Consuming media justly
Do wise comments spoken years ago ever keep you thinking even now? It must have been about 2004 that I heard Marva Dawn explain why she doesn’t read newspapers or stay up-to-date on current events. (Marva Dawn, by the way, is an incredibly gifted theologian and teacher who can blow you away with her orthodoxy in one sentence and her crazy-out-there ideas in the next.) Anyway, Dawn’s comment has stuck with me and still bothers me today, especially when I get sucked into the 24/7 news cycle and media-driven ridiculousness that feeds our culture of instant gratification. What’s the best way to consume news?
Dawn’s point, if I remember correctly, was that our moral imperative (for her, most definitely the Christian imperative) is for us to work for justice and peace at all times. Getting hung up on each day’s top stories and media ratings games pushes us off course. We get stuck in the trees of the hour’s headlines and miss the forest of God’s goodness, justice, holiness, and peace.
She wouldn’t have put it this way, but Dawn was speaking in favor of a TIME magazine print edition way of living as opposed to a Drudge Report approach. The TIME dead tree edition comes out weekly and has a more penetrating and expansive view of news — partly due to higher word counts, partly due to the timeliness of the news. But if you go to TIME’s blogs, or the Drudge Report, you get many updates each day on both the minutiae and the detritus of the hour. (Or you could use the analogy of The New Yorker vs. Huffington Post, or Harper’s vs. USA Today Online, take your pick.)
Each week, I read hundreds of blog posts, dozens of NY Times articles, check in at CNN.com scores of time. For local news I read the Grand Forks Herald and Kittson County Enterprise. Most weeks I’ll also read Newsweek, Time, The Presbyterian Outlook, and The Christian Century. Of course, I’ll keep up on current events through Twitter links and RSS feeds. Oh, and then there’s the hours of NPR listening and a few other podcasts thrown in to boot. And so I wonder, how do my media choices affect my view of the world?
Part of me wants to experiment and, for a week or two, try to avoid anything current events related. I might not get bogged down each week in articles or issues that are more adiaphora than anything. I wouldn’t hear reports of Apple’s iPod event in real time, nor would I read dozens of perspectives on the Ground Zero Mosque (that isn’t a mosque or at ground zero, by the way). But, on the other hand, I do think all the little articles add up to a fuller picture of the world. Sure, I may read some details about how Sen. Murkowski lost the Alaska Republican primary that really don’t matter, but I might also get a glimpse of the sentiments that are driving the Minnesotans and North Dakotans with whom I interact on a daily basis.
Either way you live, though, Dawn’s larger point is the most important. Do you seek justice and love in all your interactions and in all world affairs? For Marva Dawn, it’s easier for her to do this faithfully without reading the daily newspaper. I don’t know if she would grant that it could be, for me, easier to be faithful while keeping up on current events. My takeaway is this: whether one reads TIME dead tree edition or checks RSS news feeds hourly, the lens with which you read and live in the world is key. Do you live with a lens for social justice or do you live with a lens for social stories gone wild?
image by Gerhard Höllisch
Barack Obama is not a Muslim (well, it depends who you ask)
A Pew research poll yesterday found that only 34% of Americans can correctly identify President Obama as a Christian. This number is down 17 percentage points from those who identified his Christian faith correctly during the 2008 campaign (apparently folks are forgetful about their leader’s faith?). 24% of Americans incorrectly believe Obama is Muslim. (And the Pew poll was conducted before Obama weighed in on the Park51/Cordoba House project question. Here is a similar TIME poll.)
Before I go further, let me follow Amy Sullivan’s lead (here) and note what must be said at this point. Sullivan writes:
Let me pause for a moment here to say that it is of course not a smear to call someone a Muslim. It is, however, obnoxious to say someone is a member of a religious faith when he’s not–and to insist that he is not a member of the tradition he does claim. It would also be foolish and naive to pretend that conservatives who call Obama a Muslim are doing it in a neutral way and that their intention is not to raise questions about his “otherness.”
