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Jan
13
“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.” —Don Knuth, Stanford University
In North America, 65 percent of us spend more time with our computer than with our spouse.
Once you get past feeling like a geek for reading a book about e-mail, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, is everything I needed and nothing I expected. Freeman does a fantastic job of telling the story about the history of communication, pausing along the way to analyze the social and psychological implications for how we communicate. “This book is an attempt to slow things down for a moment so we can look at the enormous shift in time and space e-mail has effected, how e-mail has changed our lives, our culture and workplace, our psychological well-being.”
Reading The Tyranny was a lot like reading an updated version of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death which is also an incriminating and enlightening journey through history, primarily though the lens of television and entertainment.
Here are my highlights from The Tyranny…
Blame Literacy
“In Sweden in the eighteenth century, though, the Lutheran Church issued an injunction that everyone must be able to read the word of God, and a massive literacy campaign was launched. Within a hundred years the nation boasted a 100 percent literacy rate.”
“In the early American colonies, where religious injunction required that believers be able to read the Bible themselves, men had a 100 percent literacy rate.”
“In 1840, the average American sent three letters a year; by 1900 that figure was sixty-nine letters per annum and the total volume of letters outnumbered telegrams fifty to one. By 1950, the mail was almost out of control; in 1960, the U.S. Post Office was handling 63 billion pieces of mail—the equivalent of 350 pieces per year for every man, woman, and child in America.”
“Since most people didn’t send and receive telegrams regularly, the telegraph made the biggest impact in their lives by increasing the scope of the world it brought to them. This new, globalized sense of now would soon test the limits of human empathy. Small-town residents in the United States suddenly found it difficult to put local news into the context of large-scale disasters around the world. One newspaper, the Alpeno Echo in Michigan, defiantly shut down its incoming telegraph service, tired of becoming the world’s echo chamber rather than a record of its own community. ‘It could not tell why the telegraph company caused it to be sent a full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia,’ Standage wrote, ‘and not a line about the Muskegon fire.’”
“Communication—the conveyance of meaning from one person to the next—depends on how we frame it.”
E-Mail is Re-Programming Us
“The mind is denied the experience of deep flow, when creative ideas flourish and complicated thinking occurs. We become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening as we try to keep up with the computer. The e-mail inbox turns our mental to-do list into a palimpsest—there’s always something new and even more urgent erasing what we originally thought was the day’s priority.”
“As Susan Sontag noted in On Photography, we cannot travel and be tourists without ferrying home images of the place we have visited—as if the purpose of the trip were the collection of the images, not the being there.”
“Thirty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle, the French philosopher Guy Debord predicted we would be spending more time apart. ‘The reigning economic system is founded on isolation,’ he wrote. ‘At the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system, as it strives to reinforce the isolation of ‘the lonely crowd.’”
“If we’re performing an action that doesn’t always pay out, but does some of the time, such as playing the slots, the lesson learned is that if we want a reward we need to keep pulling that lever.”
“A work climate that revolves around multitasking and constant interruptions has narrowed our cognitive window down to a core, basic facility: rote, mechanical tasks.”
“This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen? Yet in 2006, it was discovered that Americans spent more than half of their life connected to various forms of media. This means we spend more time engaged in media than we do sleeping, more hours plugged in than we log at work. We work in order to have time to watch. We spend more time with our computers than our spouses. We check our e-mail more often than we drink water.”
Freeman argues for a “slow communication movement.”
The Slow Food movement recognized this twenty years ago, when delegates from fifteen countries drafted a manifesto. “In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes,” they wrote. In other words, we may be able to get oranges from Chile and water from Switzerland, but the carbon emissions involved in shipping them to our doorstep so we can enjoy them are destroying our environment and putting local growers and farmers out of business. Communication works the same way. If we spend our evening online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the people we could turn to for solace, humor, and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this.
“It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.”
For what it’s worth, I’ve been making subtle changes to my “digital” life for the past two years. Most recently, and because of this book, I’ve also altered my e-mail habits pretty significantly. I’m going on two weeks of establishing new rhythms and it’s been really difficult! The results have been well worth it. I’m less hurried, I’m more focused and I’m chipping away at some big tasks that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Jan
6
George Barna’s Tribes and Leaders
Filed Under God, Faith & Spirituality, Leadership, Reading Room | 1 Comment
I had never read much of George Barna until Revolution was published in 2005. I loved the controversial conversations Revolution sparked. In my opinion, Revolution was the book that expanded George Barna’s reputation–for better or worse–from purist researcher to passionately opinionated preacher. It was not a subtle shift!
