I think Hipps' take on information vs wisdom is very true. Whether it was heralded by Morse and his little tappity-tap-tap may be up for debate (the telegraph was huge, I admit). It is true that many people thrive in the current information culture, but I think a lot of them are the exception and not the rule.

That is, conventional wisdom is to have tons of facts and propositions but not to really have any depth of understanding. In the US today, I think we highly value the observation and not the understanding. While we don't necessarily value the memorization of long passages or list of facts (except maybe for those in the theatre), we still value the ability to find and state those facts. We have replaced long term organic memory with access to google/twitter/blogs/RSS/etc.

To the questions:
1) I try not to bludgeon them with the Bible like it was a hammer. As with most things, I try to get a relationship going and make sure that the focus is on understanding them as much as it is on getting my point across. Many people today don't believe that you can listen and understand someone without agreeing with them.

2) I try to leverage the technologies available to go deeper and not just wider. It's hard because I am definitely a "chaser of shiny things" when it comes to information. Twitter is especially challenging because of the near endless stream of things to chase. But I've been getting better with using it to start conversations and relationships with people i would not have otherwise had the opportunity to meet. Turning those in to "real world" relationships happens sometimes. Sometimes not.

Think of it this way. A woman that God gifted to be a prime legal mind, would (under my assumptions) have still had a fine legal mind as she was gifted in 1342, but she would not have received the training or permission to work as a lawyer. Or today there may be a smallish person that is very skilled in mathematics, but was born in the middle of Sudan during a civil war. They were never able to discover the full range of their skills and talents because the situation that they were born into would value physical skills much more than mathematical skills.

And I disagree about value of writing skills. I again think we value different types of writing now than we did 200 years ago, but not writing itself. Writing 200 years ago would have been much more concerned with form (handwriting, niceties of proper letter writing, etc.) but there were far less people employed in writing 200 years ago than there are today.

peace|dewde

1) I try and respond with respect and love, but firm in the Truth. People will respect you if you listen and value their thoughts. They will be more open to listen to what you have to say.

2) I am trying to use technology to ask questions and invite conversation. And hopefully doing that with honesty.

Technology is both a blessing and a curse. Twas always thus, and always thus will be.

I do think people have a much more difficult time trying to concentrate than people used to. I agree that part of it is that there is a lot of interesting stuff to pay attention to, but I also think part of it is that we don't make an effort to separate ourselves from distractions when we need to concentrate. And I think part of it is we have trained our minds to rapidly jump from one task and piece of info to another that our minds are not as well trained to focus on one thing for a long period of time.

Don't you think your talents would have been used differently in 1342? Or, maybe God would have given you different talents?

I'm not sure the gift and talent of writing is as appreciated today as it was 200 years ago. However, I'm still thrilled to have it.

First, I think people can concentrate when they want to. So I don't think the answer is simply blaming people for having a short attention span. Yes many people have a short attention span. But the reason for that is often that there are many good things to pay attention to. If we are not giving good content then people view our content as a waste of time. Second, Absolute truth is another answer to a question that people aren't asking. Is there absolute truth, sure. But if we start with absolute truth as the answer then we have to search for a question. Start with people's questions, the truth that we have will be part of the answer.

Another point that I think that I don't think Hipps has thought about is different types of intelligence and how that affects us. At one point in history the ability to memorize long passages and repeat them back verbatim was considered the ultimate in intelligence. Now that type of intelligence is not valued as highly as a type that takes lots of information and synthesizes it. We have shifted not only in culture and our use of information but the way that we value talents. I am quite happy that I was born when I was. My talents are now valued, but I am not sure that they would have been all that valued in 1342. So part of what we do with the glut of information is help people learn to deal with it, but understand that some people are intrinsically better at dealing with information overload than others.