The Internet Never Forgets, or The Impossibility of Digital Absolution

A follow-up to a post we did a little while ago about the indelibility of the Internet, via an article published this past weekend in the Times "Erasing the Digital Past." This is fertile ground in a number of ways. When I worked as a youth minister, one of our most effectively incriminating illustrations for sin was that of a DVD of one's life, subtitled with one's thoughts. The kids would always gasp. Well, it would appear that the need for such illustrations may become a thing of the past - with the Internet serving that function in real time. Not only have we been given an ongoing, often inconvenient chronicle of our public and private lives, we've been given one that effortlessly exposes the fruitlessness of our attempts to manage our condition (the whack-a-mole analogy that Ms. Allison uses below has also been used in countless evangelistic talks). Of course, this is all very good news for those like Good News, as it clearly begs the question, how does one translate Psalm 103:12 for the digital age?  "As far as DOS is from Java, so far has he removed our search results from us"? Wakka wakka wakka:

At first, some tried manipulating the Web results on their own, by doing things like manually deleting photos from Flickr, revising Facebook pages and asking bloggers to remove offending posts. But like a metastasized cancer, the incriminating data had embedded itself into the nether reaches of cyberspace, etched into archives, algorithms and a web of hyperlinks. 

After failing to rid the negative sites on their own, most turned to a new breed of Web specialists known as online reputation managers, who offer to expunge negative posts, bury unfavorable search results and monitor a client’s virtual image.

Reputation.com... is among a growing corps of online reputation managers that promise to make clients look better online. In an age when a person’s reputation is increasingly defined by Google, Facebook and Twitter, these services offer what is essentially an online makeover, improving how someone appears on the Internet, usually by spotlighting flattering features and concealing negative ones.

“The Internet has become the go-to resources to destroy someone’s life online, which in turn means their offline life gets turned upside, too,” said Michael Fertik, the chief executive of Reputation.com, which is in Redwood City, Calif., and is among the largest in this field. “We’ve reached a point where the Internet has become so complicated, vast and fast-paced, that people can’t control it by themselves anymore. They now need an army of technologists to back them up online.”
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Social networks, online comments and oversharing online have created a threat to everyone’s reputation and privacy,” said Mr. Fertik of Reputation.com. “Now people are trying to figure out how to put that toothpaste back in the bottle.” ONCE something is online, it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to delete. So tweaking one’s online reputation usually boils down to gaming the search engines. Image-conscious people with an understanding of the Web’s architecture can try doing it themselves, by populating the Web with favorable content... But these tactics have their limits, especially when the Web sites in question are popular and optimized for search engines.

One such site would be Gawker, the New York media blog, which had been known to pluck characters out of relative obscurity and turn them into villains. Starting in 2009, Gawker published a series of snarky items about Julia Allison, a former dating columnist for Time Out New York magazine and a social media expert. Readers were soon acquainted with her videos of her publicly arguing with a boyfriend at the time, personal e-mails sent to Gawker editors and photos of Ms. Allison in lingerie which were posted online.

Ms. Allison tried tinkering with the search result herself, but became so fed up that she once announced that she was “quitting” the Internet. “It’s more like whack-a-mole than anything else,” said Ms. Allison, who has been in talks with Reputation.com to work or online presence. “Hit one, and another pops up. I have spent hours and hours attempting to solve the nearly impossible problem of a maligned online reputation.” 

“The hardest thing is when you have a very unique name,” added Don Sorenson, the founder of Big Blue Robot, an online reputation management company in Orem, Utah, that works with corporations. “If you have a last name like Smith or Brown, you’re going to be better off, but if you have a unique name you will definitely have your work cut out for you.”

At that point, some people have been known to legally change their name.

It hasn’t become that bad for Ms. Allison. She compares the scar to her online reputation to a large tattoo: “Technically, it’s possible to remove it, but it’s painful and expensive. Plus, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever remove it 100 percent.” The entire experience has made her more cautious about what she shares. “I swore too much and there are a few lingerie photos I wish were private now, but they are the relatively average mistakes of youth,” she said. “Unfortunately, they are now mistakes that will follow me in perpetuity.”

Subway Mayhem and the Lostness of Identity

On my way to JFK after leaving the Mockingbird Conference I ended up on the wrong train. Not knowing that there are two trains that share a track, instead of ending up at the airport I ended up in Queens.

Standing on the platform feeling a little lost and very alone, I noticed something relevant. I noticed these men in their twenties, and some definitely in their thirties, who were what the world would definitely identify as "hoodlums" or "gangsters". And I couldn't help but feel a sense of sadness for these men, a sadness which stemmed from the idea of identity.

With what do we identify? In my world, the typical man identifies with his career, or perhaps with a hobby like hunting or fishing. But these men I saw on the subway platform don't appear to have a career. They don't have the money for an expensive hobby like hunting or fishing, or whatever else people tend to identify with in my world.