Faith Tribes
Last year I read Barna’s The Seven Faith Tribes: Who They Are, What They Believe, and Why They Matter. Once I got past George’s over-the-top American love-fest, the rest of the book was quite enlightening. It appears George was looking for some sort of angle to write about what Americans believe. 
Although I might have picked a different angle, he chose to write a book “about the renewal that the United States needs at this moment in history.” “The future of America depends more upon the compassionate engagement with society by devoted Christians than upon their persistent insistence of their moral supremacy.” Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a well-researched easy introduction to the faith tribes that exist in America, this is it. “We need to stop competing, comparing, complaining, and condemning, and we must start cooperating, communicating, collaborating, and contributing. It’s time to stop fighting and start loving. It’s time to stop taking and start giving.”
Master Leaders
George’s latest book, Master Leaders: Revealing Conversations with 30 Leadership Greats is a gem. It’s still got plenty of George: he’s the self-deprecating ringleader of a Green Room stocked with gurus and goodies. 
Master Leaders is packed with nuggets from some of today’s great leadership thinkers. Although the topics and conversations from the book are not anything new or groundbreaking, it’s novel in the way George brings together disparate points into a steady stream of serendipitous sunshine. It’s all your favorite leadership principles (and principals) under one roof.
A few of my highlights…
“Leaders really are the standard setters as far as values in an organization. The values are the foundation of behavior within an organization and within the development of organizational culture, and it is critical that the senior leaders are the champions of values. And it is just as critical that they are the ones who effectively model what those values are.”
“Never hire anybody you can’t fire.
“I think that every organization and every leader ends up defining success differently because of the peculiarity of their own mission. But there’s got to be fruitfulness in what they were there to do, and it’s got to be done in a way where people have been bettered in the process.
“If organizations get those three components—knowing what their business is, picturing the end result, and ranking values—and communicate them, everybody can understand them. Then, when you put it up on the wall, it has some meaning. And then you put the goals under that and they just come alive. It’s really powerful.”
“You know it’s a core value if you are willing to get punished for it.”
“If a leader is not vulnerable, you can’t and shouldn’t trust him or her. To be a great leader you have to be vulnerable, you have to let people know who you are. Most people do not want to take advantage of a leader who is vulnerable.”
And my favorite, with a nod to the late Peter Drucker, “You get what you measure.”
Oct
12
A Million Miles… by Donald Miller
Filed Under Inspiration, Reading Room | Leave a Comment
“Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.” — Donald Miller
I couldn’t put this book down. Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, should be required reading for anybody wanting to live a meaningful life. I can’t remember the last time I cried while reading a book. This could have more to do with the types of books I read, but A Million Miles moved me. Deeply.
The book is about looking at life—my life—as a story. What makes a good story? What stories do people want to be a part of? What stories do we ignore? What stories are worth living?
My highlights from A Million Miles:
“But nobody really remembers easy stories. Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That’s what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death, you know. These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world.”
“When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”
“If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.”
“A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.”
“The point of life is character transformation.”
“The idea that a character is what he does remains the hardest to actually live.”
“A general rule in creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. They must be forced to change.”
“Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.”
“It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.”
“‘Why would the Incas make people take the long route?’ my friend from Alabama asked. ‘Because the emperor knew,’ Carlos said, ‘the more painful the journey to Machu Picchu, the more the traveler would appreciate the city, once he got there.’”
A story goes to the next level with two key elements, and both of them have to do with the ambition of the character. First, he said, is the thing a character wants must be very difficult to attain. The more difficult, the better the story. The reason the story is better when the ambition is difficult, Steve said, is because there is more risk, and more risk makes the story question more interesting to an audience. The greatest stories, Steve told me, are the ones in which the character’s very life is at stake. There needs to be a question as to whether the character will make it, whether he will defeat the enemy or the enemy will defeat him. The second element that makes a story epic, he said, was the ambition had to be sacrificial. The protagonist has to be going through pain, risking his very life, for the sake of somebody else. “Those stories are gold,” Steve said. “You can ask people to name their favorite movies, and those two elements will be in almost all of them.”
“And if your friends are living boring stories, you probably will too.”
“The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.”
“I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.”
“’Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.’ His voice was like thunder now. ‘You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.’”
“But Victor Frankl whispered in my ear all the same. He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.”
“I’ve let go of the idea that this life has a climax.”
“It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.”
