marramgrass

(This post has been two-thirds written for a couple of weeks. I’ve just returned from a gathering and a conversation which has reminded me to progress it and publish it — see the first and second posts in this series for what I’m doing.)

Several years ago I began to wonder about online expressions of community. I was young(er) and full of fire, and I believed that it was real and it was good. I remember sitting in a bar having lunch with an older and wiser colleague, trying desperately to convince him of the potential in ‘online church’. I think the only thing I convinced him of was a slight softness in my head. That was then.

Now, with all these ‘online communities’ and ‘social’ sites springing up all over the web, I have to ask: is ‘community’ the correct word? Whereas once I would have shouted my ‘yes’, now I’m really not so sure.

While I am wary of overusing dictionary definitions in this kind of discussion, I’ll let dictionary.com provide the following perspectives:

A social group of any size where members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.

A social, religious, occupational or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (“the [...] community”).

the public; society.

A group of organisms or populations living and interacting with one another in a particular environment.

From those definitions, maybe not.

Given the constantly changing and developing nature of language, perhaps ‘community’ is becoming the right word, but for now I’m not really comfortable with using the same term I could easily apply to our family, our church, a street, a neighbourhood.

But since this technology facilitates communication, I suppose it could be moving us in that kind of direction.

What about that communication?

It’s an inherently different thing to sit and have a face to face conversation with a friend, perhaps over a good meal, than to talk on the telephone. The phone is a different experience again from a hand-written letter, which differs from a typed letter. All are some way from an email.

I’d suggest that at least some of the difference is down to decreasing levels of direct physical presence in/through the medium. At one end of the spectrum we can experience the full range of nuance and meaning, while at the other end there is nothing that is ever directly encountered by both parties — electrons are transmitted and translated until beams of light take over…

How often have you been party to a major misunderstanding of an email sent or received? It happens regularly, to me and to people I know.

Technology has given us myriad tools and venues for sharing and transmitting information, with increasing volume and efficiency. The one that has caught my eye recently is Twitter. I didn’t get it at first, but when I discovered a couple of friends were using it I decided to give it a try. I was quickly hooked. (You can maybe get some idea by browsing over my Twitter stream.) Based simply in keeping communication open between people, even in a micro-broadcasting or micro-blogging kind of way, it’s fun, entertaining, cute and very occasionally useful.

What Twitter isn’t, I think, is substantial or meaningful. It’s more of a “because I can” sort of thing, and a good example because of how it encourages quantity over quality of communication. In a world beset by measures and targets, it’s easy to forget that neither volume nor efficiency are necessarily the thing.

Community is formed out of relationships, which are in turn based on communication. The quality of each affects the others.

I’ll be returning to these twin questions of communication and community.

When you’re not very disciplined at keeping your grass at a reasonable length, the self-propelled petrol lawn mower is one of man’s greatest inventions.

It is, however, tricky enough to control.

And when starting your brand new mower, it’s best to ensure that you are more than one elbow’s reach from the wall behind you.

• Stuff Christians Like. This is great.
• The Prime Minister on the Twitter. Sort of.
• How to break a bottle on a ship. Apparently it’s not as simple as you’d think.
• Innocent photographer or terrorist? This keeps coming up over the last few years. It’s a debate I keep an eye on, since I appreciate and enjoy good street photography.
• Powerbook to Desktop. Looks like turning an old laptop into a basic desktop machine would be pretty straightforward and fun. But my wife would not be pleased.

Real posts to follow soon, I promise.

(See the first post in this series for what I’m doing.)

As I’ve been thinking about the interactions that take place online, in my mind they’ve fallen into two broad categories based on ‘venue’:

• Centralised, if not necessarily in a technological sense, where the interactions take place through a specific website, newsgroup, mailing list or similar.
• Decentralised, in the manner of separate blogs forming an organic network.

Within these groups I find that that there is variation as to what brings them together.

Centralised Venues.

