Everybody Can Be An Activist

In Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky examines the ways in which social media have influenced political activism.  He tells the stories of people who have gone far beyond clicking the “Like” button on a political candidates’ Facebook page or even submitting a petition by email to their local representatives.  

Shirky tells the story of one of the first flash mobs with political purpose which happened in September 2003 on behalf of presidential hopeful Howard Dean. (See the September 8, 2003 invitation in the online archive of “Doonesbury” by Garry Trudeau.)

Another story he tells is from May 2006 when protesters in Minsk in Belarus organized themselves to appear in Oktyabrskaya Square and showed up eating ice cream.  (Read more about “turning information into action”.)  By the way here’s a disappointing update from the Christian Science Monitor on the political situation in Belarus now, five years later.

But political protest persists, and just yesterday student protesters in Chile demonstrated against their government over their failed education system. 

Social media is not only changing how we communicate but how we organize and use information to inspire action.

SPOILER ALERT - How the film fest wrapped up

Tonight I finished the sixth of the movies I chose for a weekend (and a day) film festival that looked at how faith, culture and media mix and what messages about humanity, God and faith may be implicit in these films and what messages may be explicit. (Here's the original blog with the movie list.)

My interest stems from an acknowledgment that pop culture is a place where these conversations are happening, just as in social media today, and I haven’t been present, let alone participating. 

Where was I? Well, for one thing, 4 of the 6 films were rated R. I pretty much stopped watching anything stronger than PG-13 in 1995 when my oldest daughter was born.  4 of the 6 films were set in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial intelligence had overrun human beings.  I am more likely to read Agatha Christie than George Orwell and was perhaps even more telling, I was convinced upon finishing college I could find a job that didn’t require a computer.  (Clearly, I don’t have a future in telling the future)  Finally, 2 of the 6 films were set on death row, and 1 of the 6 was released when I was 12 (1982) so I definitely missed those. 

What were the common themes?

• All of the films looked at the criteria we use to value life and create identity. Do humans have greater intrinsic value than other created beings? Why or why not?  Does it matter who one’s parents are, where someone came from, how they experienced childhood?  Are we malleable? Can we change our identity?

• There were questions about sin, judgment, and grace. What is sin? Or some sins worse than others? What does judgment look like? What does hatred and division spawn? What does fear do? What is redemption? What is integrity? How do we preserve hope?  Can hope be restored?  What does grace look like?

• There were questions about love.  What is unconditional love? Can love exist among difference? Can relationship exist apart from physical intimacy?  How do children love differently than adults? Are love and faith related?

• There were questions about human finitude, grief, compassion and death.  Why does our world have disease? What happens to us at death? What happens to the people who are still alive? What distinguishes life from death? How are freedom and life related; what about slavery and death?

Eventually, I want to write up the extensive notes I have on each film, and dig more deeply, particularly into intersections with Scripture, but for now this experiment in mixing theological reflection and popular culture has taught me to listen more carefully to the world around me and to look at how we ask questions about ourselves, others and about God in our everyday lives and experiences, whether that’s in a Friday night movie, a Saturday morning cartoon, church on Sunday morning or a lazy afternoon in a hammock reading a best-selling novel.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (part 3 of 3)

**Spoiler Alert: This post explores various theological questions and topics that are present throughout the film's storyline**

When David, Teddy and Joe arrive in Manhattan and find the place “where the lions weep”, they find a young boy who looks identical to David.  David asks, “Is this the place where they make your real?” Then David asks the second boy his name and discovers he is also named David and he erupts in an uncontrollable rage bashing in the head of the second mecha boy, screaming, “I am David! I am special! I am unique!” Dr. Hobby comes in and tries to calm him, reassuring him that he is special, that he is “the first of a kind” and that he is real because, in his quest for the Blue Fairy, he has succumbed to “the great human flaw – [wishing] for things that don’t exist.” 

Questions: Where do find our identity? How do we experience the difference between who the world says we are and our identity as God’s children?  What makes us or our lives real? What icons or idols do we chase?