Sep
1
Free by Chris Anderson
Filed Under Reading Room | 1 Comment
Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, is a great read. The content is intellectually stimulating and compelling.
The main tension that Free seeks to address is that “people are making lots of money charging nothing. Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00. How did this happen and where is it going?”
Although Free often reads like an economics textbook, Anderson is making his case primarily to spur Free money-making. “Today the most interesting business models are in finding ways to make money around Free. Sooner or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use Free to compete with Free, one way or another.”
“While the last century’s Free was a powerful marketing method, this century’s Free is an entirely new economic model.
“The atoms economy is inflationary, while the bits economy is deflationary.”
Unpacking the idea of scarcity was the big lesson for me in this book. “If a resource becomes too scare and expensive, it provides incentive to look for an abundant replacement, which shifts demand away from the scare resource.” Think oil and the race to find alternative energy solutions.
Value moves to things that are not yet commodities. “Today’s knowledge workers are yesterday’s factory workers (and the day before’s farmers) moving upstream in search of scarcity.”
“Memorable experiences are the ultimate scarcity.”
“We are motivated by what we don’t have, not what we do have.”
Anderson talks about selling into the future to get ahead of the price decline curve. “Rather than sell [something] for what it costs today, you can sell it for what it will cost tomorrow. The increased demand this lower price will stimulate will accelerate the curve, ensuring that the product will cost even less than expected when tomorrow comes. So you make more money.”
“It turns out that our feelings about ‘free’ are relative, not absolute. If something used to cost money and now doesn’t, we tend to correlate that with a decline in quality. But if something never cost money, we don’t feel the same way.”
“The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny.”
Google’s “max strategy” for information markets was also interesting. “Take whatever it is you are doing and do it at the max in terms of distribution.”
Free has the power to disrupt markets by shrinking them. Encyclopedia Britannica went from a $650 million business to less than half that when Microsoft launched Encarta. No longer were Britannica salesmen needed to sell $1,000 encyclopedia sets when you could get Encarta for $99 on a CD-ROM. Then Wikipedia came and wiped out both of them.
Anderson summarized French mathematician Joseph Bertrand’s philosophy by saying “In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost.” In other words, when the marginal cost becomes free or close enough to it, the price you charge will hover at the same amount: $0.00.
Aug
25
I first heard about Nudge after reading a Time article earlier this year that said it was on Obama’s reading list, along with Influence by Robert Cialdini. I’m always interested to know the influences behind the people who influence me.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by University of Chicago professors and longtime buds Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, is a beginner’s guide to understanding how to influence behavior. Or, more specifically, in the words of the authors, this is a book about “libertarian paternalists” developing the right “choice architecture.”
“Libertarian paternalism” says that we should all have individual freedom of choice, and it is okay for private and public institutions to affect behavior.
“Choice architecture” is the title given to the people who affect our choices. For example, those who design a voting ballot, grocery store aisles or retirement applications. “A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.”
My Highlights From Nudge
“A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
“Setting default options, and other similar seemingly trivial menu-changing strategies, can have huge effects on outcomes, from increasing savings to improving health care to providing organs for lifesaving transplant operations.”
“In the language of this book, anchors serve as nudges. We can influence the figure you will choose in a particular situation by ever-so-subtly suggesting a starting point for your thought process.”
“A good way to increase people’s fear of a bad outcome is to remind them of a related incident in which things went wrong; a good way to increase people’s confidence is to remind them of a similar situation in which everything worked out for the best.”
“Setting the best possible defaults will be a theme we explore often in the course of this book.”
“Collaborative filtering is an effort to solve a problem of choice architecture. If you know what people like you tend to like, you might well be comfortable in selecting products you don’t know, because people like you tend to like them.”
“Structuring choice sometimes means helping people to learn, so they can later make better choices on their own.”
“If the underlying decision is difficult and unfamiliar, and if people do not get prompt feedback when they err, then it’s legitimate, even good, to nudge a bit.”
“Framing matters: people are more likely to engage in self-examinations for skin and breast cancer if they are told not about the reduced risk if they do so but about the increased risk if they fail to do so.”
“Random default plan assignment is a terrible idea.”
“The harder it is to register your unwillingness to participate, the less libertarian the policy becomes.”
“Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.”
The authors summarize six principles of good choice architecture; the acronym spells “NUDGES.”
iNcentives
Understand mappings
Defaults
Give feedback
Expect error
Structure complex choices
Overall, the book is a decent read, and it should be a must-read for leaders in government.
