Journalist and book author Mark Pinsky interviewed me for Orlando Magazine about the new phenomenon of online churches.  This is a fascinating topic partly because most religious traditions have emphasized the importance of in-person (or “incarnate”) community for full fellowship with other believers and, in the Hebrew and Christian traditions, for full fellowship (or communion) with God.  At a conference on worship I served as a panelist on this topic and suggested that the most difficult issue for online churches is how to perform sacraments.  — QS

A Church, iDistributed

Northland reaches out to the iPhone generation, preaching to the mobile masses.

No one would ever accuse Northland, a Church Distributed, of being behind the curve of technological innovation. Especially when it comes to trying to rope in the most elusive and sought-after demographic in organized religion: tech-savvy young adults with frenetic lives and little patience for sitting in pews.

The Longwood mega-church already is known for its high-energy services featuring Christian rock music and light shows. Northland’s $32 million sanctuary is wired with thousands of feet of fiber-optic cable, enabling it to stream its services live on the Internet as well as project services from other churches on the church’s interior walls.

Now comes the latest: an iPhone application that allows users on the go to watch both past and live services on the cell phone’s 3½-inch-wide display. Northland, with 12,000 Central Florida members and a few thousand worshipers via the Web, has posted on its blog a step-by-step guide instructing other churches how to stream their own services on the iPhone.

Much of the new outreach effort is aimed at young people —always a challenge for traditional congregations—offering what consumer consultants call a “point of entry” for new potential members.

“Our hope is to reach some of these demographics that are not now in the church,” says Nathan Clark, Northland’s 30-year-old director of digital innovation (a title not listed in many church staff directories). Clark led the team that developed the iPhone app. “It makes sense to also help people worship where they are,” he says. “It’s really imperative for us to start with the most ubiquitous technologies.”

Some within the evangelical community are skeptical of Northland’s move to connect with parishioners via iPhones. “There aren’t any purely technological solutions to any spiritual problems,” says Quentin Schultze, author of High-Tech Worship? Using Presentational Technologies Wisely. The Christian church, Schultze says, has always believed that “worship is best done by the in-person gathering of believers.’’

But Joel Hunter, Northland’s senior pastor, says the new application is a supplement, rather than a substitute, for communal worship. Hunter says his goal is to multiply small church groups in places that don’t have churches available. “The cell phone can extend beyond even the reach of the Internet. Churches will not be confined to a church building in the future.”

In the New Testament, the Book of Hebrews (10:25) warns, “Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together, as is the habit of some.” Citing this passage, Hunter says, “This will not be the end of the church but the extension of it. This is a temporary means of worship for those who can’t get to a church assembly. But it is also the delivery of worship for others who want to start a small assembly church group.”

Next up from Northland, for the more mature set: services via BlackBerry.

Michael Lotti interviewed me for this fine article about the need to apply age-old ethics to the new social contexts created by digital communications technologies.  You can find out more online about Mr. Lotti at the publisher’s (Effect Magazine, LarsonAllen) website.  Kudos to LarsonAllen for addressing ethics on behalf of society.

Ethics and the Information Age

by Michael Lotti

The information age has given us more than cell phones and emails. It has also dumped a bunch of new ethical dilemmas on us. A few thinkers eagerly look into an ever-more-electronic future as they ponder the rapid development of information technology. For them, the question is not about the right or wrong use of the Internet or a Facebook account, but how these things are paving the way for the next evolutionary step of the human species.

Luciano Floridi, a philosopher at the University of Hertfordshire in England who specializes in information theory, thinks that developments in information technology are ushering in an age where humans will develop “a new ecological approach to the whole of reality,” which will include the recognition that information systems have rights.

Arthur Saniotis, an anthropologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, looks forward to the day when there will be information technologies that “optimize human biology” and deliver “friendships with imaginative entities,” along with the ability to download a brain onto a hard drive.

If there’s an ethical imperative for such thinkers, it seems to be this: keep developing the technology so that the human species can continue to improve.

Nothing new

Besides being wildly speculative, such views make it seem as if the everyday ethical dilemmas of the information age are merely annoying speed bumps on the evolutionary highway.

For many, running into new ethical problems may be as common as answering their email messages. However, while the ethical dilemmas of the information age are very real, they pose no substantially new challenges for the people who face them.

Information technology has changed just about everything in our lives—the way we shop, educate, follow politics, and even carry on romances. We face a whole new landscape that has been radically altered by cell phones, satellites, and the Internet. But while we have new ethical problems, we don’t have new ethics. The categories we use to identify, evaluate, and solve moral dilemmas haven’t changed.

Why shouldn’t you take a call on your cell phone in the middle of an important business meeting? Because that would be unfairly taking away valuable time from your employer and co-workers. Why should businesses take significant measures to protect the electronically stored information of their customers? Because it would be a violation of trust not to do so. Why shouldn’t you text people in the middle of a family dinner or business lunch? Because that’s impolite. What’s troubling about pretending to be someone else in an online chatroom? That’s a form of lying.