So what do these men identify with? Well, it appears to be wearing one's pants too low and walking around the world in a very slow, affected way whilst blasting a certain kind of music from one's cell phone (what ever happened to ghetto blasters?!!).

And the sad thing, from my vantage point, is the fact that we're all mis-identifying. In striving to have an identity that we can create and control, whether it be in the world of Northwest Florida fly fishing or the world of NYC hip hop, we struggle to have something that defines us to others. I think this need to be defined stems from our need to be accepted, and this need to be accepted stems from what I believe is the real root of the problem: our very deep need to be loved.

The source of this universal and constant need for identity is the fact that quite frankly we've misplaced ourselves. We're fallen creatures who have misplaced the ability to focus on what's real--the thing that can give us real identity, real acceptance and real love. And in truth, this is the one thing that can fill the hole in us that we're trying so desperately to fill with these other things.


The apostle John summed up for us the identity of this real thing in three simple words: "God is love." This is a simple yet profound little sentence, and unfolding the implications of it explains why our true identity must be found in God: it's because only God's love is unconditional in a way that loves us no matter what, even when we're looking in the wrong direction.

All human love, ever, comes with conditions no matter how small. Only God's unconditional love could conceive a plan that would save us by sending his son to die in our place. I love all of you as my brothers and sisters in Christ, but as the father of a son whom I adore I just can't conceive of a love like this. None of us can. All we can do is accept it.

And in accepting this love we are accepted as God's own, and our identity then comes from that being accepted, along with the love we so desperately need. As I see it, this is what Mockingbird speaks of that the world is seeking yet not finding. This is the lost lane-end into Heaven. This is what's real.

Sexting and Identity

In the looking-for-love-in-all-wrong-places department, a rich article was released on Sunday about the growing presence of "sexting" amongst teenagers across the nation, and the implications it has not only on law and justice, but social development, popular culture, and the modern family. An article written with an arresting understanding that things don't come from nowhere, it sympathetically centers on Margarite as the confluence of teenage identity crisis, which basically comes down to social-relational confusion and basic, human love-hunger. 

Adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: the primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find attractive. Indeed, the photos can confer cachet.

..In the shifting power dynamics of middle school girls, the former friend understood well that she who sneers first sneers best. The flick of a cutting remark, swiftly followed by “Just kidding!” The eye roll. As the animosity between the two girls escalated, Margarite felt shunned by an entire group of girls and was eating lunch by herself. At home she retreated to her bedroom, alone with her cellphone and computer.


...“You can’t expect teenagers not to do something they see happening all around them,” said Susannah Stern, an associate professor at the University of San Diego who writes about adolescence and technology...“They’re practicing to be a part of adult culture,” Dr. Stern said. “And in 2011, that is a culture of sexualization and of putting yourself out there to validate who you are and that you matter.” 

...Yet when the local news media storm cascaded, the outcry was not about the severe penalties for a felony sexting conviction. It was about why (prosecuting attorney) Mr. Peters had not also arrested Margarite.

“She’s a victim,” Mr. Peters said. “She made an ill-advised decision to share that picture with her boyfriend. As far as she knew, that was as far as it would go...What good would come from prosecuting her? What lesson could we teach her that she hasn’t already learned now 1,000 times over?”

Tim Ferriss and the 4-Hour Soul

A moderately interesting look at 4-hour phenomenon Tim Ferriss in the NY Times. One gets the sense that although there's clearly some energy here - it's hard not to respect someone who goes to such lengths - all the optimization and efficiency talk is actually code for self-justification (and a very inflated anthropology). It sounds as though Ferris has simply replaced his own identity-driven obsession with business with a similar one with self - which strikes this blogger as different versions of the same thing. Plus, does anyone else think that the urgency/anxiety about time is a tad contradictory? Meaning, if there's a specific 'purpose' or 'utility' to 'living in the moment', one wonders if the moment is actually being lived in... So it may not exactly be a newsflash, but there seems to be a lot of 'hows' and very few 'whys' being explored here, i.e. precious little wisdom. Which is obviously not the point, anyway. But, hey, bro, I haven't read the books, and I certainly don't want to be a hater:

A Twitter-age savant, [Ferriss has] made a career of teaching readers how to achieve personal goals using the least amount of time and effort. His occasionally off-the-wall, even polarizing, lessons include how to gain 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, master a foreign language in three to six months and increase fat loss by placing ice packs on your neck. In freewheeling YouTube videos, he proffers advice on how to use chopsticks, survive a physical attack, tie a Windsor knot, deftly remove the shell of a hard-boiled egg and efficiently pack a suitcase (complete with odor- and bacteria-resistant underwear).

Appealing to a generation awash in sound bites, Twitter and the rapid-fire exchange of information, he holds out the promise that if you follow a simple set of dictates, it is possible to “smash fear,” “learn anything” and “have it all.” In geek speak, he’s a “life hacker,” one who has collected both ardent devotees and harsh disparagers. In 2008, Wired magazine asked its readers to vote for self-promoter of the year. The winner? “Timothy Ferriss by a landslide,” the article said.

