Part 3. The iWorld and the Unintended Consequences

Part 3. The iWorld and the Unintended Consequences

We worked in the i-world almost from the beginning. We worked with most major manufacturers and software developers who wanted to change the world in the 1985 – 2005 timeframe. And we figured out three things:


1. The world was going to change because Intel could make chips that computed faster and faster every year and no one could even guess how many generations of faster chips they could make. Lots. There would be lots of faster, faster, faster chips. Apple would get chips that did graphics faster and faster. It would be a race that both could win.


2. Over a short period of time the volume of voice traffic on networks would be replaced by the volume of data traffic on networks and it would happen faster than people thought.

3. Once people could hold the network in their hand, the world would REALLY change!


Steve Jobs, and Nokia, Motorola, and AT&T, Intel, IBM, Cisco, Netscape, AOL, Adobe, Yahoo,
Google and all those other guys gave us the network in our hands. And Jobs made it truly fascinating and beautiful to get music and art and access. We absolutely loved instant graphics printing. Graphics that really looked like you wanted them to look.

We were actually supposed to be able to have a paperless society. That is really, really funny, don’t you think? Don’t you have a shredder by your desk? Oh, well.

Thanks to all those guys, you can get the Bible in your hand in so many languages now that it
boggles the mind! But just getting the Bible in your hand does not make you a Christian, and that’s a fact.

Knowing something (and we now can know a lot about many things very quickly) does not replace doing something and many folks are misunderstanding that fact – ultimately one must synthesize information to truly learn. Just knowing and seeing is a fragment of reality.

Plenty of folks in other countries ripped off the intellectual property, stole the ideas, and reproduced them on the cheap. Jobs spawned a revolution in lots of places he never visited. So now the world has changed. Our airwaves are unclogging because our television is all data. We have broadband for that. We can get more information faster than ever before in history.

G I G O.

But the change, no matter how seductive, is not necessarily for the better! We have dependency
where we used to have freedom!

Think about this: Maybe one person in history ever got their identity stolen by using their library card and sitting in the library reading some reference material!

We have to guard the world in a way we have never done in history. Our personal identities are at
stake! Hackers of every description want our information. Hackers from other countries want to invade the United States at the byte level, and they actually have done it by hacking into some amazingly vulnerable precious stuff!

Just consider for a moment what happens if one’s government turns off the Internet, as they did in Iran recently. What happens when the net dies? Bad things happen.

You do know that the bank does not actually have very much actual money and that if the ATMs go down, or the credit card reader does not work, that you will not, repeat not, be able to get your money out of the bank or buy your gas at the pump.

You do know that not everything you read on the web is true, in fact, so much of it is not true that
people are making a good living sorting it out.

Do you know that there are people out there who have no actual friends at all --- just avatars?

They have exchanged the real, tangible world for the digital imitation. Too much of a good thing is really too much. Too much data in little bitty bites makes people think in little bitty bites.

While they can open a lot of files and go back and forth through them, their processing produces less comprehension. People are stuck in the land of instant read. Maybe being stuck is going to trigger a really torturous shift in personal relationships and comprehension, and an idolatrous "I" focus in the i-world.

More in Part 4: The “I” World

Part 2. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Knows Something that Changed the World

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein is currently professor emerita at the University of Michigan. She’s a brilliant thinker and has the awards and experience to prove it. Her initial work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, is a sizeable (2 vol.), scholarly work that described the change that accompanied the “shift from script to print”. In it she evaluated the impact of the printing press on Western thought, and ultimately on the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Renaissance. An abridged version in paperback is called, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, latest ed. 2005, Cambridge University Press, 1983.

The Gutenberg Printing Press was a technology that truly changed the world. Eisenstein focused on the spread of printed information which changed the way “literate elites” in the West thought about and contributed to the body of knowledge of their time. She thinks of printing as an agent of change, certainly not the only one. She is not primarily interested in the movement from oral to literate tradition, but the changes in thinking that occurred as people moved from “one kind of literate culture to another.”

In terms of access, the Gutenberg Press was to the world of its time what digital text and image communications are to us.

