one of the gambling advertisers dresses up in an identical suit to the commentators & they “throw” to him during regular programming.

It bugs me a bit that we can’t enjoy any kind of competitive endeavour without it being something that is gambled on.

It’s not that I don’t want people to have fun, but I think watching rugby is already fun! I love barracking for a team, I invest in my favourite players, and I don’t know why I have to add an element of financial risk to make it exciting.

OK. So did I watch the melbourne cup today? Yeah, I stopped for five minutes. Did I put any money on it? Nope.

But I watched some pretty horses.

P.S. Here’s an interesting infographic I found.