“Three passions, simple but overwhelming have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind.”

- Bertrand Russell         

Your imprint lingers
October, oh October
Crisp air, crunching leaves

Breathe with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air.  Shun electric wire.  Communicate slowly.   Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens.

This, certainly, is not my life.

But I’d like it to be.

The first steps are the hardest.

Now what about Twitter? I find Twitter to be a kind of taunt: “Okay, truth-lover, see what you can do with 140 characters! You say your mission is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things! Well, this is one of those ‘all things.’ Can you magnify Christ with this thimble-full of letters?”

To which I respond:

The sovereign Lord of the earth and sky
Puts camels through a needle’s eye.
And if his wisdom see it mete,
He will put worlds inside a tweet.

140 characters. Awesome.

@JohnPiper

Given how easy it is to post a message on Twitter and have it be broadcast almost instantly to one’s followers, Twitter becomes a medium of content delivery that is both faster than e-mail and wider reaching than an instant message conversation. Numerous people have taken advantage of the power of Twitter; Barack Obama announced his running-mate over Twitter, for one, and thousands of people followed and identified with the daily goings-on of the Mars Phoenix Rover via an employee at JPL posting on its behalf. Twitter has been used to humanize large corporations, give a heads-up to deal-seekers, and reiterate a company’s commitment to being interactive with its users. Even news organizations have taken to twitter, from new start-ups to well established members of traditional media.

This way Twitter is being used in this last instance is both promising and potentially scary. Here’s why.

It’s wonderful to receive news as it happens. Twitter allows for news to be relayed faster than traditional media outlets are able to report. For example, a few weeks ago I heard about a plane crash on Twitter five to ten minutes before it hit the news. Twitter allow the “person on the ground” to be heard by those around the world in record time.

This is a great, great tool for citizen journalism. The problems manifest when you tradeoff speed for reliability. It’s easy for rumors and misinformation to be spread around the internet, anyway, and by providing the means for anyone to become a reporter, the standards of journalism and reporting that traditional news outlets are held to are not enforced. The pressure to “get it out first” sure doesn’t help, either. 

Last week, I received an Amber Alert via Twitter.  While Twitter is a good medium to transmit Amber Alerts, this one turned out to be a hoax.  Just yesterday, my friend Mark made this tweet:

trappermark Twitter news conflict: @cnnbrk telling me 9 dead in Turkish Air crash. At same time, @nytimes says just 20 hurt.

So not all reporting can be trusted, that’s a given.  As long as people fact-check and confirm the things they hear, there’s no problem with being presented with conflicting information.  Unfortunately, my experience tells me that most people do take what they hear at face value.  Maybe regular users of the internet are different, I don’t know.  Being able to quickly sort out fact from fiction is essential to using the web effectively as a research tool.  As the web extends deeper into every facet of our daily lives, this skill becomes more and more important in shaping how we see the world around us.

I say, bring on the citizen journalism.  Let’s just make sure we do it (and read it) responsibly.

Apparently, Charlottesville-area schools are on delay again, which is sort of amusing; it’s still just rain for now.

I got in to work a few minutes ago, and I’m the only person in today, it seems; everyone else is either ona business trip or taking care of things in the Northern Virginia office. At least I have some time to breathe, think, and wrap my head around a few projects at work without any distractions.

I often lament not having more times like these when I can focus on one thing and do it well, but on the other hand I’m constantly trying to cram more and more things into my day, distracting myself with any number of things. I bet that with a bit more self-discipline, these moments don’t have to be so out-of-the-ordinary.

I know that 3 days doesn’t seem like a long time, but this is different for me. The first year that Mika and I started dating, I was part of a fellowship program called the Trinity Fellows Program out of my church here in Charlottesville, Trinity Presbyterian. Just about every hour of every week was scheduled and planned out, and I was living with a wonderful family out in Crozet, 25 miles outside of Charlottesville. Suffice to say, during that year I didn’t see Mika all that much. We would get an hour here and there at night before I drove back to Crozet, but I would sometimes go 4-5 days without really seeing her.

And that was ok.

I didn’t like it, but I simply looked forward to when I would get to see her. I still do, of course, but now that we’ve been married for a little more than four months, I’ve noticed a change in myself, a greater attachment. I mean, she’s my wife.  Things just feel different.  I see her almost every day now, but I feel like I need that.  From the moment we took our vows, I’ve never spent as much time with one person as I have with Mika, and I guess it becomes the norm.  It’s a great thing; I love it.  It just makes it that much harder when that person is gone.

