Twitter: The Telegraph of Narcissus

Earlier in the year, I posted a link to some articles suggesting ways to redeem social network. Those are all well and good, yet the more and more I give serious thought to the nature of social networking, the more I am disturbed.

Disclaimer: I have Twitter, I have Facebook, and I will post a link to Facebook as soon as I complete this entry so as to be sure broadcast to the whole world that I have a new post and they should go check it out. Why? So I get a greater hit count and subsequently derive a sense of popularity or greater significance? It's all very unsettling, simply because it has the potential to continue to dehumanize us--marring the image of God, and causing us to continue fleeing beauty. We are content to savor the ugly, and avoid surrounding ourselves with beautiful things. Why? Because they direct our minds to God, and we are immediately convicted of how we squander His beauty by wallowing contendly with ugly things--that includes forsaking the relations of people.

But I digress.

Check out this post from Justin Taylor:

Nicholas Carr, author of the book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google and the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? recently blogged about Twitter:

Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.

And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives. The moment-by-moment answer to what is, in Twitterland, the most important question in the world: What are you doing? Or, to save four characters: What you doing? Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin. Quicksilver turns to amber.

And:

Like so many other Web 2.0 services, Twitter wraps itself and its users in an infantile language. We're not adults having conversations, or even people sending messages. We're tweeters twittering tweets. We're twitters tweetering twits. We're twits tweeting twitters. We're Tweety Birds.

He's not done:

Narcissism is just the user interface for nihilism, of course, and with artfully kitschy services like Twitter we're allowed to both indulge our self-absorption and distance ourselves from it by acknowledging, with a coy digital wink, its essential emptiness. I love me! Just kidding!

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

Do I hear an amen?
HT: Andrew Sullivan

Here He Stood

488 years ago, April 17-18, Martin Luther stood trial at the Diet [formal assembly] of Worms [a small town on the river Rhine in present-day Germany). (It's properly pronounced, I believe, something like "DEE-et of Voerms," not "DIE-et of Wirms.")

On the 17th Luther was asked whether certain writings were his and if he would revoke them as heretical. He asked for time to compose his answer--he prayed for long hours and consulted with friends, and returned the next day to give his famous answer.

You can see some extracts from his response--or watch below the scene from the 2003 movie,Luther:

HT: Justin Taylor

Around the blogosphere

If Galatians was Published in Christianity Today
The Sacred Sandwich imagines what would happen if Paul's letter was to be written and published today.


How much is $1 Trillion?

A guy uses Google Sketchup to provide a visual illustration.


HT: Matt Perman

Win a Calfskin ESV Study Bible

A Boomer in the Pew wants to give you a calfskin ESV Study Bible. Take a look to see how you can win it.
Click Here

Hybrid Images of The Leningrad Blockade

A very interesting project:

These haunting, hybrid images of past and present St Petersburg – formerly known as Leningrad – are the works of Sergei Larenkov. After studying old images of the city, Larenkov visited the same spots, capturing them on film. He then digitally superimposed the old image over new, producing these eerie and thought-provoking shots using remakable photoshop technique.

See the pictures here.

But hey, socialism/government bail-out is great, right? Who wouldn't want the government determining what's really the in best interest for the people and what's best for the economy? And what a great legacy they left us: 200 million dead peasants.

HT: Andrew Sullivan/ Justin Taylor

In Gratitude

These past two days, the fair campus of Grove City College was blessed by the presence and preaching of Dr. J. Ligon Duncan, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, Mississippi.

Dr. Duncan came as a guest of the College and a plenary speaker of the second annual Grove City Evangelical Scholarship Conference, celebrating the 500th birthday of John Calvin this year. While I could ramble on about his many qualifications and accolades (Dr. Duncan is both a scholar and a gentleman, to be sure), and of the varying details of the conference, I want to make but a simple point here: expression of deep and sincere gratitude to for Dr. Duncan coming and preaching the pure and unadulterated gospel of Jesus Christ.

In chapel services Monday evening ("Covenants, Sacraments, and Assurance" on Hebrews 6, Genesis 15, 16, 17 and Joshua 9) and Tuesday morning (on Luke 2:1-7), we received nothing but positive feedback, and a sincere appreciation from the student body for what they felt were two of the best chapels of the semester.

There is no doubt a thirst here for faithful, practical, thorough, theologically sound, robust and powerful preaching of Word of God, rather than the ever-popular musings on events and happenstance that are vaguely spiritual or religious. And while the former happens more often that the latter, it doesn't happen often enough, which is why Monday evening in particular was such a wonderful opportunity for many. The preaching of the Word was accompanied with joyous singing, prayer, and faithful exposition of the Word and thoughtful application from the Word ("Less of what I have to say, more of what the Word has to say," to paraphrase Calvin).

Monday, we were reminded of the signs and seals of God in the sacraments and how that reassures us that God will uphold His covenant promises, in spite of our failure and faithlessness, for He never fails and is always faithful. Tuesday, as we heard the ever familiar "Christmas passage" from Luke 2, mindful of the fact that, though visited by angels, Mary and Joseph experienced trial and persecution, as do we, though often without angelic message--still on we press, in obedience and faitfulness, for we walk by faith and not by sight, knowing that what is happening is in accordance wih the Lord's perfect will.

Yes, indeed, it was a wonderful time to see the Lord's people gather in worship, as we were joyoulsy edified by the faithful proclamation of the Word of God.

FPC and RTS Jackson, you are very fortunate and very blessed indeed to have such a wonderful man of God and shepherd in that place.

Dr. Duncan, thank you for everything. We'll look forward to seeing you again soon, Lord willing.

soli Deo gloria!

HT: FPC Jackson blog

Holy Cow!

How Much Is $1.1 Trillion?

Amanda Shaw collects the numbers on the price tag for the new "stimulus" plan:

Adjusted for inflation, here are some other massive expenditures:

• * The Marshall Plan ($115.3 billion)
• * The space race ($237 billion)
• * The Korean War ($454 billion)
• * The New Deal ($500 billion)
• * The invasion of Iraq ($597 billion)
• * The Vietnam War ($698 billion)

So the proposed "stimulus" package costs more than the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and the New Deal combined.

Here are some thought experiments:

• If you took collected a $1 million per day, ever day from the birth of Christ, in 2009 you'd only be about 3/4 of the way to a trillion.
• If you got $1 every second, it would take almost 32,000 years to get to a trillion.
• If you stacked a trillion dollar bills on top of each other, it would go 68,000 miles into space--1/3 of the way to the moon.
• If you took 100-dollar bills and put them side to side, it would circle the equator 38.9 times
  

To make things worse, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is saying that the stimulus plan will actually make things worse long-term.

HT: James Grant via Dustin Shramek

Update: Comparison with previous expenditures fixed. Sorry about that.

posted by JT at Thursday, February 05, 2009