Aug
17
Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
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Originally published in 1984 and since revised four times, Robert Cialdini’s Influence will likely linger for decades to come. Cialdini studies the science and psychology of persuasion. “Just what are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person? And which techniques most effectively use these factors to bring about such compliance?”
This book is as enlightening as it is lethal. Understanding the “psychology of compliance” will bring greater awareness to your own vulnerabilities, but it is even more tempting to use the principles of Influence to leverage the vulnerabilities of others. “The evidence suggests that the ever-accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance more and more prevalent in the future.”
Cialdini details six “weapons of influence.” (Note: Wikipedia has a nice breakdown of these as well.)
Reciprocation: Give people something and they’ll feel like they owe you
“People we might ordinarily dislike—unsavory or unwelcome sales operators, disagreeable acquaintances, representatives of strange or unpopular organizations—can greatly increase the chance that we will do what they wish merely by providing us with a small favor prior to their requests.”
“Although the obligation to repay constitutes the essence of the reciprocity rule, it is the obligation to receive that makes the rule so easy to exploit. The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.”
“Suppose you want me to agree to a certain request. One way to increase your chances would be first to make a larger request of me, one that I will most likely turn down. Then, after I have refused, you would make the smaller request that you were really interested in all along.”
Commitment and Consistency: Get people to commit and they generally follow through
“The tactic of starting with a little request in order to gain eventual compliance with related larger requests has a name: the foot-in-the-door technique.”
“And once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.”
“The purpose behind the testimonial contests [when companies ask you to say something nice about their product] is the same as the purpose behind the political essay contests of the Chinese Communists. In both instances, the aim is to get as many people as possible to go on record as liking the product.”
“And the evidence is clear that the more effort that goes into a commitment, the greater is its ability to influence the attitudes of the person who made it.”
Social Proof: People do things when others are doing it too
“The principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.”
“Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures.”
“We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.”
“The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.”
“All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality…and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.”
Authority: People generally respond to perceived authority
“A multilayered and widely accepted system of authority confers an immense advantage upon a society. It allows the development of sophisticated structures for resource production, trade, defense, expansion, and social control that would otherwise be impossible.”
Liking: People like what other people like
Scarcity: Perceived scarcity often generates demand
“Like the other weapons of influence, the scarcity principle trades on our weakness for shortcuts.”
“This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted.”
“We can see that information may not have to be censored for us to value it more; it need only be scarce.
“The drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity.”
“The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties.”
“The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it. It is important that we not confuse the two.”
Aug
10
“In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.” —Neil Postman
I can’t believe it took me this long to finally read the late Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Published in 1984, unfortunately, it is still just as relevant today as it was then.
Although loaded with quotes and quips by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, Postman takes things a step further and argues why television is killing us. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. 60 Minutes, Eye-Witness News and Sesame Street are.”
With an initial nod to Orwell’s 1949 classic Nineteen Eighty-Four and to Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World, Postman believes Huxley got it right when he said that what we love will be our ruin.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
What follows is my feeble attempt to string together personal highlights after immersing myself over several days in this thoughtful book.
It began with the clock…
“And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.”
“And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.”
…and public discourse went from oral to print…
“The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.”
“Methodist camp meetings combined picnics with opportunities to listen to oratory.”
“What kind of audience was this [who listened to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates]? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to seven hours of oratory? These were people who regarded such events as essential to their political education.”
“This language is pure print. That the occasion required it to be spoken aloud cannot obscure that fact. And that the audience was able to process it through the ear is remarkable only to people whose culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed word.”
“Even the sounds of sentences of spoken words are rarely engaging except when composed by those with extraordinary poetic gifts. If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell.”
…slowly moving from reason and logic to an appeal to our passions…
“In 1786, Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books.”
“Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, ‘the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; …print made a greater impression than actual events…. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-leaming.’”
“Unlike the principal figures in today’s ‘great awakening’—Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, et al.—yesterday’s leaders of revivalist movements in America were men of learning, faith in reason, and generous expository gifts. Their disputes with the religious establishments were as much about theology and the nature of consciousness as they were about religious inspiration.”
“The differences between the character of discourse in a print-based culture and the character of discourse in a television-based culture are also evident if one looks at the legal system.”
“Indeed, the history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment.”
“Advertising was, as Stephen Douglas said in another context, intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions.”
“The printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect, there being no other means, besides the oral tradition, to have access to public knowledge.”
“This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.”
“The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition.”
…because the more we ‘know’, the greater our inaction becomes…
“[With the telegraph], transportation and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information.”