When Dr. Hobby leaves David to assemble the other team members, David wanders around the offices and discovers a production line of Davids and Darlenes, child mechas in various stages of assembly and packaging.  The scene changes and David is sitting on the edge of a windowsill overlooking the sea and he jumps, tumbling into the depths.  Joe watches from the helicopter they were using and then fishes David out of the sea, depositing him inside the cockpit.  Inside, David tells Joe he saw the Blue Fairy at the bottom of the sea.  In a final confrontation between orga and mecha, the police arrive and drag Joe off; as he gets pulled into the sky, Joe yells, “I am. I was.” and pushes the button to submerge David and Teddy into the water so that they can go to David’s Blue Fairy. 

Questions:  Are there times in our lives when we have tumbled down in despair and been rescued? How do we respond? Where do we find hope?

David maneuvers the capsule toward the Blue Fairy, the remnant of a Coney Island Pinocchio attraction, and parks himself there, praying “until the sea anemones died… the ice encased [him].”  With open eyes, David stared “through the darkness of the night and the next day and the next day….” 

Questions:  How is our faith childlike? How do we pray? Do we pray expectantly?

The scene shifts and we see a snowscape and the Blue Fairy, no longer under water but part of the frozen landscape.   A subtitle indicates two thousand years have passed.  David is awakened by a new being and climbs out of the capsule but when he reaches out to touch the Blue Fairy, she shatters and disintegrates.

It doesn’t matter though because here in this world, the new beings tell him that because he knew living people, he is “unique in all the world.” They create for him, from his memories, the house where he lived with his mother and Martin, but when he asks , “Will Mommy be coming home?” they explain she cannot because she is no longer living.  When they tell him that they are able to regenerate people from pieces of DNA, we discover that Teddy is still carrying a lock of hair from David’s mother.   They agree to bring her back but they explain to David that the experiment is not perfect; after the first day, the recreated humans die again when they fall asleep at the end of the day.  David insists and he has his “perfect day” with his mother, finally closing his eyes when she does, after she says, “I love you, I have always loved you.”

Questions: What are the stories we have in Scripture about being raised to new life? What does a new life in Christ look like? Read Lamentations 3:22-26,31-33. How can we talk about grief and compassion in light of God’s mercy?

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (part 2 of 3)

**Spoiler Alert: This post explores various theological questions and topics that are present throughout the film's storyline**

Hidden in the woods, David first encounters other mechas.  Near his hiding place, a dump truck deposits its refuse, a collection of mangled mecha body parts and scavengers swarm the site to find new eyes and limbs. He wanders into a mecha shantytown where damaged and discarded mechas roam. 

Questions:  What is disposable in our society? How do we define wholeness? What about community? Many of the mechas are created for one job - nannies, lovers - which they do extraordinarily well; are people disposable when they are no longer useful or productive?

Caught in an orga police raid of the camp, David and other mechas are hauled away in a trawling net and taken to a “Flesh Fair.”  The fair combines the most exploitative elements of a circus and a demolition derby, taking aim at imprisoned mechas and destroying them in public and humiliating displays.  It bears an ugly resemblance to the slave trade markets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with mechas corralled in cages. 

Questions:  Whom do we call neighbor? How do we treat our neighbor? When do we avert our eyes to oppression or bigotry? When do we even participate in oppression? What effect do hatred, division and fear (sin and brokenness) have on our world?

Led into the center ring, David surprises everyone when he pleads for his life.  People are confused and shout, “Mechas don’t plead for their lives.”  Dismissing their arguments, the despicable master of ceremonies taunts, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, recalling the verse from John 8:7 when Jesus challenges the crowd who would stone the woman,“Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  The crowd turns on him and pelts him, creating a riotous melee during which David, Teddy and another mecha named Joe escape. 

Questions: What do we learn about sin, judgment and grace here?