 Consumers, particularly Silicon Valley types, were awakening to the idea that there would always be more information than attention or hours in the day. Mr. Ferriss, positioning himself somewhere between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk, offered solutions to what he calls the “time-famine phenomenon.” In the process, he exposed cracks in the seemingly sacred Baby Boomer model of life, where work is supreme and travel and hobbies are deferred until retirement. “Managing that pain and finding solutions was a very high priority for people at the exact same time my book came out,” Mr. Ferriss said last month while driving to his house in San Francisco.

“It’s ironic that he wrote ‘The 4-Hour Workweek,’ ” said Garrett Camp, 32, StumbleUpon’s founder and chief executive. “He’s the exact opposite of that.” 
[CONTINUE READING]

Iron Mike Mellows Out

The mesmerizing jumble of contradictions that is Mike Tyson soldiers on! The NY Times magazine published a treasure trove of soundbites on identity formation/deconstruction last week in their profile, The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson. Mike appears to be turning his back on the glory-culture that's defined him lo these many years, and doing so with religious vigor. What on the surface might seem like an outside-in approach to self-improvement has to be filtered through the bottoming-out narrative that has long characterized Tyson, reaching its tragic apex with the death of his daughter in 2004. And then there's his touching relationship with pigeons, which provide quite a foil to the way he has described his nature in the past, i.e. that of a "vicious tiger." Autodidact or no, there's definitely some serious insight here. Fascinating, ht JG:

The astonishing discipline and drive Tyson once put into “the stern business of pugilism,” to quote the boxer Jack Johnson, is now being channeled into the business of leading an ordinary, even humdrum existence. It is impossible not to wonder whether this effort can be sustained indefinitely, whether you can reshape the contours of a personality by a sheer act of will, but there is no doubt that Tyson has committed himself to a wholesale renovation.

As part of his cleaning-up campaign, he has been adhering to a strict vegan diet for nearly two years, explaining that he doesn’t want anything in him “that’s going to enrage me — no processed food, no meat.” He says that he can no longer abide the smell of meat even on someone’s breath and has dropped 150 pounds since he weighed in at 330 in 2009. “I’ve learned to live a boring life and love it,” he declares, sounding more determined than certain. “I let too much in, and look what happened. . . . I used to have a bunch of girls and some drugs on the table. A bunch of people running around doing whatever.”

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace. One of the few links between his tumultuous past and his more tranquil present are his homing pigeons...
[CONTINUE READING]

Another Week Ends: Galli on B(h)ell, Growing Up Catholic, Secret Millionaires, Immortal Billionaires, Lillian Roth, Mixed Signals and Nicolas Cage

1. If you've been scratching your head over the whole "Rob Bell universalism" uproar this past week, conference speaker Mark Galli will set you straight with this charitable overview of how the topic of Hell has been dealt with over the centuries. Suffice it to say, there's nothing new under the sun, and the outcry says a lot less about Bell than about the folks reacting to his as-of-yet largely unread book. 

To lighten the mood, check the sort-of related and apparently very real After The Rapture Pet Care (ht CH).

2. The Guardian takes a look at the new laugh-or-cry memoir by comic Rory McGrath, The Father, The Son and the Ghostly Hole: Growing Up Catholic. Evidently it plumbs the depths of Catholic guilt - stemming in this case from an experience of religion as Judgment with a capital J (and zero Gospel) - in a particularly unflinching and let's-face-it tragic manner. Not exactly groundbreaking, but nonetheless striking, ht AOC:

"[After being disillusioned in high school, McGrath] never returned to the church, and he never quite shook it off. He was expecting to embark on a binge of guilt-free hedonism at university, but it didn't quite work out like that. He felt rootless rather than liberated. "You think, 'What do I do now, where am I supposed to go, what am I supposed to be doing?' It had an effect on my first years at university because I didn't know what to do. I don't know if this is to do with religion or just my character, but I had a total lack of self-discipline."

Nor did the sense of guilt disappear with his divorce from the church. In fact it grew, and he started to feel responsible for anything and everything. "I think guilt grows inside you. I'm still discovering it now, aged well whatever age I am. I'm over 40 and now discovering it's all guilt."

3. In an editorial that touches on some familiar themes, CNN accuses ABC's reality show Secret Millionaire of "shamelessly promoting a fantasy about the redemptive power of wealth." I haven't seen it but would love to hear others' thoughts:
[CONTINUE READING]

Mirror Neurons, the Mind-Body Problem, and The Limits of Neurology

The third of four neuroscience posts today/tomorrow, this one comes to us from the New York Review of Books, more precisely, Colin McGinn's thoughtful review of V.S. Ramachandran's new book, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human. A bit more technical than the previous two installments, this one may have you glazing over with its talk of 'mirror neurons'... But stick with it, as the questions at the bottom are the same, i.e. What makes us human? Why do we act the way we do? Do we have free will? Is there more to the mind than the brain (and vice versa)? Are we primarily rational or emotional creatures? Or is that a false dichtomy? To what extent do universal 'laws' rule our consciousness? What role does nature play vs. nurture? And where are the limits of neurology? McGinn rightly pinpoints the inflated anthropology running underneath - the word 'reductionism' is a frequent one - making it a fitting counterpoint to David Livingston Smith's point of view. Enjoy, ht MB:

The mirror neurons that have been identified in the brain serve as the mechanism of imitation, [Ramachandan] suggests, in virtue of their ability to react or “fire” sympathetically, and thus affect consciousness, when you are watching someone else do something: some of the same neurons fire both when you observe the performance of an action and when you actually perform that action. This is held to show that the brain automatically produces a representation of someone else’s “point of view”—it runs by means of mirroring neurons an internal simulation of the other’s intended action.

