Twitter Thoughts (dot blogspot dot com)

Some dude named Bobby Earle is a big fan of Twitter. He gives three reasons why:

1. A couple weeks ago, Tim Nosenzo helped me out big time by responding to something I posted on twitter. I had been looking for a very hard to find lens for about 6 weeks. Because of my twitter updates on the matter, Tim kept his eye open for the lens and emailed me when he found one. Long story short, I got the lens!!

2. Another time, I was headed out to Australia. I asked if anyone knew of a place within five hours of Sydney where I could find wild Kangaroos. I got a ton of awesome recommendations, but my friend, Steph (from New Zealand), responded and told me about Morriset hospital with thousands of wild kangaroos! It was a dream come true for me (spent every day in Oz at that hospital - one of the best experiences of my life!).

3. My friend and fellow photographer, Luke, lives out in Australia (if you've never heard of it, it's a small island off the coast of New Zealand - that's for my Kiwi friends :P ). It'd be really expensive for me to text him all the way out in Oz. We catch up all the time on there - and then mutual pals like Amanda in Canada or Bob in England can freely join in on our chats to each other - almost like free group texting! It's so valuable for this feature alone.

In my judgment, these are good reasons to find Twitter useful. I have no quibble with them, but it's worth noting that each of the reasons concern ways in which Bobby was benefited by the service. In other words, it's all about how he got hooked up in one way or another. And, lest you get the wrong idea, I'm all for getting hooked up; so this isn't an indictment of Bobby. Nor do I think he is just using people; I happen to know that he really loves many of these people. (Bobby is my best friend, by the way.)

Another notable thing about Bobby's three reasons is that each of them depends on having a robust number of "followers" (a creepy term in this context, but I'll leave that aside). So if you're a Twitter *noob* or just unpopular, it's unlikely you'll experience the benefits that Bobby has.

What I'm saying so far is

1. Bobby's benefits are genuine fruits of Twitter and worth acknowledging as such, but
   
2. Bobby's benefits ought to be recognized as valuable largely because of their usefulness to Bobby and
3. that Bobby's benefits depend strongly on his popularity.

This is all an attempt to gain some perspective about Twitter - it provides easy access to the content of (potentially) a lot of human minds. Hence the supremely creepy term: hive mind.

And here is where I start to worry, not so much about the use of Twitter but about overestimating what it can do for us. It is undeniably true that Twitter is able to deliver the information stored in the minds of others, but information of what sort? Well, trivia mainly - facts about this or that thing, what is available for sale and where, where the nearest Thai restaurant is, what I feel like today, where on the internet to find something funny or sad or touching or insightful, this or that individual's or organization's latest announcement or advertisement. Again, all these facts can be extremely useful to the right individual at the right time, but, for the most part, the interactions among Twitterers are necessarily superficial and pragmatic. It's like having a 24 hour help desk, staffed with as many folks as are willing to work for you (just so long as you work for them).

Still, I am quick to note that Twitter can of course connect people who can then communicate via some more substantive technology (e.g. email or telephone) or in person(!). But Twitter itself is very limited in the sort of community it can foster.

In light of all this, I worry that Twitter - by its very form - encourages treating people as means to ends and, thus, makes even less likely deep human community in the modern world. (I say "encourages" because I do not want to deny absolutely the possibility of using Twitter and resisting the temptation to devalue one's fellow human beings.)

Blah blah blah...I apologize for the disorganization of this blog; I fear it reflects the disorganization of my thoughts on the matter.

Summary: I think that Twitter is useful to individuals in a very limited and trivial way, though, admittedly, it can (if you've got the right connections) hook you up in big ways (e.g. rare and ripping camera lenses, meaningful kangaroo encounters, and free overseas texting). But I fear that it, while seeming to bring people together, might actually act as an ersatz community - a phony community of mutually self-interested people. I say, therefore, if you're looking for community, don't look for it on Twitter. If you're looking for a link into a hive mind of trivial, but potentially useful, information, join up!

Twitter is for Barneys

This post is for anyone who happened to click on the link to my blog from Bobby Earle's blog (which happens to be a blog that people actually read). Leave a comment if you would like my measured and supremely rational assessment of Twitter ;) I'm too busy right now to write for no one but myself.

Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins

Another well-written and devastating review of Dawkins' The God Delusion.

Sample nugget:

As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Universal TV

Why are almost all "educational" TV shows about the universe about ways it can kill us? Why all this emphasis on how it can crush us or incinerate us or vaporize us or freeze us or starve us or...?

Some recent autobiography: I watched about an hour's worth of the History Channel's "The Universe" last night, and what I saw was a bunch of university professors talking about how black holes or some other cosmic-something-or-rather could easily destroy life on earth if thus and so astronomical event were to take place in close enough proximity to our planet. Then this morning, out of curiosity, I turned on the History Channel again and discovered "Mega Disasters," a program chiefly concerned with informing viewers that ridiculously violent, volcanic activity - at some time or other, perhaps soon - will snuff out all or most of the human race. "It is not a matter of if but when," says the narrator.

This is a curious emphasis, don't you think? I suppose people have always been interested in death and disaster, but still, how could the producers of a high-budget television program and some of the brightest scientific minds look out on the universe and find most salient its power to destroy us? This strikes me as pathological.