When David explains to Joe that he is looking for a woman called “the Blue Fairy” Joe thinks he knows how to help and the trio travel to Rouge City in a journey and meeting reminiscent of Dorothy seeking out the Wizard of Oz.    After they arrive in Rouge City, David sees a status of an angel at a curbside chapel, “Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart”, prompting Joe’s observation that “the ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them.”  Then they go to visit “Dr. Know”, asking how to find the Blue Fairy. 

Questions:  To whom do we turn for knowledge and revelation? What language do we use to describe our Creator God? What assumptions do we have about God?  How do we respond when we cannot find answers? What do we do with our unanswered questions?

With an improvised verse from W.B. Yeats for an answer, David urges Joe to help him get to the “end of the world” which Joe knows as “the lost city in the sea at the end of the world” or Manhattan.  

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (part 1 of 3)

The story of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) is the story of David, a child mecha created as a prototype by Professor Hobby, a human scientist and inventor who steers Cybertronics, a giant in the artificial intelligence industry.  Living in a society that has survived extreme climate change and the loss of seaboard cities like New York and Amsterdam, humans have thrived by limiting human population growth, licensing human pregnancies, and relying on mechanized beings (mechas or robots) because they use a finite number of resources.    Now Dr. Hobby has proposed creating child mechas for whom “love will be the key by which they acquire a subconscious.” 

**Spoiler Alert: The remainder of this post explores various theological questions and topics that are present throughout the film's storyline**

One of the earliest theological questions in the film is creation.  Someone asks if a robot can love, what is the responsibility of the human to that robot? And Dr. Hobby parries, “Didn’t God create Adam to love Him?” 

A second question exists around end-of-life questions.  The family into which David is “adopted” had a young son who was in a coma-like state for five years; the parents continue to visit him in a sterile, clinical setting waiting for his condition to change, and then, resigning themselves to his condition, agree to adopt David.

Shortly after his arrival, the mother gives David “Teddy” a supertoy teddy bear who accompanies David everywhere he goes.  Teddy had been their son’s constant companion.  Perhaps, he appears here as a paraclete? 

Miraculously, the biological son Martin recovers and returns home, and tragically but not surprisingly, a sibling rivalry begins.  In this context, a fourth set of questions about difference, biological vs. adopted, and race, organic (human) or mecha (robot) are raised.  The mother reads Pinocchio to the boys and David becomes convinced that if he were “a real boy” his mother would love him more.

His dilemma raises several more questions, including “What does authentic relationship look like?”, “What does unconditional love look like?” 

After an accident involving the boys endangers Martin, the parents decide to return David to Cybertronics, where they know he will be destroyed.  Destruction is inevitable because when the parents adopted David, they implemented a protocol that “triggered” his love; it was irreversible, unconditional and unalterable.  In this iteration, he could only love the person who implemented that protocol; that person was the mother. 

So now we encounter questions about covenant and the cost of breaking covenant.  The covenant is first broken when the parents decide to give up David.  However, the mother fails to return David to Cybertronics; instead she leaves him in the woods theoretically to protect him from destruction.  With her actions, she breaks the covenant she had with the company also. 

apokálypsis

I had a parishioner ask this morning, “How do they teach you about prophecy? as in Revelation or Daniel?” I didn’t have a knock-‘em-dead answer. True, we studied Daniel briefly in the core course overview of Prophets, and apocalyptic preaching was part of our preaching discussions. I think Revelation may be offered as a New Testament elective, but apocalyptic texts and their interpretation are not explicitly core curriculum.

As I reflected on his question, I was reminded that too often, our understanding of apocalypse is defined by popular fiction such as The Left Behind series, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness or movies like “2012” or “Independence Day”. In fact, several of the films I chose for this weekend are set in “post-apocalyptic" worlds, after civilization as we know it in 2011 has destroyed itself.