The mirror neurons act like sympathetic movements that can occur when watching someone else perform a difficult task—as when your arm swings slightly when you watch someone hit a ball with a bat. For Ramachandran this specific neural circuitry provides the key to understanding the growth of culture; indeed, the mirror neurons are held to permit the evolution of language, by enabling imitative utterance. According to him, we need special inhibitory mechanisms in order to keep our mirror neurons under control—or else we would be in danger of doing everything we see and losing our sense of personal identity. We are, in effect, constantly impersonating others at a subconscious level, as our hyperactive mirror neurons issue their sympathetic reactions. [CONTINUE READING]

Old and New Adams (and Andrews) in The Office

Friction and Addiction in New Social Media

A fascinating read, from beginning to end, in GQ about what's going on behind the "New Social Media" phenomenon in Silicon Valley, "The Viral Me". The answer appears to be a peculiar form of narcissism, which is as idealistic about changing the way people relate as it is cynical in its understanding of how to do so. In other words, these guys are attempting to (and succeeding in) exploit our addictive tendencies (via endlessly random incentives) and predict our self-justifying impulses for the sake of efficiency and harmony. At bottom, all this new tech is exciting, terrifying and very, very human (ht KW):

I still have an embarrassingly antiquated idea of what people mean by "privacy" when they complain about, say, Facebook. To me the danger is basically some Russian guy who steals my credit card number. Or Google knowing my porn predilections. Both of those things are certainly happening. But the "private" stuff that's most likely to get you into trouble is the information you willingly share—semipublic stuff provided by you that can become known by audiences you don't anticipate. My reflexive response to that privacy fear would be to pull all data whatsoever from the public sphere—erase my Facebook account, stop with the Twitter. People like Rahul have the opposite solution: Flood the social layer with information you want out there about yourself.

(If you're confused by the term social layer, think of the word layer as meaning "lens." The social layer is one lens you can look through to see the content of the Internet. Who you're connected to, what they're connected to, what they like and don't like.)

"More and more people are going to have careers where they move from one thing to another fairly publicly," Rahul says. "And what people are really investing in is your track record. Your brand. What you do and what you say and what you think are just as important as your skills. Specifically for me, for our company, it's very important for me to be known, to have credibility, and to have opinions."
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The first thing I want to know is why, apparently, people on [DailyBooth] don't feel exposed, vulnerable, embarrassingly narcissistic. "There was a study done," Brian says. "They gave people video cameras. Everyone over the age of 25 would turn it outward, and everyone under the age of 25 would turn it inward. This is the first platform that captured this behavior of turning the camera inward. It created a platform for communication around that one behavior. Look at the iPhone 4. It has two cameras—they added one specifically to face inward. And the fact that Steve Jobs, who's sort of the person who defines what's acceptable in technology and behavior, put this here? So this behavior is becoming even more acceptable."[CONTINUE READING]

Man-Children and the Women That (Don't) Love Them

When did The Wall Street Journal become the go-to place for provocative social commentary? An editorial by Kay Hymowitz entitled "Where Have All The Good Men Gone?" has been raising plenty of eyebrows this past week, doubling as a gender specific follow-up to this past summer's landmark NY Times article about The Age 30 Deadline (not to mention last week's conversation about high-school wrestling). Both articles explore the identity politics of "extended adolescence"/"pre-adulthood" in fascinating ways, and both hit on the various contradictions involved in the culture of self-definition. There might be a slight note of "woe-are-they" buried in here, but the observations themselves about the man-child phenomenon seem sound, that the law of human identity in this case (i.e. who society tells us we must and should be) is literally killing love. Much of this, of course, has been played out/mirrored in the church - and I know some would point to "secularlization" as a key part of the problem. But regardless what you see as the root cause, there's a lot of food for thought:

The knowledge economy gives the educated young an unprecedented opportunity to think about work in personal terms. They are looking not just for jobs but for "careers," work in which they can exercise their talents and express their deepest passions. They expect their careers to give shape to their identity. For today's pre-adults, "what you do" is almost synonymous with "who you are," and starting a family is seldom part of the picture.

