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I am not sure what Tesco's in Durham thinks it is doing but it is surely a crime against every nation's cuisine, even British, that they should display this choice of sandwiches. I mean if we were closely to Wimbledon, I could understand but...we're not.
So wrong.
Pete
p.s. what 's the worse you have seen?
http://pmphillips.posterous.com/the-wrong-choice-of-sandwiches-you-saw-it-herLinking in with the recent posts about Social Media Principles. One of those was about global penetration, or the problem with the digital divide - the gap between digital rich countries and the digitally poor countries.
Thanks to @uinp for bringing this to my attention (via Mashable). It's fantastic graphic.
The actual document can be found in greater resolution at www.globalwebindex.net - along with some great comments from around the world.
So, Friday's post on @andrewgraystone's principles brought a little flurry of comments - more on one post than I have had for ages.
Some of these agree with Andrew, most tended to disagree, with @thechurchmouse voicing the most stringent protests.
So let's take another look at Andrew's list with some comments on what I heard Andrew saying and what I think the issues are. I will end with an alternative seven principles for discussion.
If you haven't read the comments on the previous post, it is probably worth a quick look. I have listed Andrew's principle first and suggested an alternative issue second after the double colon:
1. Singularity of Personality :: Authenticity
Andrew's point here is one that he has made on a number of occasions: I am one person although I may express myself in different ways in different contexts - therefore my online presence should reflect this unity of persona in offline life.
This point raised the most angst among commentators. I am not so sure that the point is singularity of persona. I think the issue is authenticity - in the sense of being true to who you are. In other words, I am different in different situations. I blog differently when I represent different parts of my portfolio career - when I am research director of CODEC I talk digital, I explore, I write geeky, I play with concepts and push boundaries. When I am Secretary to the Faith and Order Committee, I speak bureaucrat, Methodist, ecumenism and all that. I am different.
I cannot have a singularity of personality online because I don't really have such a tight singularity offline. However, I can be true and open to who I am. I can have authenticity as Pete Phillips who has a portfolio life offline and a portfolio life online too. Pete Phillips who does not copy all the trivia off twitter onto facebook; who runs two blogs (posterous as a post site, postmodernbible potentially as a more academic site - but which are often identical). It is this authenticity which is absolutely crucial in online terms. In other words, being true to myself offline and online is an awareness that the values I espouse offline need to be part of my existence online.
Though my language, my interests, my discussions may differ, I think it is important that my authenticity and values are not different. I am married offline and online. I cannot go around pretending to be single online without denying my fidelity to my wife. It is the same as Jesus saying that the very thought of adultery is as bad as adultery.
Offline values broken online are worth nothing. Let your presence online bear the same hallmark of authenticity as your life offline. (David Wall-Jones talks of congruence or coherence)
2. Humanising digital relationships :: Move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 - from the infoWeb to the socialWeb
I think Church Mouse is right when he points to the basic problem of this principle in terms of content providers vs. consumers. This is a Web 1.0 way of looking at the issue.
In Web 1.0, people provided content for a passive audience to read. Websites were infopoints and the main reason for blogging was to get your message out. Like the broadcast media, we had specialists creating content which the rest of us could consume. On such terms, there could be a problem. However, Andrew's usual discussion of this is in terms of his Direct Debits - where a computer carries out the transaction and no human being is involved. Andrew wants a fair trade approach which links consumer and content producer.
But, as Mouse says, that is precisely what we have in Web 2.0 - the interactive web. Blogs in 2.0 are not about information but about interaction. Twitter is about connecting with people and encouraging even greater interaction. The whole point of social media is that it is social - it builds community.
So this point is valid in so much that we do indeed need to move more and more into a much more interactive world. We need to make sure all the content we provide interacts with people and offers multiple opportunities for people to feed back thoughts and interact with us again. It is about information cycles rather than information transactions. Web 2.0 not Web 1.0.
And as for the direct debits - forget it, the world isn't going back to human bank tellers and machines, automatic transactions and robots are going to become more prevelant - freeing us up for much more interactions with real human beings online and offline. Social is the way forward.
3. Conscientization :: Always play social media in the key of Grace
I'm not so sure that this is a word. According to Wordnik, it is! It refers in marxist theory to a process of becoming aware of social and political differences. In other words, wake up and smell the coffee.
It is important to look at the power imbalances which are prevalent in our lives and in the media which we look at and use. But that isn't so easy as it sounds. The BBC have a huge hand in much of what we do - they have an unequal power balance. At the Church and Media conference, the BBC had all the airplay with no other broadcaster given a space to expound their views. Isn't that a social imbalance? Isn't the web a good place to undermine all of that powerplay and old boy's network?
So, at #medialit11 this week, we were able to allow non-contributors to speak to us through the twitterfall - speakers addressed their queries and it was as if they were there. What if we extended this to academic conferences allowing people to break free of their geographical restraints whether they be in Palestine, China or Lancashire? What if this allowed the poor or the academically less fortunate (non-Etonians?) to have a voice within HE research? What if the Methodist Conference were to allow ordinary Methodists to have a voice on the Conference floor.
Of course, the issue here is how we deal with social media. It isn't really about a marxist political stratagem, it's about basic discipleship. Let God's grace govern the way you act - be as gracious and welcoming and accepting as God and you won't be going too wrong. Act like Jesus did and have a bias to the poor. Act like Jesus did and listen to the outcasts. Act like Jesus did and simply ride roughshod through the old boys clubs of prestige and control. But do it with grace and love.
Always play social media in the key of Grace.
4. Authority and Openness :: Authenticity (again!)
Andrew argued that everything should be traceable to the real you! Be clear and authentic and let people check you! Andrew rejected/rejects the idea of pseudonimity online. In his online church he uses a pseudonym but easily trackable back to the real person. We've discussed this above in terms of a singularity of identity.
