thejakers

Social media can take over your life if you’re not careful. Personally, I fight a constant battle to keep my social media activities in check and a healthy, balanced part of my life rather than a monster that consumes my free time, energy, and steals from my family.

I found this great little video over at Fast Company on how to master your social media monster:

These are great suggestions, no? I’m curious as to how you’re coping with the barrage. What are some tactics you employ to tame the social media beast?

A few years ago the concept of personal branding would have seemed silly. Sure there were people who could get away with it–the Donald Trumps and Bill Gates of the world. But that was only because they had worked hard to build a business in a traditional way that gained them notoriety.

Nowadays it seems like everyone is talking about personal brands–and everyone is trying to build one.

As a recent article by Tom Peters in Fast Company puts it:

You’re branded, branded, branded, branded.

It’s time for me — and you — to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that’s true for anyone who’s interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

It’s that simple — and that hard. And that inescapable.

Peters is probably right. But as pastors and Christians, the concept of personal branding brings up some prickly problems. Here’s just one question I’ve thought of lately:

Would Paul have participated in self-branding?  Did Jesus self-brand?

I’ll argue the answer is unequivocally no. Both continually pointed to God the Father and sought to give him glory. Paul, after all, wrote this to the Corinthians:

1And I, when I came to you, brothers,^a did not come proclaiming to you the testimony^b of God with lofty speech or wisdom.2For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (I Corinthians 2:1-5).

The biblical admonition is to find your identity in Jesus and to count yourself as nothing. I’m guilty of falling into the trap of the personal brand (after all, my blog is named after me…). Are you? How do we reconcile the world’s continue pressure to self-brand with the Bible’s teachings? Or do we at all?

A fascinating piece this morning over in Fast Company on the future of the PC, as imagined by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation, which for all intents and purposes predicted the netbook revolution.

Basically, OLPC envisions a mashup of the rumored tablet PC technology just around the corner and a full netbook experience. It calls the prototype XO3. Fast Company describes the project like this:

Designed by Yves Behar, the XO3 is a totally different 21st-Century beast compared to the classic notebook design of the original XO: It’s a super-skinny plastic tablet/slate PC. Suited for its intended use out of the normal environment of PC use, the screen is actually plastic, so it’s resilient and slightly flexible. It’s also a multitouch device, laden with sensors so it can transform into book-reading or web-surfing mode. And, just like the original machine it’s got a dual-mode screen that works both in daylight or as a self-illuminated LCD (no surprises that the OLPC team has links with PixelQI).

But that 8.5 by 11-inch screen makes this device far from being a curio destined to transform the education of kids in far-flung, poor corners of the world. As does the design, which was driven by Negroponte’s request to make the thing “extremely simple and practically frameless.” As a result, there’s practically nothing separating the computer from the screen, just a thin trademark green rubber edge, a camera on the back and a finger loop for steadying the PC while it’s hanging from a belt. The screen and body of the XO3 mean the machine itself practically vanishes when it’s being used–the experience is delivered entirely on screen.

Here are some conceptual shots of the product:

Pretty cool, huh? The best pat is that the XO3 is targeted for a $75 price point. At that price, most people will be able to afford one, or a similar competing device.

No doubt this type of technology will happen. And it will continue the progression of the necessity of personal technology becoming synthesized into our daily lives.

I actually get excited when I think of the applications this type of technology can have in a church liturgy. Back in the day, churches used hymnals and prayer books to help guide people through the church service. Today, we use projection screens for the same purpose. This type of PC technology could usher in a new era of prayer book type liturgy with a digital twist, whereby a dedicated church worship planning program creates a file that has all the readings, songs, and accompanying multimedia streamed into each persons’ personal computing devise.

Does this type of technology excite you? What are some other applications you can think of for church services and ministry?

Just when you think you’ve seen it all in social media comes Twoddler, an interactive toy that allows your language challenged baby to tweet you via a Fisher Price Activity Set. You think it’s a joke, but sadly it’s not. Check out this video.