Unlike adolescents, however, pre-adults don't know what is supposed to come next. For them, marriage and parenthood come in many forms, or can be skipped altogether. In 1970, just 16% of Americans ages 25 to 29 had never been married; today that's true of an astonishing 55% of the age group. In the U.S., the mean age at first marriage has been climbing toward 30 (a point past which it has already gone in much of Europe). It is no wonder that so many young Americans suffer through a "quarter-life crisis," a period of depression and worry over their future.
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American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.
[CONTINUE READING]

Conference Preview: Do You Have A Zombie Plan? Part III

It doesn't take long in this life to see particular groups of people peeling off the major interstate of human relationships into their own provincial enclaves.  This can be geographical (as in the small towns that recycle their populations) or metaphorical (as in the cliques that arise in schools and morph into adult subcultures).  Everyone within reach of this digital word finds themselves in the midst of some subculture or homogeneous people group.  It could be the good ol' boys in Rayne, Louisiana or the hipster Christians of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  It could be the Old Row fraternity scene at the University of Alabama or the Crips in South Central Los Angeles.

It all goes back to the idea of good ol' bootstraps, self-generated identity. And identity is always the reservoir of self-assertion and, thus, suffering, violence, judgment, and fear. As one of the Bloods on a Gangland documentary said, "If you ain't Blood, you're my enemy." Similar but less ominous attitudes appear in other subcultures. Imagine walking into a University of Georgia sorority party with an 80's bouffant hairdo and acid-washed jeans. Even (especially?) the Christian subculture (whatever form that may take in your town) is much more about cultural ethics, politics, language, and subtleties than God's Law.

But, what about the coming zombie apocalypse?  What position do all of these individual members of their respective subcultures find themselves in as they realize they are being stalked by the living dead?  Is there something universal here that we will be forced to recognize?  Come to the breakout session "The Zombie Apocalypse in Christian Thought" at the Mockingbird Conference to think about and gird yourself for the coming zombie horde.

College Football Message Boards... And Sanctification

This just in from Mbird contributor Cameron Cole:

One of my favorite pastimes (addictions) is surfing message board related to Alabama football, predominantly TiderInsider and BamaOnline. I love scouring the threads for inside information about player development, recruiting, coaching changes, and SEC rumors. The world of football message boards can be toxic, erratic, and exhilarating all at the same time. When Alabama loses a recruit of a football game, the board spirals into a meltdown. After Alabama lands a major recruit, particularly at the expense of a rival, electric euphoria fills the air.

Over the past five years, much has changed with Alabama football, but little has changed in the culture of the message board. Since Alabama hired Nick Saban in 2007, the Tide has risen from an historic national power (with little to show for it on the field from 1997-2006), to now being one of, if not “the,” preeminent power in college football. In the ten years before Saban, Alabama accrued five losing seasons, only one SEC title, and three ten win season. In four years with Saban, Alabama has three ten plus win seasons, a national title, an SEC title, and two SEC West titles. Alabama has won more games in the past three years than any other program, and they have been ranked #1 for nearly half the year in 2008 & 2010. Few expect this overwhelming success to stop any time soon with Alabama racking up their third #1 recruiting class in four years and with nearly all early prognostications pointing to the Tide as having a preseason number two ranking behind the favorite Oklahoma Sooners.

Still, with the new identity as baddest boy on the block, the tone and behavior on message boards has changed little. People still flip out after a loss and attack the coaching staff. Panic ensues when a rival has success. Fans get downright nasty when a recruit de-commits from Alabama and heads to another school. Fear, venom, and complaint still generally define the culture of message boards. (Posters call this “Shula-itis,” referencing the dismal Shula era at Alabama, where the Tide mustered one winning season in four years.)

At times, I just want to scream (or post), have you guys forgotten who we are? We just signed top recruiting class in America. Why are we freaking out over a four star linebacker going elsewhere? We just won the national title in 2009 and probably will again in the next two years. Why are we having a panic attack over the success of another team? We have who many call the best head coach in college football. Why panic over play calls and schemes?

In essence, I am saying that true recognition of our identity in the grander scheme of college football- a national power- naturally should warrant a change in our behavior, compared to the struggling program we were ten years ago.

So it goes with considering sanctification in the Christian life. CONTINUE READING.

Brene Brown on The Power of Vulnerability

A courageous address from Brene Brown at last year's TED summit in Houston, jam-packed with insight and premised on a concept of 'enoughness' which has more than a little in common with what we talk about on here so frequently. It's, um, enough to make one wonder where Brown, the social worker responsible for that fantastic article on Perfectionism a few months back, is coming from. That is, it seems positively soaked in Christian understandings, endorsing in roundabout ways the healing power of repentance, our enslavement to self-justification and inherent obsession with righteousness, the entire idea of strength in weakness, she even touches on grace in parenting. And minus a grounding in something a bit more realistic/Eternal, her notion of 'whole-heartedness' is almost a direct borrow from the church, going so far as to co-opt religious language.