By the way, for those who actually want to think deeply on Obama’s faith, pick up a copy of The Faith of Barack Obama by Stephen Mansfield. But here’s what this outrageous poll data causes me to ponder:
First, I’m struck by the fact that though I interact with hundreds of people personally and professionally, I’d be hard-pressed to name more than a handful who might believe President Obama is Muslim. But, according to the poll, 1 in 4 Americans believe so. This reminds me of my sheltered nature, of the cliquishness of American life, and my self-selected friends and relations. Additionally, since Obama’s faith practically never comes up in regular conversation, I wonder if perhaps I’m just way off presuming my friends and relations have accurate understandings of Obama’s faith.
Second, who knows how really to delve into such things via a poll, but I wonder how much the faith poll numbers would correspond to more overt racism if pollsters asked the right question. My guess is that many of those who believe Obama is Muslim might also be very uncomfortable with those of other faiths and those of other skin colors in general. (For example, the TIME poll finds, “Nearly one-third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President.”) Perhaps it’s the case that maligning Islam is somehow culturally okay, while overtly using racial epithets crosses a time-honored line.
Finally, I profoundly disagree with Sullivan’s statement in her analysis that, “In a perfect world, nobody would give a hoot whether the president went to church or said grace before meals or ever uttered one word publicly about his religious beliefs.” Religious belief is hugely important to me, as is any moral underpinnings or claims about the end times, or belief in divine interventionism, or God’s loving nature, or God’s non-existence, etc.. I will happily vote for candidates of many religious faiths (or none), but I will always seek to do so considering a candidate’s faith, thoughtfulness, and positions on the issues. I appreciate Sullivan’s reporting, but I’ll go to my grave professing that faith matters matter. And that’s what’s awesome about the US and the First Amendment — and very scary about this poll data.
Update: Amy Sullivan reflects a bit more on 8/20/10 in “Are One-Quarter of Americans Freakin’ Morons”
Creative Commons image by Alex Johnson
In Defense of Twitter
Let’s call it “Twitterphobia.” Several times a week, in my usual perusal of weekly magazines, op-ed pieces, and current event commentary I run into a well-respected and well-researched writer bemoaning Twitter. “Twitter is dumbing down our teenagers,” they say. “Twitter is besieging our English majors.” “Twitter is poisoning our minds and starving us of the few intellectual merits we still have.”
Nice try, but Twitter ain’t the issue folks. In fact, I think Twitter and its 140-character messages is causing a flippin’ amazing surge in creative thinking. Let me explain.
- Though some say 140 characters is a too short to say much of anything, I say the 140 character limit Twitter employs actually pushes us to write with precision, creativity, and pizzazz. Who knows, maybe its just the the fact that there’s a limit at all causes anyone with tenure to freak out over a perceived threat to intellectual freedom. Mark Twain once apologized to an editor when sending in a new essay, “I’m sorry I didn’t have time to make this shorter.” Brevity is not the enemy. Sometimes the attacks feel like a group of poets worrying long form poetry is at risk, but instead of writing good long form poetry they lash out against haikus. I say simply: brevity is beautiful.
- Sure, Twitter isn’t a platform for drawn-out arguments laced with careful caveats, but it’s not trying to be. What Twitter can do – really well, in fact – is point people in the direction of just that sort of work. Every day, I click on Internet links recommended by those I follow on Twitter and arrive at fantastic articles, sometimes very long, which I often then recommend to my followers on Twitter as well. In fact, the New York Times and Slate recently reported that some of their most-read articles over the past few years have been their longest. Twitter isn’t killing long-form journalism, rather, it might be resuscitating it after all. … Continue Reading
Non-church miscellany
This post is not about General Assembly. Neither is it about Presbyterians, or even Christianity. Thank you, blog readers, for sticking with me through some heavy PC(USA) polity and politics. Instead, this post is about three things (which, I promise, has nothing at all to do with the fact that some sermons have three points.)
1. Living in Grand Forks, North Dakota has its perks — no, really, it does. For example, for eight months out of the year you don’t have to worry about ice cream melting in your trunk on the way home from the grocery store. Actually, in seriousness, I’ve found another.
