Poetry at Work, Chapter 18: The Poetry of Electronic Work

Think back 25 years (if you’re old enough). It sounds almost quaint today, but email was just beginning to come into its own. At the company where I was working, with more than 40,000 people, some 5,000 had been brought into the email system. Eventually, all would be, but 5,000 was enough to give us critical mass for a new communications venture – an email newsletter for employees. 

To show how new this was, only one other company in the United States had an employee email newsletter. I hoped we would be the second.

I had meetings with the people in charge of the email system – not only were there various departments, there was also an email council overseeing email operations. My proposal was a text-only newsletter to be sent to the 5,000 people on email.

The response was something akin to asking people to sit in a room full of rats infected with bubonic plague. I didn’t know what I was asking. There were too many hardware platforms. I didn’t understand the technical aspects of the work. The system could crash. The company was too diverse for people to care about what was happening in other divisions. To be fair, these objections came not only from IT people but also from my own communications colleagues.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Poetry at Work: The Poetry of Electronic Work

Twenty years ago this summer, I was having a series of meetings with the then-company’s IT people. We wanted to do an email newsletter for employees; IT did not want us to do that. “It will crash the system,” we were told. “This will harm all of our computer systems,” they said. I even heard vague hints that our overtaxing the email system could lead to financial chaos and cultural collapse in the West.

We took the risk and started our newsletter. Nothing bad happened. In fact, the email system handled the news letter just fine, thank you. Nothing even minor happened.

The first lesson we learned was to look at dire claims of disaster with a skeptical eye. The second lesson was that an email newsletter was work. Despite the appearance of ease that bytes and pixels seem to promise, nothing was easy about an email newsletter. And we learned that, if employees liked the newsletter (and they did), our work for employees soon found itself far outside the company. Imagine – they forwarded the newsletter to friends, sales prospects, academics, and just about anyone else they thought might find it interesting.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Charles Rondeau via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Discerning the message and the medium

This week I finished reading The Life of the Body by Valerie Hess and Lane Arnold, the book we’ve been discussing this month at The High Calling. This final section covered the seasons of life, children, caring for the planet, and the conclusion.

As it is sometimes wont to do, kept moving away from these final chapters and toward another thought altogether (but there is a connection).

I kept thinking about where we get our information from. Are we as Christians discerning as we listen to news, watch entertainment, or read books (not to mention everything online), or do we let the culture saturate us as it saturates social, political and spiritual life around us?

Twenty years ago, for reasons related to work and my first surprising experience with electronic communications, I began to read about communication theory. I read writers like Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy), Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Eloquence in an Electronic Age), and a host of academics who were beginning to grapple with the electronic word and what it meant. I also reread Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message), Neil Postman (Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death), and Jacque Ellul (Propaganda).

What came of all of this reading and reflection was a sensitivity to both words as content and media as means to communicate those words/content. (Today we say “content” to collectively include text, photos, art, audio and video.)

Most of us, me included, usually focus on the words or content – the “message.” What we understand less is how different media, or channels, favor some kinds of content over others, and how these channels actually shape the message that’s sent and/or received.

Video, for example, like television programs, movies, network news reports, and uploads to YouTube, appeals to the emotions, the feelings. This is even true for documentaries. To fit the channel of video, a communication has to be shaped in a particular way if it’s to be effective.

This isn’t a complaint or regret, more a statement of what is. Watching a TED talk is not the same thing as listening to a speech, because the screen itself frames the talk, favoring certain kinds of content over others.

The world I currently inhabit for work is that of social media. And it’s a world that’s changing our ideas of authority – who has it, who we listen to, and who is believable or credible. Twitter and Facebook, for example, expand our understanding of authority to include our friends and networks. They increasingly give us filters on news. This can be good (accuracy checks on news media) and bad (205,000 people follow Roseanne Barr on Twitter and consider her a credible source of information on news and public policy).

