Things the Internet Has Killed (Part 3)

If you didn't see the first two posts in this series, they are here-

  Part 1
  Part 2

We are now to the next set, which includes vacations, privacy, and facts.

Vacations-  How in the world has the internet killed vacations?  Well, primarily by our own addiction to it.  It kills vacation by our staying in constant contact with it, whether that be email or just casual surfing, FB, or whatever.

I remember taking my laptop on vacation with me many times in the past.  I would spend quite a bit of time on it to the detriment of time spent with my family.  Then I started leaving it at home.  I got much more family time, but ended up with free time and nothing to do when the others were doing their own things (wife shopping, kids napping, etc.).  So I finally decided to go ahead and take the thing along, but to turn off the wi-fi connection.  It works.  Now, I can work on stuff (like my Sunday school lessons), read (I have Logos 4 installed, which includes a couple thousand books), or just organize my disorganized photos and files, if I have down time.  But since the wi-fi is not hooked up, I don't get bogged down in FB or with email.

Bottom line here is, it's really up to you, not the existence of the web, as to whether your vacation is ruined or not.

Privacy- This is the 'scary' one of the bunch, and one that we seem to have less control over than we'd like, or think.  The only real control we have is to not participate in the internet at all.  Even then, there will still be information about us on the web.  Have you ever typed your name into a Google (or other) search box and hit the enter key?  Try it...you'll be surprised at how much information is out there about you, and at how many people share your name (even if you have one of those 'unique' names, chances are its not unique).

The people that share your name are actually more of a problem than you might think.  How much of that information do you think gets associated with you by mistake?  And how hard is it to fix these false associations when you find them?  What if one of these people is a criminal?  In this culture, when everybody wants to be interconnected with all the information obtained by others (see the 9-11 Report if you need evidence), chances are pretty good that you have false information about you or connected to you floating around on the internet.

Now this, just in- a group of popular web sites has been harvesting your browser history to see if they can target  you with ads.  This 'history snooping' isn't new, but is just recently made the headlines.  Its just another example of how you have to not participate to save your privacy.

Facts-  This one cuts two directions.  First the good part:  facts are a lot easier to find with the ubiquity of the internet.  Even 20 years ago when I was a grad student, finding much information about much of anything required a trip to the library.  A couple hours in a card catalog, or searching on the terminals (after about 1990), yielded quite a few connections...all of which had to be physically found in the stacks, as they were called.  (I suppose they are still there, and still called, the stacks, but I bet its a lonely place these days.)  Now, if you need to know something, you type it into a Google box.  As one person (name forgotten) recently quipped, "In the past, if you needed to know something, you asked a smart person.  Now, the person you ask starts with G-O, and its not God."

But there's the rub...now, to find the information you need, and know it is legitimate information, you need to know more about the subject, or at least something about the sources, that you find.  And one problem I never had with a card catalog was getting two hundred thousand hits for a two-word title or phrase.  How are we to ever know if we are finding the right resources when we only skim through a few pages of the three thousand pages listed?

There's always the pages like Snopes.com, where we can check facts.  But who's checking the fact-checkers?  I remember one of those internet myth emails going around a couple years ago about Snopes being a liberal watch-dog site that was biased against conservatives.  I have no idea if it is or not, but you can bet that you won't find an entry at Snopes.com about it!  (Oh, come on...think about it...if it is true they are a liberal plant, they won't have an article confirming that they are a liberal plant...if they are not a liberal plant, they won't have an article confirming that they are a liberal plant).  I hear there are at least a dozen fact-checker sites now...but I'm not familiar with any of them.  And word is there are more starting up all the time.  But again, how do you know if the one or three fact-checker sites you consult are bias-free?


On with the show in a few days.

Two Minutes? (Is there really hypocrisy in the gay-marriage debate?)

Every once in a while, a response comes along that is so good (or important) that it needs to be shared, even if the original document to which it is responding wasn't on the radar screen.  We have one here.