Contrary to our popular assumptions though, apokálypsis means "lifting of the veil" or revelation, giving us a definition of apocalypse that reorients us to paying attention to what Scripture has to say. Understanding that apocalyptic literature was written to people experiencing crises of faith frames the text much differently than imagining that the text is saying something about “the Last Days”. Understanding that the text may reflect messages of perseverance or hope, a call for endurance or a claim to God’s sovereignty presents different possibilities than using the text as a roadmap to survive the Second Coming.

Another point made by Anathea Porter-Young in her article about preaching apocalyptic texts is that “apocalyptic preaching also reveals the true nature of visible things, using symbols to characterize what it reveals.” Apocalyptic images and symbols have meaning, but their meanings may have been skewed or changed in popular media. As preachers and teachers, how then do we reclaim or interpret the meaning of symbolism and images in ways that are consistent with Scripture, and encourage our hearers to do the same?

Here's a related article on WorkingPreacher.org: Greg Carey, “Preaching Apocalyptic Texts”

Note: portions of this post were first written and published in a short essay in Middler Preaching in Spring 2011.

Faith, Culture and Media Film Fest

Here and in comments to others, I’ve mentioned that while I am participating in social media, I often miss the ways in which technology, theology and popular culture intersect.  Popular film and music just aren’t spheres I spend a lot of time in. 

So while, I tweet and watch trends on Twitter on things like #edsocialmedia or conferences like this weekend’s “Wild Goose Festival” (#WGF11), connect with friends, classmates and professors on Facebook, and network with colleagues in fundraising and communications on LinkedIn, if you ask me to list the top three movies in the last year, I bomb.

Somewhere in reading Drescher or Hess, I decided it would be interesting to watch A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and The Matrix (1999) both of which came up in conversations about how digital technology, questions about God and culture mix. 

As long as I was going to watch those two, I wondered what else I might be missing, and discovered a list of 100 movie titles with “spiritual significance.”  Reviewing the list, I picked out another four films I haven’t seen :

Bladerunner (1982)
Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Dead Man Walking (1995)
Signs (2002)

So with the weekend ahead of me, I’m going to spend some time looking at what these filmmakers and actors are saying, or not saying, about who God is and who we are as human beings.

"A Glimpse of the Future" (2019)

As we navigate social networks that have risen so dramatically in the last five years, a video titled “A Glimpse of the Future” from Microsoft that was first shared in 2009 illustrates what they are working on in the next ten years (2019).  Even with my own encounters with social media  and my own experience of distributed learning, it's astonishing to see what people imagine for the future.  But this is not the stuff of Star Trek. How we communicate and work are changing; how we teach and learn are changing; how we use paper and technology is changing. How we live is changing. 

Just as our paradigms for the marketplace and our classrooms are changing, we need to recognize that our ways of being congregations and communities are changing too.  We are facing an adaptive challenge that demands a response outside of our current knowledgebase and requires us to learn new ways of doing and new ways of finding answers.  Ready, set, go!

For more on leading people through adaptive challenges, listen to Ronald Heifetz.

Mermaids & Progressives - changing collaboration and collective action

Writer and scholar Clay Shirky writes about how ways of organizing people, and consequently organizations, are being changed in Here Comes Everybody.   Using Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) as an example, Shirky writes that “the costs of all kinds of group activity – sharing, cooperative and collective action – have fallen so far so fast” and given rise to a new way of making things happen – namely, “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.”  (Shirky, 47) Here’s the “Coney Island Mermaid Parade” that Shirky describes and a link to the group on Flickr that now hosts more than 2,900 photos, including this one of a "sea urchin" from moriza:

As I read Shirky, the example of collective action and collaboration that came to my mind was Huffington Post. “HuffPo” launched in 2005 and grew as independent bloggers, often unpaid, contributed content, creating a “citizen-powered online news organization” (Wikipedia).   When its founder sold HuffPo to AOL in early 2011 for $315 million, the National Writers Union and others launched a boycott of the Huffington Post arguing that the founder benefited unfairly from the unpaid labor of others.  Is the sale to AOL an example of “The Tragedy of Commons” where one person subverts the common good? (Shirky, 51) Do the writers, who voluntarily donated their writing, gaining a publishing platform, have a legitimate claim?