Of course, there are plenty of bones to pick - this is not a theological talk - but the congruence is remarkable. And her wonderful delivery is a case in point re: the power of vulnerability. Has she listened to Breaking The Fourth Wall? You be the judge, ht CC:

Technology, Honesty, Loneliness and Identity: Facebook Making Us Sad, Take 2

A follow-up to the recent post about Facebook making us sad is the full-length review in the NY Times of MIT professor Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. She's basically exploring the psychological side effects of the Internet, which of course, have an enormous amount to do with identity, anxiety, control and what we call the Law. Although one does detect a slight air of curmudgeonliness ("in my day..."), and some of the insights may strike you as awfully self-evident, it nevertheless sounds like a worthwhile and important book:

Many of the adolescents cited in her book express a decided distaste for using the phone. One high school sophomore says telephone calls mean you have to have a conversation and conversations are “almost always too prying, it takes too long, and it is impossible to say ‘good-bye.’ ” Another student says: “When you talk on the phone, you don’t really think about what you’re saying as much as in a text. On the telephone, too much might show.”

Texts, in other words, offer more control — and the ability to keep one’s feelings at a distance. Many young people “prefer to deal with strong feelings from the safe haven of the Net,” Ms. Turkle writes. “It gives them an alternative to processing emotions in real time.”
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Noting that the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson regarded identity play as part of the work of adolescence, she argues that the Net not only supplies teenagers with lots of opportunities to explore who they are and what they aspire to but also generates added anxiety, heightening peer pressure and encouraging many to construct, edit and perform a “self” in an effort to win friends and influence.

Of an interview subject she calls Brad, Ms. Turkle writes: “Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting ‘confused’ between what he ‘composes’ for his online life and who he ‘really’ is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people treat him in the real. People already relate to him based on things he has said on Facebook. Brad struggles to be more ‘himself’ there, but this is hard. He says that even when he tries to be ‘honest’ on Facebook, he cannot resist the temptation to use the site ‘to make the right impression.’ ”
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There are other consequences to constant networking as well. When we are always tethered to our offices, our families, our friends — even when hiking in the woods or walking by the ocean — then solitude becomes increasingly elusive, and creative, contemplative, carefully considered thought increasingly gives way to immediate, sometimes ill-considered reactions.

At times, Ms. Turkle can sound primly sanctimonious, complaining for instance that the sight at a local cafe of people focused on their computers and smartphones as they drink their coffee bothers her: “These people are not my friends,” she writes, “yet somehow I miss their presence.” Such sentimental whining undermines the larger and important points she wants to make in this volume — the notion that technology offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy and communication without emotional risk, while actually making people feel lonelier and more overwhelmed.

Tina Fey and The Baby-Career Dilemma

Tina Fey plays the double messages of modern life better than anyone, particularly those that relate to women. On 30 Rock, her character Liz Lemon is a catalog of contradictions, constantly (and hilariously) battling the differences between the ideal and the real, her 'shoulds' and her 'wants', her convictions and her appetites, etc. She mines those discrepancies for laughs, and in doing so, has become something of an icon for (a certain kind of) modern woman, a walking commentary on contemporary gender politics. She adds just enough straight-man self-deprecation to get away with some fairly subversive comedy, and whenever 30 Rock veers from that mold, it gets pretty shrill/snobby, pretty fast. Anyways, Fey recently put her considerable skills to work for the New Yorker, examining the question of whether or not to have a second baby, "Confessions of a Juggler." The piece, which is really very funny, doubles as a crash-course in moving-target Judgment, both the internal and external kind, and the fruit it produces: sleepless nights, canker sores, counter-judgments, etc. And in the final paragraph, if you substitute "minister" for "gynecologist," (and assume Christ as the basis of the assurance), you almost have Law/Gospel treatise on your hands... I'm only sort of kidding: 

"What is the rudest question you can ask a woman? 'How old are you?' 'What do you weigh?'... No, the worst question is: 'How do you juggle it all?' 'How do you juggle it all?' people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes, 'You're screwing it all up, aren't you?' their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggles as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I've poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.

The second-worst question you can ask a woman is: 'Are you going to have more kids?'
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"I Did It All For The Glory Of [Me]"

In recent years, nearly every personal newspaper, magazine, or internet piece has been written written by someone "who is working on a memoir," "has just completed a memoir," or "is thinking about writing a memoir." While some of these pieces are very good, most are unmemorable, becoming indistinguishable from previous entries within moments after reading. Why so many memoirs?

Neil Genzlinger's recent NY Times Book Review The Problem with Memoirs laments the market saturation. While reviewing four memoirs (none of which I've read), he offers guidelines for deciding whether a memoir should be published:

Sure, the resulting list [of tens of thousands of memoirs from an Amazon search] has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how many other people have already written about it. Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually every­one who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight. By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an under­privileged child or been an under­privileged child. By anyone who was raised in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, not to mention the ’50s, ’40s or ’30s. Owned a dog. Run a marathon. Found religion. Held a job.