INCA Award 2009 WINNER: Twoddler from IBBT on Vimeo.

Yet another “pioneering” event has happened in the digital world. A Japanese man named SAL9000, married his longtime virtual girlfriend, Nene Anegasaki, a character from the digital dating simulator Love Plus. Yes, folks. This is a real person with a fake name, marrying a fake person with a real name.

Here is a video of the “ceremony”:

Unless you think this is a fluke event, it’s not. In fact this is a growing trend in Japan. Here’s a quote from a New York Times article that details this peculiar cultural phenomenon:

In Japan the fetishistic love for two-dimensional characters is enough of a phenomenon to have earned its own slang word, moe, homonymous with the Japanese words for “burning” or “budding.” In an ideal moe relationship, a man frees himself from the expectations of an ordinary human relationship and expresses his passion for a chosen character, without fear of being judged or rejected.

I think this is a prime example of emergence of digitalism and digitalist culture, which I wrote about here. The inherent narcism of the Internet and digital media is leading to men who are unable to love anything that requires a pouring out of self. Worst yet, they justify it by blaming society and other women for wronging them! And worst of all, the culture in Japan revolves around pre-pubescent anime depictions of girls, often in the nude – inanimate depictions of helpless girls.

As one Ken Okayama explains it:

“I was steps away from getting married,” he explained earnestly when prodded about his experience. “You have to make sure you don’t hurt a real person; you have to watch what you say, and you have to keep your room clean. In Japan, it’s not O.K. to like another person if you’re already with somebody else. With an anime character, you can like one character one day and a different character the next.”

Many might think that something like that wouldn’t happen here, but American advertisers are already setting up technology to replace relationships as the primary value providers in our life. In what I wish was intentional irony, this ad was prominently displayed at the top of the New York Times article.

There’s a lot of blogging advice out there that claim the short blog post is the best kind. And generally I agree. But I’ve also been rethinking the implications of why we like short blog posts. Here are some reasons I came up with.

The Nature of Screen Reading
I don’t know about you, but the nature of reading anything on a screen lends itself to shorter, scannable material. After a while, my eyes start to bug out when I read for too long on a computer screen.

The Nature of Internet Usage
People don’t generally use the Internet for deep study. The fact that it’s called surfing the web is indicative of our attitudes and approach to online activity. Rather than go deep, we skim along the surface, moving from blog to blog, or website to website.

The (Changing) Nature of Our Minds
There has been a lot of speculation out there as to how the Internet is rewiring the way our brain works. The famous article on this is Nicholas Carr’s, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I certainly can feel my ability to focus and sustain hard thinking is slipping away. It seems that the web is rewiring our brains to be predisposed to short, pithy statements rather than long, well-thought out arguments.

The Nature of Information
Because there is so much information to be processed in a day, we tend to move through it as quickly as possible. After all we are finite beings working with a finite amount of time. The amount of information that barrages us lends to a kind of schizophrenia. The goal is to move from one topic to the next, getting just as much information as we need for our own purposes rather than to explore the rabbit trails that information leads to. Always at the back of our mind is the thought that there may be a better and more relevant piece of information we should be focusing on.

The Nature of Humans
It is human nature to take the path of least resistance. Arguably, it is much easier to read a short, pithy blog post than to commit the time and effort it takes to process a long and involved one. And it’s takes much less effort to write shorter posts, as well.

The Long and Short of It
The question is not whether short posts are better in a consumeristic sense, but are they good for our soul. I posted this killer quote by J.I. Packer yesterday, but I’ll share it again:

“I’m amazed at the amount of time people spend on the internet. I’m not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger—and then moving on quickly to the next blogger. That makes us more superficial, not more thoughtful.”