It’s a gorgeous day.  At 8:45 AM, it feels like it’s in the upper 50′s outside.  I didn’t get a chance to take advantage of the weather yesterday, so I’m hoping to today; get outside, work out, take some pictures, and enjoy these hints of spring.

And tonight I’ll have something wonderful to come home to.

A couple of quotes that I found particularly convicting:

We desperately seek to contribute – to be significant.  Blogs give us this chance, and so does YouTube, and Twitter, and Facebook, and the rest.  Suddenly we have things to say and — more importantly — people who are listening.

But these ways of “reaching out” or “giving back” to culture are still predominantly about me.  About how I find meaning by bouncing ideas off of the wider web world.  About feeling important, validated, useful, interesting.

I’ve never really thought about it this way, but the “Social Networking Revolution” is, fundamentally, something about “me.”  In broadcasting what is going on in my life (and seeing what is going on in the lives of others), Twitter/blogging/whatever speaks to my pride, my desire to “feel important” or be respected.

Even when it comes to finding new music, a voice in the back of my head considers the satisfaction and the affirmation I receive I find something my friends haven’t heard of before.  I used to check the stats on my webpage often to see how many people visited daily, and from where.  Seeing lots of hits made me feel important, as though people somewhere looked to me for insight or information.  It was a good feeling.  

Looking to the outside world to affirm that can be very, very dangerous.  In attempting to feel connected with others, we increasingly abstract ourselves from real relationships, selfishly focusing on ourselves above all else.  We end up creating our own truths and realities.

It appears that ultimately we’re retreating further inward, to the “i” world of our personal computing universe.  Under the guise of increasing our levels of connectivity, these technologies are ultimately just tools to help us isolate, insulate and unshackel from the outmoded constraints of having to answer to anyone other that ourselves.

“Social web” applications such as Facebook or Twitter by nature open up a multitude of possibilities and capabilities for digital interaction, and I’ve incorporated a number of them into my daily routine.  It is important to balance these digital interactions out with “real” relationships, however.  There is no substitute for grabbing breakfast or coffee with a friend, looking them in the eyes, and really communicating without feeling the need to show off.

Accountability is refreshing; it’s funny how we can find ourselves silently sitting in front of a screen for hours on end, wondering why we still feel empty. 

The end of the article frames the issue well from a Christian perspective:

In times like these – when it’s easier and more alluring than ever to be or feel important –  Christians must remember that we’re not called to be viral superstars, we’re called to be living sacrifices.  We’re not instructed to make ourselves look as good as possible in front of the largest audience we can; no we are instructed to deny ourselves and humbly follow Christ.

It’s our best friends that remind us of that, anyway.

Edit:  my friend Harrison has some good commentary on this article over on his website, as well.  I recommend you go over and read what he has to say.

In the course of doing something completely different, I ran across a LiveJournal blog I started sometime in high school, I think. Oh, the memories.

At the time I created the site, I had deftly mastered using AOL’s website builder and, despising it’s limitations (and the grotesque HTML markup it generated), I searched for greener pastures. Hope exciting; a page on the World Wide Web all to myself, outside of the shepherding crook of America Online. I wrote journal entries and blog posts, and thought myself rather clever. I eventually lost interest in LiveJournal and went elsewhere for my blogging needs; I think I actually posted entries manually using a text editor to my UVA webspace for a while before using ModBlog and then graduating to WordPress.

Anyway, the last time I posted to this LiveJournal page was in 2001, the year of my high school graduation. Curious, I looked to see if I could identify a progression in how I thought and how I conveyed my ideas to others over the course of posting.

My prognosis?

Oh, my. Horrid. How did I ever manage to get into UVA, writing like that?

When I actually sit down and make the time to write, I consider myself a careful writer. I strive for clarity and search for the right words: why add superfluous words to get my point across when a handful of well-chosen ones will do? Now, in light of this glimpse back in time of the state of my writing as I entered the University of Virginia, it’s quite humbling to see where you’ve come from.

I look back at much of the poetry I wrote in high school, the stuff I was so proud of, and now see clumsy, cheesy phrases and awkward idea constructions. These are problems of execution, of course, not imagination – it’s like watching a small bird make its first feeble wing flaps before it trips and totters awkwardly out of its nest. Even so, I had some good ideas, and it felt great to get them out on paper.

I wouldn’t consider myself a master of the language now, by any means. It is encouraging, however, that I can look at the same pieces and writings now with some perspective, see what was wrong, but also see what was right.

I guess, if anything, it shows that I’m always growing. Where I came from shapes where I am now, and it eventually leads me closer to where I want to be.

…But it’s still somewhat embarrassing.