Part 4: The Big "I" World

We looked at the i-World and how it has become ubiquitous. We considered how the focus on information can cause us to miss the life and joy around us. Digital information access is a lot like a cultural phone booth, where individuals can "call" anywhere and get info, but where other actual people are kept out.

That little “i” in iPhone has turned into the Big “I” with which Christ-followers are so familiar -- after all, the failures of man in every age are there for all to see.

This current culture shift offers a great opportunity to tell our digitally hooked friends about the other great illusions that have separated us from the reality of our need for authentic human connection and spiritual depth that can only come from a relationship to God through faith in Jesus, the Messiah.

Consider the lady at the grocery store whose kid was getting ready to jump out of the cart while mom texted -- oblivious in the digital world to the real world of crashing kid. Ever nearly caused a pile-up because you were I-ing while driving? Big I.

Or the youngster trying to see his homework on a screen the size of a deck of cards – he was about 3 inches from the screen. When asked why, he said, "I have to do it. All the kids do it." Creeping up on Big I, this kiddo might do anything online that his friends do...juice bar with porn on the side (Portland, OR)?

Or the girls who go into deep depression at the relative number of friends they have on facebook compared to the most popular ones in their class. Big I. In our day it was the prom date ranking -- today, maximum friends one never actually sees in person.

Or the woman, in love with her iPhone, has her iPhone stolen in Paris, finding that her entire life has been stolen in the process. Sadly, the Big I, believing that her i-world is impervious to disaster. In our day it was the buddy who told all your secrets, or the friend who read your diary. We know the Big I.

The Unintended Consequence of the iWorld

Today, i-technology has changed the world and has made communication instantaneous and ubiuquitous. But it also has focused many individual users internally focused and tunneled, locked into a tiny reality, thinking in little bits.

There is no balance in that kind of thinking. There is no influence from experience. There is no synthesis of external plus internal information; no assimilation of multiple, simultaneous sources of information. Just a small, tight focus on oneself. I think we used to send people to counselors for that problem…

We who have lived through our version of the Big I and found it wanting can help prevent the logical outcome of this culture shift - Myopic Self-Worship -- the same old besetting sin in a new, pernicious form. Satan has only a few cards to play, but, man, can he find interesting, sneaky ways to play them.

What to Do? Engage!

Let’s make a pact to step back into the reality of the messy world we live in, not the manufactured digital world which, of necessity, has been packaged, and managed, and delivered to us by someone else and may be a lie.

Let’s think of OUR God, OUR world, OUR opportunities to serve, OUR neighborhoods, OUR families, OUR issues and problems to solve and let the “I” go for a little while in favor of real community.

The i-technology may be producing a generation of “I”-hogs – only interested in others if there’s something in it for “I.” Only finding things relevant if they relate directly to “I,” Only worth sacrifice if it benefits “I.”

Let's enter our culture as weary warriors of our own years of Big I struggle, and help revitalize face-to-face discourse and discussion of meaning and life.

Let’s get together and talk about ideas again – create community in your home or neighborhood – a group that gets together and talks and studies face-to-face about what the Bible is and says, heroes of the Bible and heroes of America, real American history not regurgitated pseudo-history, or how our government works, or what's going on that you can positively affect in your kids’ school, or your church, or even to pray for God's blessing on your families.

There is a spiritual reality in every person's life. That reality can be pushed down and disguised by the noise of everyday living. Give up some texting and online time. Turn off your phone and put it in your pocket. Take a good look at your girlfriend, wife, boyfriend, husband, children, or best buddy if he or she is still there!

In all this work you do, and in all this struggle, consider Jesus who can make all the difference in our understanding of the world.

If you're going to be online today, Why not start your day online with the Bible (http://bible.org/) -- it's out there in cyberspace waiting for you. Don't know anything about Jesus? Go to http://www.jesus.org and there you will find a varied, interesting, and Biblically accurate view and answers to many, many questions that people have about Christ, Christianity, and God in general. Use the access to find the Truth.

Read "More than a Carpenter," or Charles Swindoll's biography "Jesus". They are good overviews of Jesus. Spend time imparting Truth to your children from the Bible. Chances are they will not receive it from any other source. Parents are the primary teachers of spiritual and ethical values. It's not too late to start! Go to the Book of Proverbs and get some advice.

Teach your children to turn the digital world off and spend some time looking at what God has made. Walk with them. Go camping (I know, but just go. You will change and so will they.). You can start at a state park where they rent cabins... Oh, go on and get a bike.

Deal with the Big I

A tight focus on ourselves causes loss of perspective, loss of awareness, loss of historical connection, and disconnection from the context into which our bits of information fit. Those consequences are very, very real.

I-solation causes people to forget why we have rules of law, or families with moms and dads, or allies, or national interest in a republic vs any other form of government. They forget to learn any history. They expect results without effort.

There is a generation of God's offspring blindly becoming totally self-absorbed, spiritually bereft, ill-equipped people with few historical, moral, or geographic moorings. They will not know until it is over what they have lost.

Can Christians stand by and let this happen?

Get engaged. Share the gospel with every person you can. Use the AWANA gospel app to reach people in the iWorld. Take EvanTell's evangelism training at www.act111.org and hit the bricks!

The Lord works in every part of history and He is working here now -- every member of the Body of Christ can help re-engage someone who is drifting into "I"-solation.

Beware the idol of "I" whose priest is in your hand.

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.