I receiving a parking ticket a few weeks ago for parking on the street outside our apartment on day the city does road cleaning. Having lived there for a year and unaware of the Monday no parking policy, I called the city to complain. Before I could get an angry word out, the nice guy I spoke to said, “Well, we’ll be happy to forgive your ticket. As a courtesy, the city council has a policy to forgive any questionable first time tickets, so let’s get this erased.” And in about a minute, we did.
2. You big city folks will not believe this next story. Yesterday I was working at the church in Hallock, Minn. and made a phone call. On accident, though, I switched the numbers and ended up … Continue Reading
What? My phone has an off button!
I’m not a huge multi-tasker, but my skills for doing one thing at a time are slipping fast.
Though I don’t tend to talk on the phone, chat online, listen to the radio, etc. at one time — mostly because I’m just not very good at it — I find my attention span shortening. I read for shorter spells. I check emails or facebook when I might be writing. I tend to value responding to an email quickly more than working hard while my inbox fills.
I am not alone. The solution, many are saying, it to get an iPad. Their clean interface and lack of ability to do more than one thing at once forces users to focus on one task. Just read. Just email. Just tweet rather than doing all at once.
I find the iPad solution wishful thinking, wishful both because, sure, I’d love an iPad and because of the certainty that the technology will allow multitasking in the future.
As I ponder this trend, I recall students who claim they “studied for four hours straight” but whose studying was constantly interrupted by text messages and phone calls. In truth, they studied maybe 3 hours total, and never more than 15 minutes consecutively.
This is all quite problematic, because every technology that interrupts my tasks has an easy way to be turned off. I can leave Twitter alone. I can close my email program. I can silence my phone and leave it in another room. The world would go on, I’m sure. And I, likely, would be more productive.
But it’s very hard to turn off. Extremely difficult. I’m of two minds about the reason for that. Either, I can’t turn off because of the alluring (even sinful) human tendency to be led away from what’s best for ourselves and the world. Call it pride, sin, stupidity, lack-of-focus, whatever but it certainly could be that simple: I should turn off and its just a poor decision, a moral misjudgment when I don’t. Or, perhaps I can’t turn off because of what those peeps and tweets and emails mean: human connection. Maybe what’s keeping me away from the “quit” button is that I don’t want to quit people and the connections made through technology.
Quit Facebook Day was supposed to occur recently. If you didn’t hear about it don’t feel bad. You didn’t miss much. It was a flop. Perhaps that’s because in a world where we long for human connections, quitting facebook would feel like dumping one’s friends, family, and community. People didn’t quit because ultimately they love what facebook does for them: connect them one to another.
Sure, it’s not as easy as that. Virtual connections are a bit different than others. Fine. But, at the end of the day, I think virtual communities are a net positive and that’s part of the reason they are so hard to turn off, even for an hour.
What do you think? How do you turn off your technological connections for a time? Surely I am not alone.
image by Jakub Krechowicz
Is Grand Forks the next Atlanta?
In the past ten years I’ve lived in a Florida town of 350,000 people, in the Atlanta area of 6 million plus, in a Scottish coastal town of 50,000, become quite familiar with the Twin Cities of 3 million, spent significant time in a Minnesota town of 1100, and now live in Grand Forks with about 50,000. In each place I’ve preferred neighborhoods that promote walking or biking, provide easy access to shopping and restaurants, and encourage relationships with my neighbors.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoVXoB6x3vM]
I enjoyed this video on suburban expansion versus the merits of in-town living. Sure, it’s PR, but it’s well done and points to an important issue, both environmental and social. Though it focused on Atlanta, I wonder now that I’m a Grand Forksian (is that right?), if Grand Forks can’t do more to address southward expansion. When I drive in the neighborhoods south of town I just feel, well, like I’m worshiping closed garages, viewing unsustainable expansion, and am more connected to pretty lawns than kind people. That’s probably not fair, as I haven’t actually lived out there, but my point is that Grand Forks would do better to improve downtown development than southward expansion.
If Grand Forks really wants to tackle North Dakota’s brain drain, leaders should fix downtown parking problems, fix up downtown living, address the loud and long trains, incentivize shops for groceries and every day products, and improve the bus system. This weekend’s arts festival was a great example of what Grand Forks can do and be. I hope leaders build on this success, emphasizing smart, sustainable, friendly community life.
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