Then again, perhaps it is just a natural consequence of the naturalistic point of view.

How often have you heard statements like this: "From time immemorial, sages, mystics, philosophers, priests et al have speculated about the end of the world, but now - for the first time - we know how the world will end...'not with a bang but a whimper.'" (Or, as an alternative to taking Eliot out of context, maybe this time they tickle our ears with a bastardized Shakespearean quip.) Following this confident assertion, the narrator takes us on an historical tour of the Cosmos, from the Big Bang all the way to the future "heat death" of the universe. This sequence of events is presented as inevitible and bleak. No light. No heat. No life. Nothing but cold, dead matter and empty space.

(Now if that is the truth about the world, then so be it. But has the issue of its truth been settled? Clearly it hasn't. Christians believe that God will make a new heavens and a new Earth, one invulnerable to decay - full of light and life. What in the history of philosphy or science refutes the Christian vision? Nothing that I can see. Yet, it is treated as if it were refuted or at least irrelevant to the realm of facts. But this isn't really the point of this blog; so I'll leave it for another time.)

I wonder (I don't know) whether fixation on the various powers of the universe to kill us is not in large part the result of widespread, naturalistic (atheistic) presumptions about the world and our place in it.

What I See When I Look Up

Perhaps nothing is more provocative of philosophical reflection than looking up at night. This upward gaze issues in all sorts of experiences, but one I think is constant: the sensation of radical finitude. We feel very small, very “located” in something vast. Beyond this felt smallness, thoughts and experiences are diverse.

The diversity of thought and experience that is of particular interest to me has to do with, for lack of a more fashionable term, worldview. An atheist looks up and feels even more certain that, since we are but a particle of dust in a vast cosmos, surely we are insignificant, and surely we are not image bearers of some super being like the God of the Bible. A Christian, like me, looks up and sees “the Heavens!” and is nearly dumbstruck by the hugeness of God’s Creation. But, more than that, a Christian like me is well nigh bowled over by the impression that knowledge is a rare and precious gift to us and that we would not have that gift if there were not a God who cared for us deeply. (This impression is not unique to me but can be found in various forms in the work of René Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, C.S. Lewis, and—most recently and most articulately—Alvin Plantinga.)

Both the atheist and the Christian are struck by their radical finitude, but whereas the atheist sees even more evidence of an indifferent universe, the Christian sees a Creation of bewildering and wondrous magnitude, mystery, and beauty. Such is the power of worldview.

Yet, as I see it, the Christian has the advantage in this conflict of impressions, for the Christian has a powerful argument ready to hand. Roughly it goes like this:

1. If the Christian impression that knowledge and atheism are incompatible is veridical, then atheists have no good grounds on which to claim to know anything at all.
   
2. If atheists have no good grounds on which to claim to know anything at all, then Christian theism is rationally superior to atheism.
3. The Christian impression that knowledge and atheism are incompatible is veridical.
   
4. Hence, Christian theism is rationally superior to atheism.

Or something like that. Read Plantinga for a tight argument. Then go look at the night sky. Then read Plantinga again. Then look again. Then report back to me.

Some links to Plantinga's work:

• Most rigorous
• Popular level (best place to start)
• Lecture (audio)

Enjoy.

Moral Ignorance

Why not another nugget from Berry? "Moral ignorance," he says, is "self-induced" and comes with the "excuse" of "objectivity."

One of the purposes of objectivity, in practice, is to avoid coming to a moral conclusion. Objectivity, considered a mark of great learning and the highest enlightenment, loves to identify itself by such pronouncements as the following: "You may be right, but on the other hand so may your opponent," or "Everything is relative," or "Whatever is happening is inevitable," or "Let me be the devil's advocate." (The part of devil's advocate is surely one of the most sought after in all the precincts of the modern intellect. Anywhere you go to speak in defense of something worthwhile, you are apt to encounter a smiling savant writhing in the estrus of objectivity: "Let me play the devil's advocate for a moment." As if the devil's point of view will not otherwise be adequately represented.)
--Wendell Berry, "The Way of Ignorance" in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, p.55

Ironic, isn't it, that those who consider themselves most objective say things like "Everything is relative?"

Berry Nuggets

All of the following is drawn from Wendell Berry's essay "The Joy of Sales Resistance," which serves as the preface to his book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.

Berry describes the "political package" of Tolerance and Multiculturalism like this:

Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven't been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on. Tolerant and multicultural persons hyphenate their land of origin and their nationality. I, for example, am a Kentuckian-American.

On "intellectual property," he says,

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are thieves.

He also sees one (perhaps the only one) advantage to being a straight and white Protestant American:

I am, I acknowledge, a white Protestant heterosexual man, and can only offer myself as such. I take no particular pride in my membership in this unfashionable group, nor do I consider myself in any way its spokesman. I do, however, ask you to note, dear reader, that this membership confers on me a certain usefulness in that it leaves me with no excuses and nobody to blame for my faults except myself.

Concerning those who oppose him,

On my more charitable days, I am grateful even to my enemies, who have sharpened my mind and who have done me the service of being, as a rule, wronger than I am.