“For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make ‘one neighborhood of the whole country.’”
“The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.”
“The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”
“Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives.”
“To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”
…and television is the king of entertaining inaction…
“If television is a continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press in the fifteenth.”
“The assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle.”
“For these reasons and more television will not have the same meaning or power as it does in America.”
“But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”
“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”
“Thinking does not play well on television.”
“The single most important fact about television is that people watch it, which is why it is called television.”
“Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.”
…meanwhile religion is further marginalized…
“[One example is that] on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”
“Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”
“The danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows but that television shows may become the content of religion.”
What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.
…and education is being re-defined…
“Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch.”
“John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning.”
“The greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes … may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history…. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”
“We learn what we do.”
“America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education.”
“I mean only to say that, like the alphabet or the printing press, television has by its power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
“But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment.”
“Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.”
“There must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount.”
“The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment.”
“The consequences of this reorientation are to be observed not only in the decline of the potency of the classroom but, paradoxically, in the refashioning of the classroom into a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly amusing activities.”
“The content of the school curriculum is being determined by the character of television, and even worse, that character is apparently not included as part of what is studied.”
…in the end, the joke is on us.
“For America is engaged in the world’s most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug.”
“For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
Aug
6
In Love and War, the Stockdale Story
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“A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armor of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last.” —Joseph Conrad
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve read a book with this many pages, but at the suggestion of Jim Collins, I just finished reading In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam Years, by Jim and Sybil Stockdale.
James Stockdale was a navy pilot shot down in 1965 over Vietnam. For seven years he was tortured and held prisoner in Hoa Lo Prison, before being released in 1973.
In Love and War is a first-person account of the Stockdales story. Every other chapter is written by the other spouse, telling the story and struggle from their side of the world. It’s tender and tenacious, violent and victorious.
I was most impressed with Jim Stockdale’s grounded sense of self. As he recalls “a pilgrimage to [his] birthplace,” Jim says, “I figured it was healthy to be reminded of my upbringing and who I was from time to time; I would take all of those qualities I acquired in my boyhood home with me to the grave.”
It was this prevailing sense of self that led another Jim—Jim Collins—to unpack a bit more in his book Good to Great. Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp. Says Stockdale, “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
When Collins asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied: “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Stockdale then added: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Witnessing this philosophy of duality, Collins went on to describe it as the Stockdale Paradox.
In contrast to this paradox, Stockdale said in his book that “chance and continual uncertainty are the ultimate destabilizers.”
Aug
3
Culture Making by Andy Crouch
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I first heard Andy Crouch unpack some of his “culture making” thoughts at Q Atlanta back in 2007. A year later, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling was released and I finally got to read it this past month. My only major complaint with the book is that it’s about 25 percent longer than it needs to be. Other than that, Crouch does a great job defining and describing culture in a way that makes a lot of sense. I was encouraged by the simplicity and inspired by the significance of what it means to create culture.
From innocence to responsibility
“The essence of childhood is innocence. The essence of youth is awareness. The essence of adulthood is responsibility. This book is for people and a Christian community on the threshold of cultural responsibility. What does it mean to be not just culturally aware but culturally responsible? Not just culture consumers or even just culture critics, but culture makers?”
Culture is what we make of the world
“We make sense of the world by making something of the world.” In other words, creating culture is the “activity of making meaning.”
“We don’t make Culture,” says Crouch. “We make omelets. We tell stories. We build hospitals. We pass laws.”
Culture is a shared experience
“Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world–it is never a solitary affair. I hope that most people who read this book will read it together with someone else. One of the most mysterious and beautiful things about culture is that it has to be shared. I hope families will read this book and discover that the family, so seemingly insignificant in an age of technology and celebrity, is still the heart of culture, the primary place where most of us are called to cultivate and create.”
The only way to change culture is to create more of it
“Creativity requires cosmos–it requires an ordered environment.”
“The biggest cultural mistake we can indulge in is to yearn for technological ’solutions’ to our deepest cultural ‘problems.’”
“Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. But culture is not changed simply by thinking.”
Christianity and culture
“How did a movement with a few thousand adherents at most in the first century become half the population of the empire by the fourth century?”
“The answer comes down to culture. In feature after feature of Roman culture, Christians, animated by a powerfully different story from their pagan neighbors, were boldly creative. Their lives simply did not look like their neighbors’. But they were not cut off from their neighbors–the culture they created was public and accessible to all.”