[Rules]

1 That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir. This maxim, which was inspired by an unrewarding few hours with “Dis­aster Preparedness,” by Heather Havri­lesky, is really a response to a broader problem, a sort of grade inflation for life experiences. A vast majority of people used to live lives that would draw a C or a D if grades were being passed out — not that they were bad lives, just bland. Now, though, practically all of us have somehow gotten the idea that we are B+ or A material; it’s the “if it happened to me, it must be interesting” fallacy.

2 No one wants to relive your misery. . . .

No, the sole purpose of this memoir, like many, many others concerning some personal trial, is to generate sympathy for its author. But it’s the reader who will need a hug after choking down this orgy of self-congratulation and self-pity. That’s what happens when immature writers write memoirs: they don’t realize that an ordeal, served up without perspective or perceptiveness, is merely an ordeal. . . .

If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it. . . .

That’s what makes a good memoir — it’s not a regurgitation of ordinariness or ordeal, not a dart thrown desperately at a trendy topic, but a shared discovery. 

Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.

Enduring ordeals like the ones mentioned above inevitably produces new insights, recognitions of false gods in which we've placed our trust, which are profound to us. We want to discover their meaningfulness. But, our "will" resists the work of the Holy Spirit. We don't want to die. So rather than taking up our cross and waiting and trusting Christ to work in us, we bind ourselves to another version of the law, another attempt at shaping others' perception of us, that will end the pain and improve our circumstances, perhaps through a memoir whose scope does not escape navel gazing. Rather than accepting justification through Christ on the cross, we seek to transform ourselves and avoid a painful death. But the cross is what and all we need, even as failed actual or contemplated memoirists.

The Ripped and the Righteous: The Gospel According to Jack LaLanne

Frank Bruni cooked up (!) quite the enlightening editorial in Saturday's NY Times about the recently deceased fitness guru Jack LaLanne, tracing the ways LaLanne was responsible for turning exercise into a religion, the gym into a temple, etc. I'll spare you a diatribe about the superficiality of "discipline" for discipline's sake - Bruni says/implies what needs to be said/implied - what's more interesting here is that although LaLanne may not have come up with the outside-in approach to self-improvement (that particular 'face' has been launching ships since the Stone Age), he was certainly instrumental in figuring out how to market it. It would seem he casts a shadow of Charles Finney-like proportions. I for one was unaware how explicit the movement was, from its outset, in co-opting religious language (ht AZ):

That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you could pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These... are [Jack LaLanne's] doing, at least in part. What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul.

“There seems to be a whole substitute morality, where your obligation is to go to the gym and not ask why,” says Mark Greif, a founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and the author of a widely discussed 2004 essay, “Against Exercise.” “If you don’t, you become a sort of villain of the culture.”

The message that perspiration is a gateway to, and reflection of, higher virtues is captured in health club slogans like ones used by the Equinox chain over recent years: “Results aren’t always measured in pounds and inches.” “My body. My biography.” “It’s not fitness. It’s life.” The same idea is encoded in the language of personal improvement. A “new you” usually means a trimmer, tauter version, not someone who has learned to speak Mandarin or picked up woodworking skills.
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In his own way, Mr. LaLanne was also a moralist, proselytizing about diet and exercise. To go back and look at his language is to be struck by its religious flavor.  He once compared himself to Billy Graham, saying that while Mr. Graham (no relation to Sylvester) was “for the hereafter,” he was “for the here and now.” He called what he was doing a crusade, adding, “To me, this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of America." And he admitted that exercise wasn’t always pleasurable or diverting. You did it because it was right and good and true — because it would better you. The Protestant work ethic pulsed through every one of his jumping jacks.
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There’s a bullying strain to the modern fitness ethos, a blurred line between cheerleading and hectoring. And it’s hard not to wonder whether that kind of intimidation — in addition to the social and economic realities of diet and exercise — helps explain the paradox that for all the newfangled aerobic machines and reduced-rate January gym memberships, Americans aren’t noticeably haler and healthier.

When exercise comes wrapped in value judgments, does it wind up entangled in an anxiety that threatens the very resolve to get fit? As Mr. LaLanne was siring new methods for shaping up, he was fathering something else, too: a potent, and in some cases immobilizing, strain of contemporary guilt.

Another Week Ends: Facebook Blues, Freshman Blues, Bowling Blues, Val Kilmer and The Office

1. Libby Copeland at Slate asks the question "Is Facebook Making Us Sad?", unpacking some findings from a recent study at Stanford. Very relevant stuff:

"The researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends' reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others' attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. 'They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life,' he told me.

"...the notion that feeling alone in your day-to-day suffering might increase that suffering certainly makes intuitive sense. As does the idea that Facebook might aggravate this tendency. Facebook is, after all, characterized by the very public curation of one's assets in the form of friends, photos, biographical data, accomplishments, pithy observations, even the books we say we like. Look, we have baked beautiful cookies.

"Facebook is 'like being in a play. You make a character,' one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology, Alone Together. Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this "presentation anxiety," and suggests that the site's element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves."