Do You Hear What I Hear?

In Engaging Technology in Theological Education Mary Hess explains the element of the "sonic environment" in mass mediated popular culture.  She encourages us to be more attentive to how the experiences we bring shape how we hear the world around us.  What are "the multiple meanings people are making with various sounds of music?" (136-139)

This attentiveness to sound intrigued me, particularly as I reflected on participating on Friday in the culminating worship experience of the Three Day Feast.  Together our worship class of more than forty-five seminary students led the class through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil.  The sounds of the day included acapella voices, choral voices, reading voices of men, women and children, acoustic guitars, drums, piano, a singing bowl, sledgehammers, chainsaws, running water, wind and silence.  It was in the best sense of the word a riotous cacophony.  During the Good Friday service which included a procession outdoors, the impromptu whine of a chainsaw across the street revved up just as we heard John's narrative account of how Peter cut off Malchus' ear:

¹⁰Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear.

Later people talked about the emotions that they experienced; where I was distracted, others welcomed the juxtaposition of the sounds against the text.

Thinking further about the exercise Mary describes in her discussion of sonic environment (136-139), I wish we had encouraged people to correlate their emotions to color. Elsewhere in the book, Mary talks about how we live in a world which is "socially constructed white."(106)  It challenges me to think about how that construct could influence, for example, the choice and use of the colors for the liturgical church year where black may be draped across the cross during the penitential season of Lent while the church is bathed in brilliant white and gold for the jubilant Easter celebration.  Lament and death and the macabre are often depicted with black, when it may be more accurate to describe them as gray or even colorless, because they are those times when we sink so low that no Light shines in.

Intersections of Religion and Pop Culture

During the EL3517 course on campus this weekend we looked at how religion and pop culture intersect.  Now, I am not a technological Luddite but I am Luddite-like when it comes to pop culture references.  For those of you who remember Trivial Pursuit, I could survive questions in Geography, History and Science & Nature but was hopelessly lost when it came to Entertainment, Arts & Literature and Sports & Leisure, and my knowledge of song lyrics, entertainers, plot lines and movie quotes hasn't improved with time.

In one exercise, we looked at clips from Firefly (tv serial), Saved (movie), Baracknophobia ("Daily Show with Jon Stewart") and the animated Simpsons episode “She of Little Faith” (Season 13) and asked how real we each thought they were.  But to answer that question we needed to explore how we defined "real"? Did the genre or the production values matter, did the message matter, did we feel manipulated, did anything resonate as especially authentic? The questions helped us appreciate that we all carry interpretive frames with us and that what is "most real" for me may not be "most real" for you.  

Culture is full of cues and messages and we aren't going to all interpret them in the same way because we are each coming from different places and experiences, but just as I believe we need to be engaged in social media because people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are in conversation and we want to participating in conversations where people are,  we need to engage culture and ask, "What are the implicit messages that are being conveyed there?" and "What do we want to contribute to the conversation?"

Baby Face

One of the arguments Elizabeth Drescher suggests in her book Tweet If You ♥ Jesus is that social media actually retrieves ways of communicating that gradually disintegrated after the invention of the printing press. With the bound book's advent, we moved away from churches and reading Scripture together in an assembly to reading privately and with that shift, our ideas of public an private were changed as well. Drescher suggests that "premodern communication ...is fundamentally grounded in creating and sustaining relationships" and then points to the ways in which the hallmarks of the Digital Revolution - immediacy, transparency, interactivity co-creativeness, integration and distribution - are returning us to a habit of social and public communication. (72, 49)

Last night as I was closing the windows in Firefox and calling it a night, a Facebook message from a friend in North Carolina appeared on the screen: "in labor...for real." That was a little after midnight there. In the hours that followed 20 people "liked" the post and 16 commented on it. This morning, about five hours later, came the post, "New baby!!!!!! Tired mommy but oh so excited!" with a beautiful picture of mother and baby and already the post has 16 likes and 18 comments.

