Chapter 4 covered by Lon as part of our Group Blogging Project discussing the book Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps. If you need a quick overview to what Flickering Pixels is about, please go here.
Walking and talking comes intuitively to humans, but reading the words you’re reading right now does not. Shane Hipps goes as far as saying it’s completely unnatural. The basic technology of writing that “compresses reality into line after line of strange shapes arranged in sequence” transforms not only our world, but the way in which we view the world.
Hipps states one of the primary differences between eastern and western civilizations is due to the technology of language. Chinese pictographic characters are non-linear, less efficient, but more holistic. While the phonetic alphabet system of the west is linear, efficient, and rational.
With simply 26 symbols and the printing press communication and learning has changed forever. Higher order learning and the Industrial revolution were made possible because of this. However the values of efficient have also shaped the gospel often compressing it into a linear sequential formula.
The even greater danger Hipps suggests is that our culture’s love for mental reasoning and efficiency ends up deadening deep desire:
- We acquire the bland taste of a domesticated god who resides somewhere in our head.
- We are what we behold.
- Our thinking patterns actually mirror the things we use to think with.
- My two year old can now string together all her ABC’s. Pastors can now become social media literate through churchcrunch.
- It might be ‘unnatural’, but we do need to spend ample amounts of time preparing ourselves to interact with the world as it is.
- We live in a fast-paced, efficient, and tech savvy world.
However, I wonder what it would look like to spend just as much time creating the world as it should be?
- It’s not cost-effective to meet in person when we can just skype or tokbox.
- It doesn’t make sense to share an idea with an individual, when I can broadcast it to thousands online with a global reach.
- It goes against logic to spend prolonged time with another person, when I can extract their latest and greatest thoughts on their blog.
But does any of this make us more human or Kingdom-oriented?
What’s one thing we could do today, that might possibly be less efficient, but more natural, and more life engaging?
[Image from Pensiero]