“The church had no magic or medicine to cure the plague, but it turns out that survival even of a terrible disease has a lot to do with one’s access to the most basic elements of life. Simply by providing food, water and friendship to their neighbors, Christians enabled many to remain strong enough that their own immune systems could mount an effective defense.”
“Stark believes, the church’s doctrines were ‘the ultimate factor in the rise of Christianity…. Central doctrines of Christianity prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.’ In simpler terms, Christian belief was neither just the product of social forces in Roman culture; nor was it a culturally inert ‘private’ matter.”
“Culture, then, is the furniture of heaven. Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the new Jerusalem?”
To put it most boldly: culture is God’s original plan for humanity–and it is God’s original gift to humanity, both duty and grace. Culture is the scene of humanity’s rebellion against their Creator, the scene of judgment-and it is also the setting of God’s mercy.
What is God doing in culture? What is his vision for the horizons of the possible and the impossible? Who are the poor who are having good news preached to them? Who are the powerful who are called to spend their power alongside the relatively powerless? Where is the impossible becoming possible?
For nearly all of us, becoming a celebrity is completely, categorically impossible. For all of us, becoming a saint is completely, categorically possible. So why are so many trying to become a celebrity and so few trying to become a saint?
We are called to create culture
“Where do you experience grace–divine multiplication that far exceeds your efforts?”
We are called to create culture, says Crouch, “at the intersection of grace and cross.”
Quoting Frederick Buechner, Crouch suggests that “calling is found where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Jul
27
Chasing Francis by Ian M Cron
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“Preach as you go!” -Saint Francis of Assisi
I’ve always been curious about the life of Francis of Assisi. From Brennan Manning, who often quotes Francis, to my friend who has a millennium old man crush on him, it was time I got to know Francis for myself.
Unfortunately, the book I chose for my introduction was a bit too cursory. In Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale, Ian M. Cron does an admirable job telling a fictional story about a “reverent agnostic’s” journey to Italy to encounter the life of this much-loved saint. Although this was not the book to read for really getting to know Francis, there were several hooks that pointed me toward wanting to learning more.
Life 800 Years Ago
Cron gives some context to the life of Francis, to understand how the world worked a little back then. “The medieval Christian perspective got beaten up during the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers saw the universe less as a mystery and more as a machine where you got hold of truth by using reason, not divine revelation. The Christian worldview that had never been challenged before suddenly came under attack. Scientists replaced theologians, and the age of modernity was born.”
“Eventually,” says Cron, “the church became so threatened by modernity’s scorn that they turned the Bible into more of a history of ideas, rather than a story.” “The Bible is less a book that tells us what to do than a story that tells us who we are.”
As a result, “early Franciscans used songs, storytelling, impromptu dramas, and poetry in their preaching rather than philosophy, logic, or theology.”
Simple Life, Significant Living
“You couldn’t read anything about Francis that didn’t talk about his devotion to poverty. He actually despised money.” “Maybe living the unprotected life is what it means to be a Christian?”
Most of Francis’ writings “are about the importance of worship, liturgy, and the sacramental life.” In this age of “lights, camera, action!”, Francis was more about “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
Cron would end each chapter with his main character writing a journal entry, as if writing a letter directly to Francis.
Francis, your genius was that you read stuff in the Bible (like the Sermon on the Mount) and you didn’t spiritualize or theologize it. You heard Jesus say, “Happy are the peacemakers,” so you got up every day and embarked on a new peace mission. My usual approach is to read the Bible, try to understand what it’s saying, and then apply it. Your formula was the reverse. You applied the Bible and then came to a fresh understanding of what it actually meant. What a concept.
“Francis was so animated that people called him the ‘living tongue.’” “A truly great preacher isn’t someone with a seminary degree who explains the gospel. It’s someone who is the gospel.”
Jugglers of God
“When the front door of the intellect is shut, the back door of the imagination is open.”
“Francis, you changed the church (in fact, you reevangelized it) -not through being critical but through forming a community that confounded it.”
Now I see the Story more like a painting filled with glory, poetry, and even blurry lines. Paintings are trickier than photos. They’re open to a wide variety of interpretation, depending on who’s looking at them and the situations those viewers live in. Seeing the Bible this way could lead to things getting messy from time to time-but the Word is living, not static. Our job is to invite people to inhabit our story, to be part of what God’s doing in history. And we don’t need to feel constant pressure to defend it against its critics. Truth doesn’t need defending. It is its own witness.
“Let us begin again, for up to now we have done nothing.”
-Saint Francis, in the last days of his life