Media and McLuhan

Posted on May 8, 2014 by awtraughber

A friend laughed at me a few years ago when I told her that I had “discovered” Marshall McLuhan.  I didn’t quite see what was funny; reading McLuhan set me on a path to better understanding media and culture (even if it’s on my own plebian level). I blame Douglas Coupland, whose short biography of the thinker got me to check out McLuhan’s Understanding Media over Christmas vacation.  True, a lot of what he said is beyond me, but the things he “saw in advance” were quite amazing . . . and sobering.  This clip, short and unfortunately incomplete, is a nice snippet of his thinking.

 

 

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It’s What You Do with the Dots That Matters

Posted on May 7, 2014 by awtraughber

Dots from Cult of AndroidFrom Seth Godin’s blog:

Without a doubt, the ability to connect the dots is rare, prized and valuable. Connecting dots, solving the problem that hasn’t been solved before, seeing the pattern before it is made obvious, is more essential than ever before.

Why then, do we spend so much time collecting dots instead? More facts, more tests, more need for data, even when we have no clue (and no practice) in doing anything with it.

I think we all have a predisposition to collecting something.  Maybe it’s part of our commercial culture.  Maybe it’s something deeper.  For some students (current or life-long), it manifests itself as jumping through hoops for good prizes that supposedly exist in discrete spaces.  This ought not be, but it’s a difficult trend to push against.

There are dots everywhere.  Collect them if you want.  But point me to the people who can connect them.

You can read more of Godin’s thoughts everyday here.

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Augustine and Getting Love Right

Posted on May 5, 2014 by awtraughber

Augustine from WikipediaI’m currently reading my way through James K. A. Smith’s new book on relativism, which is a lot more interesting than it sounds.¹  A third of the way through the book, Smith brings up Augustine and his book on education and doctrine, Teaching Christianity, in the context of understanding the relationship between things.  Great quote about the different between “use” and “enjoyment.”

There are some things which are meant to be enjoyed, others which are meant to be used, yet others which do both the enjoying and the using.  Things that are to be enjoyed make us happy; things which are to be used help us on our way to happiness.

“Things that we enjoy,” Smith adds, “are ends in themselves, ultimate goods.  In fact Augustine says that the things we enjoy are the things we love.”  Returning to Augustine:

Enjoyment, after all, consists in clinging to something lovingly for its own sake, while use consists in referring what has come your way to what your love aims at obtaining, provided, that is, it deserves to be loved.

Smith again: “What you love is what you enjoy; and what you enjoy is what you love– what you treat as ultimate, what you treat as an end in itself. . . . Some things are meant to be used, while other things deserve to be loved. . . . This order of evaluation and obligation is what Augustine calls the ordo amoris, the right order of love.”

I really like this.  For Augustine, of course, God was the Ultimate Good.  People, I think, should be in line somewhere behind Him.  As much as I enjoy good movies or good books, I’d like to think that I love people more, that I enjoy being around them (and that they can be enjoyed for their own sakes).  I fail at this miserably, I think, but it is definitely something worthwhile to keep in heart and mind.

Oh, to love rightly.

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¹  The book is Who’s Afraid of Relativism? and it’s a great deal over my head.  But it contains one of the best discussions of one of my favorite movies, Lars and the Real Girl.  Smith is on something of a roll right now.  His book on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is brilliant. [the picture, by the way, is from wikipedia.org]

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Absurd and Almost Home

Posted on April 30, 2014 by awtraughber

The funniest thing about Mr. Peabody and Sherman was probably the short that played in front of it, Almost Home.  Turns out that the short, with lead acting voice by Steve Martin, is a precursor to a feature film: Home.  I showed it to my students yesterday, but they didn’t laugh as much as I did.  Absurb.  Existential.  But also funny in it’s own way.

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Making the Journey to Area X

Posted on April 23, 2014 by awtraughber

One of the odd consequences of loving things like The Lord of the Rings or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so much is how it prevents me from reading other science fiction and fantasy novels.  Sure, a younger me dabbled in Piers Anthony and Harry Harrington, but names like Frodo and Zaphod Beeblebrox are about as much as I can take.  But Robin Sloan (of Mr. Penumbra fame) said that Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihiliation was a great sci-fi read, of a kind different from most other sci-fi novels.  And he was right.  The story of four explorers in the mysterious “Area X” is wonderfully vague and psychological.  It twists and turns on itself like some ancient but newly-discovered staircase. And it’s the first of three books to be released over the next few months.  You can read the entire first chapter of the book for free here.  You can check out a nice little “map” of “Area X” here.  And you can check out a random “recruitment” video for the Southern Reach (the group behind the organization) below.

 

Authority, the second of three Southern Reach books, drops in early May.

 

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Time, Why (Do I Let) You Punish Me?

Posted on April 22, 2014 by awtraughber

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a post or five about Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock.  It was one of my favorite reads of 2013 and has been the book I find myself thinking about the most from last year.  Well, the folks at Whole Foods have made a nice video with Rushkoff in which he brings out some of the books highlights.  It’s an interesting take on chronos vs. kairos, which are terms you often hear when pastors parse the Greek words for time.

 

One thing the clip does not go into are the five major consequences of “present shock.”  Whole Foods even did a nifty chart of those five consequences: narrative collapse, digiphrenia, overwinding, fractalnoia, and apocalypto.  I highly encourage you to read the book, though you can check out the brief descriptions of these “new realities” here.

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Easter and the Window Love Left

Posted on April 20, 2014 by awtraughber

A song to celebrate the Day.

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Lewis and Catastrophic History

Posted on April 19, 2014 by awtraughber

C. S. LewisSomething to reflect on from the introduction of C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain:

 There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be “one with”, the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking—a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly—that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an usually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. And if you do that, all else that is claimed by Christians becomes credible—that this Man, having been killed, was yet alive, and that His death, in some manner incomprehensible to human thought, has effected a real change in our relations to the “awful” and “righteous” Lord, and a change in our favor.

To ask where the universe as we see it looks more like the work of a wise and good Creator or the word of chance, indifference, or malevolence, is to omit from the outset all the relevant factors in the religious problems. Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity which I have described. It is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awful facts which have to be fitted into any system we make.

Italic emphasis added.

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Osenga Sampler

Posted on April 16, 2014 by awtraughber

Andrew Osenga's HeartLast year brilliant Nashville musician Andrew Osenga posted plans for a Kickstarter project: Heart & Soul, Flesh & Bone, a four-EP collection with each EP focused on one of four of the title’s theme.  This first EP, Heart, dropped a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a great bundle of thoughtful music that you should definitely check out.  You can hear the entirety of one song, “Out of Town,” here.  The folks at the Rabbit Room also posted a song-by-song breakdown based on Osenga’s own reflections, which is pretty cool.  You can also check out snippets of each song while you listen here.  My favorites so far are “No Heart Beats Alone” and “She is a Foreign Country.”  You can purchase the EP through iTunes or over at the Rabbit Room.

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Must-See Hobbit TV

Posted on April 14, 2014 by awtraughber

This is what the internet was made for. . .

 

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug dropped this past week.  Can’t wait to see what the extended version looks like.  Someday soon I’ll get my thoughts on my last viewing of DOS down.

Hat-tip: The folks at aintitcool.com.

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