Networks and groupings can form on the basis of:

• Shared interest or purpose, for example a discussion forum or mailing list focussed on a particular subject. I have participated in groups discussing technology of various flavours, youth ministry, theology, particular authors, photography and even the collection and use of fountain pens. This sort of group can be an excellent source of information.
• Shared experience, for example Friends Reunited, or the way many use Facebook — “we went to school together.”
• Shared presence — stumbling into people you have never and may never have otherwise met. In my short experience this is the way MySpace seemed largely to operate.

All these factors reflect processes that occur in the real world, where we physically meet different people in all kinds of different contexts.

Decentralised Venues.

Where I find it more difficult to draw a real-world parallel is in the ‘blogosphere‘.

Anyone (with the necessary resources) can publish a website, and can interact with what anyone else has published either through direct communication (public or private) or by responding back on their own site. Networks of individuals gather around particular conversations, but can also easily draw in others who have some other incidental interest or curiosity. It’s fascinating (to me at least) to click around various blogs and follow the lines of who links to who, and who participates where — and you can participate in the wider network to as large or as small a degree as you like.

There are strengths and weaknesses in each of these forms of network, and they all intermingle anyway, connecting and overlapping through the individuals involved. I suppose it’s called the ‘web’ for a reason :-) You probably could map it, but it would get very complicated very quickly.

So far I’ve deliberately avoided using the word ‘community’, even though it has threatened to roll out by itself. I’m wary of applying that name to what goes on online, but it’s a question that needs asked:

Is this ‘community’?

That’s for the next post in this series.

This is another one of those posts that many regular readers will want to skip on past. It’s nerdy, and only interesting in a very specialised way :-)
(more…)

Not too long since the last one, but here we are again.

• Google’s Street View raises privacy concerns in the Guardian. Bizarre and tremendous :-)
• Leave a camera tied to a bench, see what happens. It’s kind of sweet.
• A Victim Treats His Mugger Right. Uplifting, inspiring, humbling.

A couple of videos I found when we were looking at a new lawnmower at the weekend:

• How To Mow A Lawn Using A Petrol Lawn Mower.
• How To Fold A T-Shirt In 2 Seconds — Explained. It’s been doing the rounds for a long, long time, but it’s great. Surprisingly useful, too, if like me you are almost entirely incapable of folding clothes neatly.

And finally, an interesting one that is well worth a read for the author’s observations, even if you have no interest at all in science fiction or its production.

• Steal This Pitch: The Coming War Between Religion And Super-Science

I might have to try working some of those themes into a story or two…

My reading through of NT Wright’s theology of resurrection has been slowed by life getting in the way. I don’t get nearly as much time to sit and read as I used to, and when I do I tend to fall into easy fiction that doesn’t require too much thought.

As I continue to crawl my way through the second section of the book, the text on a couple of pages jumped out at me.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p108:

Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil which is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p106:

Evil then consists, not in being created, but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honour elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. The result is that the cosmos is out of joint. Instead of humans being God’s wise vice-regents over creation, they ignore the creator and try to worship something less demanding, something which will give them a short-term fix of power or pleasure. The result is that death, which was always part of the natural transience of the good creation, gains a second dimension, which the Bible sometimes calls ‘spiritual death’. In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image for death is exile.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, pp105-6:

Nor — and this is crucial — does evil consist in being transient, made to decay. There is nothing wrong with the tree dropping its leaves in autumn… indeed, it is precisely the transience of the good creation that serves as a pointer to its larger purpose. Creation was good, but it always had a forward look. Transience acts as a god-given signpost, pointing not from the material world to the non-material world, but from the world as it is to the world as it is meant one day to be…

Prior to this, Wright has explored what he views as the two most common ways Christians tend to view the destination of creation: that it is progressively improving towards perfection, or that it a vile physicality to be endured until we find perfection in some ‘spiritual’ reality. While he doesn’t spend too long presenting evidence for the prevalence of these views, they certainly fit with what I have heard and observed — while not fitting terribly well with my reading of Scripture. The author then goes on to explain what he understands as the Scriptural picture.

I am intrigued by the image of death as exile, never having given it too much thought. I’m looking forward to exploring it further as a way to help understand salvation, redemption and new life.