If you want to know and think and ponder these realities, you have a fine companion in Elizabeth Eisenstein who truly gets it. She has recently published Divine Art, Infernal Machine, U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Imagine the differences in data collection, storage, access, and retrieval caused by the early proliferation of printing! One could not separate a printing press from its content. We can’t separate our devices from the Internet and i-content either. Without the content, the device is a paperweight (or a doorstop). Beware the tyrant with the keys to the content – the device becomes a propaganda machine.

In those days, the propaganda machine might not have had much competition. Think about worldview again. Let’s say that scribes are pretty slow, and expensive, so there aren’t many copies of anything. So even if you might have been literate, you might not have a copy of your own Bible, because it was simply not available.

Up until the point that people actually got a chance to learn to read, and then read the Bible for themselves, few people knew what the Bible really said. Thus their worldview was limited. But, even literate people had little access to the Bible before the Bible was printed and made available more widely. Some people who did have access to the Bible desired to control it.

People in power (Henry VIII, for example) had interpreted the Bible for other people, and, in may ways, to suit themselves. Reproducing information was costly, time-consuming, and, as a result, unavailable to most people. The Catholic Church did not object to printing itself, only to people who printed “heresy” based on how the Church interpreted heresy. Eisenstein cites a case in which a French king attempted to ban printing altogether, but failed. As is often the case with closely-held, personally valuable information, people were actually not told things that were in the Bible that might cause them to think the status quo could or should change.

Kings and tyrants, even today, find uneducated peasants much more tractable than educated ones. Literacy and access to information is a great liberator.

Each copy of one of those Gutenberg books was exactly the same. Amazing! People even thought it was magic! Consistency was the key! One could trust that what was on the page was the same in every copy made – they compared them to the originals. It was revolutionary – they had the Word of God, just alike, in their home and their church – not chained to the pulpit – right there on a table. The growth of public knowledge and individual thought began to produce change in many aspects of life.

Eisenstein’s most recent work has a chapter entitled, “Printing as a Protestant Weapon.” It was not just the sheer volume of published material that did the number on culture, it was the fact that anyone at all could put their thoughts out there – crazy or sublime, thoughtful or clueless –
ideas proliferated and culture changed. The “common man” as thinker was a radical, culture-warping phenomenon. Truth was out there for all to see.

I would submit that much the same thing happened when print became so commonplace that everyone could read what was happening around the world. Communism and socialism were revealed to be the deceptive, culture-eroding, primitive, death-dealing traps that they are. People read the truth in so many places that the truth could not be denied. They saw photos. They heard speakers. The individual man could see for himself that his family was in mortal danger!

Here in the United States we read, and listened on the radio. We read our newspapers and later watched on television. And we realized something, without many people telling us. The
words were true: what communism had, what Nazi-ism had, what socialism had, what Islamic
terrorists had was inferior to what WE had.

We’d better fight for what we believed or our lives would change immeasurably for the worse. So we fought WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars I and II, and Afghanistan.

Old, wretched, even demented worldviews can only persist when deception replaces truth. Having the Word and words in one’s hand is a miracle every time. If we have truth, and we don’t share it, and we won’t read it, and we don’t use it, then we are clearly unequipped to deal
with falsehood.

There were leaps and bounds of technology, and it changed and grew. The printed word mattered, and its format was familiar, and suited to the capabilities of the time. We rode to
victory on our newspaper headlines!

Part 3: Steve Jobs and the i-World tomorrow.

Guttenburg, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Steve Jobs

How the World Changes

Part 1

The World Changes When Something

Changes How People Think

Join me to think about technology changes that have had a
profound impact on our culture. I worked in the IT and telecom industries for and with innovators from about 1980 to 2005, so watched much of it happen and I am thinking about context.

Access to information and the amount, speed and delivery range
of information escalated dramatically with these leaps in technology.


We don’t seem to be much smarter because of it. In fact, we can use those same technologies to observe humans all over the world doing thoughtless, misdirected, counter-productive, hateful, world-harming, people-crushing things. So, in Part 1, let’s think about getting smart.