This morning I was talking with some fellow Praxis staff, and we knocked around this idea of superficiality that our culture seems to thrive on. Here was our question:

Is it the Churches job to create content that meets people where they are at (i.e. – short, pithy sound bites), or to try and redeem the culture of superficiality and help people rediscover deep thinking and contemplation?

At the end of the day, we know short blogs are better in a pragmatic sense…but are the better in a cosmic sense? Or are they major contributors to a fundamental change in our ability to think deeply?

What do you think?

[Photo by Will Lion]

There is tons of advice out there about how to make sure technology doesn’t get in the way of your responsibilities to your family…specifically to your spouse.

So, I’m going to go ahead and say that this is definitely not the way to start off on the right foot with your new bride.

Apprently this guy didn’t tell his bride that he was going to be so gosh, darn hilarious at the alter. As you can tell, she was thrilled. But the pastor’s face is priceless.

For the record, Tracy changed her Twitter name to @tracymariehanna since this event.

What do you think? Cute or idiotic?

[Photo and scoop from TechCrunch]

In case you missed it, I was privileged to do a series of guest posts on the topic of online church over at Rethinkmission.org, Jonathan McIntosh’s blog. If you don’t read Jon’s blog, you should. It’s an awesome blog filled with some great content.

My series was in response to Doug Estes recent blog tour to promote his new book, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World. In particular, I was responding to his post on Out of Ur. It’s probably no secret that I don’t support the notion of doing church purely online, though I do think the Internet is an invaluable tool for churches and ministry. I was disappointed that Doug seemed to be attacking straw men, rather than engaging in a fruitful debate on this topic. Thus, I wrote the following series linked below. Thanks again to Jonathan for letting me soap box on his digital lawn.

Rethinkmission.org Guest Posts:

In Defense of Physical Community – Part One

In Defense of Physical Community – Part Two

In Defense of Physical Community – Part Three

In Defense of Physical Community – Part Four

[Photon of church in Second Life by rafeejewell]

Justin Taylor shares a devastating quote from Peter Kreeft’s notes on Pascal’s Pensees:

“We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .”

This is a theme I’ve been more and more interested in. I especially appreciate Kreeft’s connection to our business and our desire to avoid introspection.

I’m no Pascal, but I’ve mused on this in a more low-brow form here while reflecting on this quote from Paul Carr:

“And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia. A world where our reaction to any event, no matter how serious, is influenced, not by what’s right, but by how it will play with our micro-audience. An audience that, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s wholehearted support of the real-time web, is about to get even bigger and more tempting.”

[Photo courtesy of cofano]

Recently Miley Cyrus made a headline splash by declaring that she was quitting Twitter. “I stopped living for moments and started living for people,” she said (Of course a few pics of you in your skivvies might influence your decision to get off the interwebs too). She then lost all possible credibility on the topic by making a hideous rap song and posting it on YouTube.

But let’s not forget that Miley is seventeen years old (I kind of choked on my coffee when I realized she was born my freshman year of high school). So, she’s allowed to make a fool of herself more often than not. That’s what teenagers do – fortunately, and unfortunately for Miley, most teenagers don’t have their lives in the limelight a majority of time. But teenagers also have little moments of wisdom that we’d be wise to heed, and I think Miley might be on to something here. When she says she’s living for people, she of course meant her followers.

I understand where she’s coming from. I’ve found myself more concerned about providing content for others than enjoying life and its moments. I’ve been sucked in to the Real-Time Web, where every moment is an opportunity to be catalogued and disseminated to a waiting audience (kind of like right now).

I came across an excellent article by Paul Carr on this concept of the Real-Time Web. We’d all be wise to ponder the implications of Carr’s words. Here’s a quote I found especially poignant:

“And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia. A world where our reaction to any event, no matter how serious, is influenced, not by what’s right, but by how it will play with our micro-audience. An audience that, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s wholehearted support of the real-time web, is about to get even bigger and more tempting.”

You can read the whole article here.

[Picture courtesy of Come Back on The Radar]