On Twitter, everything you need to know has to be crammed into 140 characters. Talk about minimalist communication. Nuclear disarmament, or understanding international terrorism, in 140 characters. Or less.

This is how many of us get our information on issues, controversies, and news – and “many of us” includes Christians. Someone says something on a blog or Facebook, someone else tweets it or pins it on Pinterest, and it’s considered of equal importance and weight to what a Ph.D expert who’s spent decades researching and studying has to say.

I’ve taken issue with a few things in The Life of the Body, but to be fair, I’ve seen similar sentiments in Christianity Today, blogs belonging to respected Christians, and Christians posting and commenting on Facebook. We readily accept anything if someone we like or trust says it. Or we google a topic and learn everything we need to know by simply scanning the first page of search results.

Greater discernment is crucial. We live in a time when virtually nothing can be taken at face value. Just because it’s a trending topic on Twitter doesn’t mean it’s true. Even something seemingly authoritative as a scientific journal has to be examined. Did you know that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of “peer-reviewed” scientific journals whose definition of “peer review” is a Visa card?

Retweets on Twitter and shares and likes on Facebook are not measures of truth. Volume does not equate to truth. Truth isn’t a popularity contest – the prime example of that being the life of Jesus.

We’ve been discussing The Life of the Body at The High Calling, even if I went off the track today and discussed it by not discussing it. Check The High Calling for the main post and comments.

Photograph by Fran Hogan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“The Next Story” by Tim Challies

In 1800, people could travel no faster than they had at the time of Christ. But change – massive change – was afoot. The Industrial Revolution has started in Britain in the 1760s or so, and technology was on the march. First came Fulton and his steamboat, then the railroads, and then the single most significant communication tool since the printing press – the telegraph. And then the telephone. And the first horseless carriages.

The pace continued in the 20^th century. My grandmother was 11 in the year 1900. When she was born, most people traveled in wagons and by horseback; they could also ride in a steamboat or travel by train. By the time she died in 1984, men had landed on the moon and desktop computers were appearing in offices.

If the change seems bewildering it’s because it is bewildering. A decade ago, the only social media anyone had heard of might have been discussion boards and chat rooms. Some blogs were getting established. Today, it’s more a case of “I tweet therefore I am.”

We’re still coming to terms with what this change in communications technology means to culture and society. Tim Challies wrote The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion to reflect on what the change might mean for the church, and for faith.

His point is this: No technology is neutral. Every technology carries both advantages and costs. And a second point is this: every technology has inherent biases. Some kinds of activities are favored over others. The form of the technology is just as important as the content it carries. Look no further than Twitter, which favors speed over context and understanding (and often accuracy). Certain kinds of information – quick blurbs – are favored over longer ones.

My church just started tweeting.

In less than 20 years, Amazon built a mail order empire for books (and other consumer goods) that drove book stores and chains into bankruptcy, and by moving directly into publishing it’s upending the book industry once again. Book buyers have an amazing array of choices – millions of new and used books, in fact. But fast disappearing is the personal service of the bookshop clerk or owner, who not only knew what books and authors you liked but also how your mother was faring after her surgery and whether or not your son got that college scholarship, and wasn’t that new biography of Mark Twain as good as it was said to be.

Challies provides a concise history of communication technologies (and you need the history to understand what the implications are), and then offers a series of discussions on what communication actually is, what is meant by “mediation,” and the dangers of what he calls distraction – how we seem to be unable to set our iPhones, iPads, cell phones, laptops and other hardware aside, or walk away from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or blogs, even for a short time. He also considers the impact of communication technologies on the family and on faith.

And he asks provocative questions, for which we will have to turn our cell phones off to seriously consider. Questions like, what does it mean when social media have an inherent bias for video communication, with its emphasis upon the visual and the emotional?

To continue down the road of distraction will eventually take away our ability to think deeply. That’s where he heads with The Next Story – to demonstrate the importance of thinking, reflection, and deep understanding, and who it’s so important for faith and the church.

Related: Ancient History Lesson