Laura (in the comments) talks of the occasional need for pseudonimity. I am less sure of this than Laura or Mouse are. I think I would prefer to know who a blogger is simply because of the power balance/imbalance which is afforded to a pseudonymous blogger. We don't know where they get their info from or whether their info is privileged. Mouse seems to have extraordinarily good access to (published and so public) Anglican finances and investment details. I am NOT saying Mouse has secret knowledge or illegal insider knowledge. He is a mouse not a mole. But he is a really well informed mouse, isn't he. I'd say that authenticity, and coherence in online/offline values, is paramount. But if a nom de plume helps you do your work...
5. Digital Justice :: Justice offline = Justice online
Andrew wanted to make the point that access to the internet and to material which we provide should not depend on wealth. In fact, it does. Does this then create a kind of digital apartheid? Should we not have a preferential option for the digitally poor.
Rallying cries for justice are easy to make. Presumably, this means be just online, just as you are just offline. If you fight for equality offline, then fight for it online too. If you have a specific offline area of justice (women's rights, veganism, the imopact of global warming) then those values need to be carried into the online mode as well.
That's easy (and fits with the authenticity and grace points above) - well, at least straightforward. But what about the concept of digitally rich and poor. Digital costs money - like all technology. But developing nations are using entrepreneurship to challenge the need for high-end technology. Small handsets are the norm in India rather than super-costed smartphones. As the base cost of technology decreases, so more and more people will come online in more and more ways. Sadly the proposals to give away vast numbers of cheap equipment failed. But the move towards a globally connected world moves faster and faster all the time (track the World Internet Stats for more details).
So part of our justice will be to ensure content which we want to be shared with as many people as possible is available in as many forms as possible - high end for those who have it, mobile for others, text only for others. That is part of the just distribution which we can do. Share what you have as justly as you can online and offline too!
6. Mission and Service :: Get on with it!
Global community is connected by digitisation - what does it mean to do mission/to serve in a hyperconnected planet. Agreed. But note Mark Howe's comments about McLuhan meant by this. It is that nowadays each village is more cosmopolitan. Its the seepage of media culture into all culture. It's the integration of different communities. It's the opportunities which globalisation affords us to share the good news.
Blatant plug here for BigBible and its #digidisciple strand...!!!
7. Embodiment :: the priority of embodiment.
Here Andrew was talking about the priority of human-human relationships. We mustn't forget that even the Church Mouse is a real human being. We cannot limit ourselves to purely digital relationships - turning ourselves into a geek in a darkened room (see Social Network, the movie). Mary Ann Hobbs talked about this at Thinking Digital and when the video finally comes up for that conference I will link it through. It's a problem I am teasing around in my Haptic Theology paper - more on that anon.
The question is whether this is true. Which it is. We were made for human-human relations. Or rather whether it is exclusively true. Aren't we made for relationship rather than embodied relationship. David Wilkinson explored this further in the afternoon when he talked of himself as a non-reducible physicalist. I challenged him about whether this denied the very existence of God - he says not! I remain less than convinced. I think we are more than the physical - more than Plato's cage. I think we extend into other places.
More on this later but you might want to look up Ned's blog where we look at this a little together in conversation.
So, my alternatives:
Pete
LATEST UPDATE:
Will Parker emailed me about the questions I had raised in my email to him. He comments on the translation process:
The "new translation" is from Father Mark Arey. It is his personal translation from the Greek. Father Mark is a Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of N.A. You may have heard of his church in New York City, St. Nicholas. It was destroyed when the towers fell in 9/11. Feel free to look him up.
You'll find more about Mark Arey and the church on the internet but my initial searches were a bit fruitless...he doesn't seem to have a personal presence on the web.
Will also pointed to the stellar nature of those involved in the process.
One of the most interesting parts of our story is not just the artwork itself or the fact that we've made the Bible a digital graphic novel App (the first of its kind), but that our team is so unique. We consist of our amazing artist from Greenville, SC, a writer from Hollywood, our Greek Orthodox Archdiocese from New York City (Father Mark Arey; St. Nicholas), Chris Diamantopoulos (currently starring in the Farrelly Brothers new movie, The 3 Stooges), myself, and a few others. We really have quite the team!
I'm pressing him for more on the text.
LATEST UPDATE
I bought chapter 1. It cost me 59p so not that expensive. I wasn't so sure whether this is my cup of tea but clearly it is going to be someone's. There are two ways of readings - either portrait or landscape with portrait giving a full page of pictures/text, but landscape going from frame to frame. Here are an example of a pages (portrait only as I can't get the app to open at the moment!):
The drawing is always yellow/gold on black - evidently the style chosen.
The translation doesn't appear to be too at odds with normal translations - so all good there. However, the matching of a full text with the visuals does mean that the illustration is a slave to the words rather than this being a true graphic novel. In other words, you aren't really reading the graphics. The graphics are helping you visualise the words and the words carry the freight of the storyline. I'm not so sure this is normal practice in graphic novels. Anyone want to comment on that?
Pete
There is a dedicated page out on the main posterous homepage for this site.
Great time so far.
You can follow our twitter stream on the hashtag #medialit11 and even add your own voice to the discussions. You can see the archive of tweets on www.twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/medialit11 - when I checked last night there were over 1100 tweets stored with some great links to youtube clips, notes, articles and so on...
Also Bex is posting lots at BigBible.org.uk - including live blogging of the content of the seminars.
Here is the timetable - pop in and say hello on the twitterfall in the venue!
All this teaching does mean posts will be fewer at the moment!
Sorry!
Pete
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