How Does Someone Get Smart and Learn to Think?

Well, the limits for how smart we are likely to get are set early in our lives… Every person is more likely to get smart if:

A. From the time we are born our moms and dads love us, pay attention to us, help us when we are weak, pick us up, talk and sing to us, teach us that we have a positive purpose
in life, show us things and name those things, give us food, take care of us when we are sick, and see that weshare and appreciate others. Thus, our God-provided brains get all those synapses going and growing. About 70% or 80% of our lifetime brain is in place by the time
we are 3-4 years old, according to the early childhood experts. No sophisticated electronics or technology required. Mom and Dad do this.


Question: Can a society that does not value the family unit expect to have smarter or less smart generations to come?


B. We learn to read. Really read and comprehend – we can start with just about anything like labels on the cans in the grocery, and blocks, silly Seuss, and comic books (my personal favorite when I was a kid), and maybe Mad Magazine. We can progress to books with lots of pictures and then no pictures. And reading the Bible, of course, which I will get around to eventually.


Question: How much is it worth to know how to read?

We begin to understand, compare, and process what we are told and what we read. Even as a little kid, we begin to develop what people now call a “worldview,” which is the framework of thinking within which we process what we learn and experience.


“Worldview” is the construct of what we believe to be true. Even very tiny children appear to have this capability – they know their parents love them and they make their little kid decisions based on the safety and love and care they have come to expect as true. “Jesus loves me,
this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” This basic element of truth is core belief to one who holds the Christian worldview – even a very young someone.


Worldview can be positive, realistic, and wholesome. But worldview can also be died-in-the-wool off-planet like some people I knew in the 60’s, some of whom appear to be occupying parks this week!


Teachers and parents make the big difference here, because a child’s mind is malleable and has little defense against sincerely delivered falsehood and cultural programming. We get authentically smarter if we have a school where truth is told and where parents defend the individual “smarts” of their children. (See http://www.celebratekids.com/)


In the truest sense of the word, we are “smart” when our worldview is accurate, (built on immutable truth), and comprehensible (it makes sense to us and others), and helps us make decisions that meet the requirements of life in a wholesome way in the company of family and our larger circle of life.


Our worldview is fed by what happens to us, what we learn, and what we let into our minds whether on purpose or by accident. I am a Christ-follower and have an orthodox Christian worldview that is based in Christian understanding of what is true.

If you are a Christian we have real truth in common. No matter where you live at least one aspect of our worldview is the same – the eternal one.


We got here by thinking about information and how it affects life. It reminded me of how the whole world changed in two historically separate technology leaps and how those changes have both intended and unintended consequences.


See Part 2 of this discussion tomorrow.
Elizabeth Eisenstein Knows Something That Changed the World.

Seeing What God Sees

For a long time, well into my twenties, I thought I was who my parents said I was.

After that, I wrestled with who some other person said I was. Now I’m in my sixties and I know the Truth. But my road to Truth started a long time ago when I first heard The Big Lie.

The Big Lie is: You are only valuable if another person says you are.

The Big Lie is the foundation for:

• Racism – You don’t look like us or talk like us, so you’re not valuable.

• Class and age discrimination – You’re no longer productive. We don't need you.

• Euthanasia -- You’re consuming resources a healthy person needs. You’re dispensable.

• Discrimination against people with disabilities – You’re not productive enough.

• Abortion – You are a small human inconsistent with my life goals. You’re expendable.

Fight the Big Lie! The Truth is that every person has intrinsic value because GOD established the value of every human being. God made us in HIS image – we can think, and reason, and communicate, and love – He has a plan and purpose for us. Every one of His offspring are precious to Him. Read Genesis 1:26-31. We are “very good” workmanship.

A person’s true identity is realized when she trusts Christ alone for her salvation. She understands that Christ died as a substitute for her sins and rose from the dead to prove that death and sin had been conquered. She receives the gift of forgiveness, eternal life in relation with God, and the Holy Spirit’s power to live each day. People can live transparently. We don’t have to “measure up!” God’s grace overcomes the Big Lie!