The Medium Is The Message Part 2
The Internet is the most influential, prolific, and cultural impacting event in this lifetime. No other medium has created so disruptive a change in media consumption and distribution. Today, you can read, listen or watch almost anything on the Internet. You can do it anytime and from anywhere.
In the early days, large web portals dominated. AOL, Yahoo, MSN were the ultimate portals, controlling your web experience from the moment you “dialed up”. All that changed when Google came. No matter how much content a Yahoo could produce, it could not effectively compete against the rest of the content in the world. Google leveled the playing field by making it easy for any user to find any content created by anyone. Google became the ultimate “portal” because it owned no content but gave you all content. So what’s next?
We now reach the latest chapter in this most interesting saga; the world of real-time. This is the buzz word of today. Twitter was the catalyst. With the hundreds of applications built around it, you can now see what people talk, reference, share or connect in real-time. Twitter is like instant messaging (IM) on steroids, capable of one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many discussions. You can access Twitter via the iPhone, the Blackberry, a Windows client, a Mac client and many other channels. In other words, it is everywhere and because of its ubiquity among mobile devices, it is the fire hose of real-time thoughts of millions of people everywhere, all the time and on almost any topic. It captures the zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment. It is the “collective mind” of the Internet generation.
All this brings us to the following question. What biases does the Internet medium portend for us?
Shane Hipps believes it is in the NOW. What happens when real-time streams, that is, the instant access to anything and everything becomes a fire hose of non-stop data? I say data, because there is a switching cost for the mind to convert data to knowledge. The more data you consume, the more your mind has to filter out the “noise”. One single stream of noise may be controllable but what happens when you have a multitude of real-time streams? Voice, email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and IM are all integrated into your smart phone. You are connected all the time. You are reachable all the time. And you multi-task across multiple data streams all the time, in real-time.
We become “multiplexers”. We accept all data streams and constantly flip from one to another. One moment I’m talking to you, next I’m checking my email, next I receive a phone call, next I’m twittering my thoughts and then back to you again. Multi-tasking is at its height because technology has finally removed the barriers of time and distance to produce, consume and communicate information. But as with anything, there comes a cost from this incessant switching of attention.
We are slowly becoming a generation of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) consumers. We are being trained to absorb quick shots of tiny information but to accept many streams. Our mind is becoming a champion of information juggling. The cost to us is that our minds begin to resist concentrated focus on any one subject. Don’t believe me? Try focusing on doing one project today but shut down your information streams of voice, email, Twitter, and Facebook from both your personal computer and also your mobile phone. Many us have become information addicts. When forced to do so we are unable to “shut down” and let our mind relax. Have you ever been on a flight and the moment the plane touches down you reach for your mobile phone to check everything? Look around you at your fellow passengers as well.
If the Internet is the ultimate “medium”, then its impact on the message is the bias for information to be as short, simple, and easy to digest as possible. Anything that requires a dedicated thought process without interruption is at risk. How does this impact our relationship with God? It impacts our connection with the Holy Spirit. It impacts our worship. It impacts our focus on the presence of God.
It’s already begun. Witness the start of a small but potentially disrupting trend of tweeting during sermons. This is becoming quite the hot topic of the day in the church circles. I’m still torn between the benefits of having a back-channel to discuss the sermon and creating an interactive session between the pastor and the congregants. However, if the Lord is “speaking” to me, is it possible that I am so distracted by the other competing streams that I’m missing out on His presence? Are we so purpose driven that we’ve forgotten it’s truly about the presence of God and listening and hearing His will?
This is the “struggle” of the Internet generation.
P.S. During the making of this blog post I was simultaneously chatting on IM, reading incoming emails, visiting my Facebook page and checking tweets. But I sure tried hard to focus only on this article.
Colin Wong lives with his wife and three kids in the always sunny, never rainy wonderful land of Seattle.