At this point in my reading I find the passages I’ve quoted above to be full of hope, but I wonder how well they would be received by the very most conservative and traditional, what with the slightly gnostic (gasp!) tendencies that tend to be expressed in those ends of the Church.

20 st 11 lbs.

Ten weeks in, and I suppose time for a little review.

After a couple of blips, I seem to have settled into a very slow but consistent downward trend. It’d be nice to go a little faster, but moving in the right direction is enough to keep me happy. Going slowly increases the chances of it being sustainable.

Also, this week I am half a stone down from my high-tide mark of 21 st 4 lbs, which is a very satisfying milestone indeed.

(Please forgive the poor pun — sometimes I can’t help it.)

It seems like over the last year or two everyone paying attention to the web has been talking about social networking sites. The chat in the press started with the Arctic Monkeys, and then somewhere down the line Microsoft paid a fortune for a tiny bit of Facebook.

There is something inherently social about the internet. It’s a medium all about the transmission of information, and that information has to come from somewhere (and go to somewhere).

All over the world there are people writing, publishing, singing, dancing, talking, and there are plenty of people reading, watching and listening to them. I’ve been writing this blog for a bit over five years now, pretty much just for the hell of it; there are even a surprising number of people who drop by here regularly, don’t ask me why. The power of the internet: although I haven’t seen the complete works of Shakespeare materialize just yet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the implications of all this and I thought it would be interesting, for me at least, to chart my own engagement with the social aspects of internet use.

When I was a teenager my parents stuck a PC in the living room with a 56k modem that introduced me to email. That was pretty much all I used it for. The same people I saw every day, talked to on the phone regularly, we emailed each other too.

Once I moved to Scotland, email became a more important way of keeping in touch with people. I also began to discover how much information there was out there on the web — and its great potential as an aid to procrastination.

Since then, this is the journey I have taken through various online interactions:

• Fora and newsgroups. Discussions, theoretically based around a particular subject area.
• Instant Messengers (MSN et al.). Like a phone call, only slower :-)
• Friends Reunited. Feeds the gossip in us, or it did the last time I went near it.
• Flickr. A mix of photos and fora.
• MySpace. Maybe a year or two ago I followed a bunch of friends to MySpace. You can probably count on two hands the total number of times I’ve logged into my account there.
• Bebo. I have an account, and I’ve literally never done anything with it beyond signing up.
• Facebook. More recent, a similar story as MySpace except you can probably do the counting on one hand.
• Twitter. Tough to describe. I was initially very skeptical, but there’s something compelling about it.

Alongside this there are all the blogs out there (like this one). It’s not a formal network built around one specific site. Instead readers and authors link to each other, communicate through comments, emails and other posts. Some of those I follow are linked in the sidebar over there; I still haven’t got round to making it a more complete list.

After all that, though, I’m left with some questions:

• What’s the point of it all?
• What’s the use of it all?
• What constitutes quality, genuine interaction and communication?
• Does it matter ‘in real life’?
• Where can we take it?

In the car this morning I was listening to an interview with Tony Jones (of Emergent Village) where he said:

I just don’t think we can overstate how important the internet is in reshaping the social structure of our society. It’s an egalitarian force…

Is this true?

I may have a few thoughts and ideas, but I’ve formed no conclusions yet. This short series of posts is by way of me thinking out loud, so please do chip in.

• Cory Doctorow on security in the real world. Worth a read in these hyper-paranoid aware times.
• Cool business card designs to feast your eyes on.
• Open Source Community. Going through my wallet at the weekend, I found a card I picked up at a Tearfund partners’ conference last year. It was advertising this site that features various policy documents and successful funding applications available for reference. I haven’t had a chance to explore it in detail, but it looks like a resource worth remembering.

And to finish, a couple of videos:

• RSS in Plain English is a creative explanation of what I tried to say a couple of months ago. Geekness aside, it’s very nicely done.
• Getting a cork out of an empty bottle. Simple, elegant, fun.