In this blog post by Frank Turk (on the Pyromaniacs blog, which I recommend you follow on a regular basis), he responds to an op-ed in the USA Today newspaper early last week.  The piece, by Kirsten Powers, is important only because so many people read USA Today.  (USA Today intentionally writes its stories at the 6th-grade to 7th-grade reading level...that should say something about its value, but that's another story.)

If you want to read the article first, it is right here.  The article is called, "Hypocrisy shrouds the gay marriage debate."  It is a great example of shallow thinking and how to use emotional manipulation and ad hominem attacks to deflect people away from actual thought.  (And people wonder why the print media has fallen on such hard times?)

If you've heard folks throwing around ideas about what's wrong with Christians who oppose gay marriage, and known the arguments were hollow, but you weren't sure how to answer them cogently, then read Powers' article followed by Turk's response.

It is amazing what a little clear thinking can produce, if we try it.

How Porn Really Isn't a Victimless Crime

This summer, the First Things First blog published a fantastic article on the effects of pornography on society and on individuals. The article, here, is rather long for a blog-type post, but is well worth the read because of the multifaceted approach it takes to the dangers of this media, especially on the young.

Having teenagers at home makes this issue a lot bigger than it was a few years ago, personally.  With the recent brain research showing how adult images can re-wire the brain in ways that make normal relationships with people difficult to impossible, it gets even more scary.  (See this article, for example, citing how the exposure can make teens more rebellious.)  Add to that, porn now seems to be a growing problem among teenage girls and young women (see this article from Christianity Today).

This raises the whole question of the new media again...not just adult-related material but the whole concept of rapid access to shallow bits of information.  How is that process affecting our kids' ability to reason?

I don't have the answers, but some smart folks are working on it.  Hopefully, they'll have more answers sooner rather than later.

Of Kindles, iPads, and Such

There was a big sale over on woot.com on Kindles this morning- $149 for the first 5000 folks to get there. I was about two hours too late. Not that I really wanted to buy one...I don't. But I might. Maybe.

The problem is, I've used technology long enough now that I know all of it will become obsolete at some point in the future. I started using the personal computer in 1979. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80 (we called it the 'trash eighty' even back then). I've also been buying books for a longer time than that. I don't exactly know when I bought my first book with my own money, but it was probably around 1972. The TRS-80 is a museum piece now, and I wonder if there are any working models left. If you've ever had to save your programming on a cassette player, you'd wonder if the thing was working even then, but it was, all 4K of memory and such.

Funny though, none of my books have ever become obsolete. Granted, I've tossed a few in the trash because they were worthless, but they still worked exactly the same when I tossed them as when they were printed. The only risk was over-zealous salesmanship on the back cover, not a change in technology rendering the thing unusable.

So I have this distaste in my mouth about buying a Kindle or similar reading device. I wonder how much of my investment in books will eventually be lost to technological upgrades (or just hardware failures). The iPad is even more frightening...it costs about two or three times as much as a Kindle. Yes, it does more stuff, but I really don't know how much of that stuff would be useful to me verses how much would be a distraction and time waste. I fear about two-thirds or more of the appeal of the iPad would be time-wasting activities. At least a Kindle-type device is dedicated to reading books, which is rarely a waste of time.

I have jumped into the bible-software revolution with Logos 4, which has several thousand books in digital format. It wasn't cheap, but the thing about Logos is, they guarantee your investment will carry over to the next platform (and have demonstrated it in the move from L3 to L4). Plus, the per-book cost of Logos titles in the upgrade was so much lower than the cost of paper-and-ink books, it was too good a deal to pass up. One of the temptations with the Kindle is, it has a built-in PDF reader. And if I understand the platform, it will read text files, .doc files, .gif files, etc. Any of my Logos titles can be saved in such a format and then loaded onto the Kindle, which makes reading the Logos titles much more accessible (after all, carrying a Kindle is easier than a laptop or even a netbook, and reading from the Kindle screen is supposedly much easier on the eyes than reading from a computer screen). So I'm not totally against digital literature, just worried about it on a long-term basis.

Hmmmmm.