Sharing photographs connects us to people and enhances relationships. The connectivity of social media where pictures of babies (graduations, gymnastics meets, tae kwon do belt tests, weddings, etc.) closes the distances whether it's seeing my friend's new baby in Asheville, a friend's daughter's wedding in Nashville or my niece's new haircut in California. This connectivity across large distances is a divergence from premodern times when community was perhaps defined as everyone within walking distance, but the desire to gather and share together in celebrations, and grief, is fundamental to our relationships.

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!

In honor of the 102 degrees in St. Paul, Minnesota this week and the paltry 93 degrees that we endured in western North Carolina over the last week, I am sharing two cold salad recipes. Trust me that these involve more than iceberg lettuce on chilled plates. (Of course, that would be a reasonable expectation from my kitchen. When I met my husband Jamie, I didn’t know how to make grilled cheese sandwiches, so I am not a culinary genius.) I’ve learned one or two things since then, but I still deplore cooking everyday six o’clock dinners. After all, for nine months of the year I eat in the dining hall at the boarding school where we live. My favorite food is… “cooked by someone else.” Add to the dinnertime chore the delight of summertime heat, and I am delighted to find ways to make the whole task more enjoyable. So here are two new discoveries and both have passed our Test Kitchen, also known as the dinner table, this week. You can find more by Googling “Too Hot to Cook”!

Shrimp Salad combines fresh/frozen shrimp and black beans with summer vegetables like fresh tomatoes and gold and white corn, mixed with honey mustard dressing to serve up dinner. The recipe says 4 – 6 servings, but it served our family of 4 and left several lunches leftover.

Steak Salad is even simpler, using marinated round steak cooked on the grill, corn, bell pepper and tomatoes, mixed with cubes of cheese and creamy Italian salad dressing. Recipe says 4 -6 servings and we had a little meat leftover but all the vegetables were gone.

Incredibly, we served both on beds of butter lettuce and the kids even ate the greens.

Finally, here’s food for thought, last summer St. Anthony Park Lutheran Church in St. Paul sponsored a “Chef School” on Sunday evenings once a month, inviting older youth and adults to come together in the church kitchen where they learned new tricks like Solar Cooking, Sausage Making and Canning. As with any chore, cooking dinner is a lot more fun when you have company!How do we move beyond simply sharing a pew with someone and share our lives?

The Front Porch

Practices of listening, attentiveness, connection and engagement are at the heart of Elizabeth Drescher’s Tweet If You ♥ Jesus. Encouraging church leaders to adopt these practices by entering the Twittersphere and being on Facebook, she describes “the Digital Age as “a place” where we can wind our way in and out of communities and engage people we might not encounter face to face. Drescher chides, “What if those who might be seeking spiritual engagement in your community started hanging out right outside the doors of your church. Would you squander that opportunity?” (148)

I appreciate Drescher’s challenges to listen, to be attentive, to connect and to engage. Especially on pages like one might have for a youth group or congregation, it is easy to fall into a pattern of using Twitter and Facebook to broadcast news and events and bury dialog under the headlines.

Reading Tweet If You ♥ Jesus. I still bump up against the tension between how I engage those who might be seeking spiritual engagement in my community who really are hanging out right outside the doors of my church, and those who are on my digital front porch. That is, many of the people in my community – rural western North Carolina – are not online but in line at a soup kitchen or the Salvation Army shelter. They are struggling to find work or they are sinking under oil bills from last winter. While Drescher points to the prevalence of social media, and encourages more vibrant conversations, I appreciated her description of Kirk Smith, the Arizona bishop who engaged people in his immersion at the border, but clearly remained focus on doing the work he was doing rather than crafting a message about it.

Yes! These practices are important, replacing the echo chamber of anonymous and empty spaces with the chatter of a campfire or coffeehouse will change how we engage with one another and how we define community, but we also need to recognize when we have made it too easy to engage from our front porch swings and never actually step foot into the world.