2.  From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a further look at the correlation between ambition and emotional health, "College Freshmen Report Record-Low Levels of Emotional Health" (ht AZ):

This year's freshmen reported record-low levels of emotional health, according to the latest results of the University of California at Los Angeles's national survey of first-year undergraduates. At the same time, more students gave themselves high marks for ambition to achieve. College counselors say the two are clearly related, as students put more pressure on themselves to excel.

3. Two sports-related stories of interest: First, a touching study of failure in professional bowler Tom Daugherty's refreshingly light-hearted response to rolling the worst game ever televised by the PBA. And second, the telling bafflement at Royals' pitcher Gil Meche's decision, following a serious shoulder injury, to refuse the remaining $12 million in his contract and retire. Evidently, doing the "right thing," i.e. not accepting money that you didn't earn, is not the norm in the major leagues.

4. From The Onion, in case you needed an amusing reminder of how the world hears most theodicy, there's "God Almost Forgot To Kill Dave Elfman of Boulder, CO Today".

5. The perennial question of the relation of the Law to the Gospel in the life of the Christian is frequently in the air when the message is presented pastorally. Our friends at the White Horse Inn, Michael Horton to be exact, have posted a helpful take on the current discussion around this issue. Dane Ortlund of The Gospel Coalition also weighed in with a piece that is very much worth reading.
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Self-Knowledge and the Steelers

I'm a huge Steelers fan. I come by it honestly, having lived in Pittsburgh for three years while I was in seminary. Yet I've recently noticed that rooting for the Steelers really throws my lack of sanctification into sharp relief.

Before last week's AFC Championship game against the hometown Jets (my parish, though in New Jersey, is closer to New York than New Meadowlands Stadium, where both the "New York" Jets and Giants play), people started asking me if we were going to throw a Super Bowl party at our church. We did last year, watching the Colts fall short against Drew Brees and the sentimental favorite New Orleans Saints. Our sanctuary is outfitted with a projector and giant screen, so it's undeniably fun to watch a game there. My stock answer to the Super Bowl question, though, was "Not if the Steelers win tonight." This, of course, only made people more curious. As it turns out, the reason I was only willing to host a Super Bowl party if the Steelers WEREN'T in it was that I didn't want people to see the person I turn into when the Steelers are losing.

Though our church (notably named "Grace Church") preaches a message of Grace and Gospel every day of our lives together, it says something about humans, or at least about me, that I still don't believe that if people REALLY knew what I was like they'd still want to come to my church. I'm an incredibly gracious victor. Unfortunately, I'm a pretty sore loser. I'm also mildly embarrassed that I refer to the Steelers in the first person. You know, as in, "We made the Super Bowl!" I'm even more embarrassed that the ups and downs of a silly football team hold such sway over my emotions. I ride such a high after a win and such a morose down after a loss. It's good for my congregation that I have Mondays off.

This roller coaster ride serves to remind me, though, that it is the miracle of the Gospel that Jesus can truly know us, and yet love us. When it happens amongst humans, it's shocking. It's why people get married. It's also the very cornerstone of the Good News. We are known, in all our sin, our imperfection, and our pettiness. And yet, the Son of God, who knew none of that, no sin, no imperfection, no pettiness, died for us, to reconcile us to God.

It's possible that this knowledge might allow me to survive a Steelers loss in the Super Bowl. I just pray I don't have to find out.

Perfection and Failure in Black Swan

A great little post by Anthony Sacramone over at First Things about "Law vs Gospel in Black Swan", ht MS:

Nina [the ballerina, played by Natalie Portman] is simply too naive, too fragile, too “good,” even, to access the “dark side.” She is offering up only half a performance. She must “free” herself! Only then will she be capable of delivering the “whole,” even if it means a terrifying fragmentation of her personality.

But with a little help from her friends, and her own internal pressures, she gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it). And better. Until she achieves that unity of purpose that renders the “perfect” artistic performance—to her ultimate peril.
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The film is not subtle and Nina’s inner life, her delusions and paranoid fantasies, trace the borderline of camp. But what is really missing is a way out of this false dilemma between “perfection” and “failure.” Perfection is in the eye of the beholder, and so in order to achieve it one must always subordinate the self to some other authority, which, in this realm, is always, always fallible. It is a self-defeating exercise, because even if you think you’ve achieved it, give it a minute, and the criteria by which that perfection is judged will shift, and you’ll find yourself having to place catch-up. To be perfect is, by definition, to fail. And the ultimate failure is death.

Which is why we Lutherans have placed such emphasis on law/Gospel dichotomies. Every time gospel implies “You must” or “You must not,” it becomes a word of condemnation, of failure, because, with all do apologies to Yoda, “you can’t,” try as you might. The good news is that someone already did, and you can rest in his success as if it were your own. You can put yourself under his authority without fear of collapsing under its weight, because his yoke is easy and his burden is light. The price of admission to perfection is faith alone, because the cost of that admission was paid 2,000 years ago. And faith is never a work. Only believe.

But Nina never hears that word, drowned out as it is by the disparate and competing demands of “You must.”