Lying, impoliteness, trust, and fairness, along with concepts such as justice, self control, respect, generosity, loyalty, and many others, are part of the human fabric. Even for Plato and Aristotle and other long-dead thinkers, these terms had no discernible origin.

So when we need to answer a new ethical question, we don’t really need to invent new categories, because the familiar terms apply.

Big changes—especially big technological changes—usually outpace ethical reflection, but basic ethical sensibilities gradually catch up. The information revolution is not a revolution (or evolution) in creativity or consciousness or awareness, even if it has changed our lives an awful lot. It’s a bunch of new tools that, like the factories, telegraphs, and steam engines of the industrial revolution, can be used justly or unjustly, to spread truth or lies, or to find much-needed information or gratify the worst appetites.

The challenge of the medium

But even if Saniotis’s scenarios of “optimized human biology” are farfetched, can’t information technology actually change a person’s mind or “consciousness” for the worse? And can you tackle such a problem with familiar ethical terminology?

Quentin J. Schultze, the author of Habits of the High-Tech Heart (Eerdmans, 2002), is not against the innovations of the information age, but thinks we “should be just as concerned about the kinds of persons we are becoming as we are with being able to send messages quickly. In fact, our technologies will reflect our weaknesses as human beings if we don’t address our weaknesses up front.”

Consider the following experience a friend shared with me. He noticed that his 15-year-old daughter’s social habits changed significantly about six months after she got a cell phone and a Facebook account. She didn’t gossip, lie, cheat, or do anything that would be called unethical with her new tools. She texted people constantly and had lots of less-than-a-minute conversations on her phone, but complained about not having any close friends. As my friend put it, “She was alone in a crowded room.” Schultze would say, information technology, despite giving her dozens of new ways to communicate, actually served to amplify her normal sense of teen isolation. It hadn’t done anything to bridge the gap between communicating and connecting.

“… our technologies will reflect our weaknesses as human beings if we don’t address our weaknesses up front.” —Quentin J. Schultze

Marshall McLuhan, a professor from the University of Toronto who pioneered the field of communication studies in the 1960s and ’70s, articulated the problem this way: a medium of communication does not just deliver a message, it is the message. It shapes the person who uses it, and not always for the better. Television news is the classic example. On the surface, it communicates information about events, politics, weather, and sports. At a deeper level, it communicates a way of looking at the world—namely, that it is a bunch of unconnected events, political sound bites, weather radar, and sports scores that can be easily digested in 22 minutes, with 8 minutes of commercials designed to mold a consumer’s mind and motivate a customer. At first glance, it’s hard to say that tweets, text messages, and emails, along with the ever-present advertising on the Web, won’t alter mental habits in a similar way.

Schultze, for example, says that increased social isolation and attention disorders are predictable byproducts of the use of modern information technologies. Ron Greene, an associate professor of communications at the University of Minnesota, adds another worry: “Modern information technology intensifies fragmentation of community,” he says. “It produces an echo chamber effect as folks increasingly only communicate with those with like-minded prejudices.” Greene also thinks the easy access to information is leading students to think they are educated simply because they have accumulated a lot of data.

So can the old ethical tools possibly address these new problems? Or are these new problems at all?

For the past six decades, parents have limited their children’s time in front of the television. Why? Because they instinctively knew that kids who watch a lot of television don’t easily develop long-term concentration skills, and they, being responsible parents, wanted to do what was best for their children. And before the age of television, parents restricted time in front of the radio. And before the age of radio, books and movies were screened. Even Plato, way back in 380 BC, was critical of the stories, music, and plays that entranced so many in his day. In other words, people of every age—especially parents—have felt an ethical obligation to protect and guide children, and that meant managing the media of the day.

Information technology can disrupt or damage things that we value, like academic integrity and a workplace without unnecessary distractions, so we try to figure out how to productively combine it with those things instead of abandoning it. In other words, we’re taking a very old ethical concern—and applying it to a new situation.

And for what it’s worth, people are gradually figuring it all out. For every person checking into an Internet addiction center, there are millions who use the Web to find valuable information, send pictures to grandparents, manage finances, and connect with business contacts. Max More, an internationally acclaimed futurist who has written extensively about ethics in the information age, likens our time to Europe in the decade after the invention of the printing press. “I’m sure there were people worrying that with books so easily available, everyone would stop having conversations,” says More. “But people obviously adjusted.”

The deepest choice

Maybe it’s too simple to say that people are asking the questions that they have always asked as they navigate the ethical waters of the information age. Maybe it’s too easy to say that many things have changed—the boundaries between work and home life, the ways our private information can be misused, the sense of always needing to be plugged in. But the distinction between right and wrong has not changed.

If it’s not terribly complicated, why is there so much obvious misuse of information technology? How are we to make sense of humans, with their innate ethical sense and their notably unethical behavior? Plato writes that ethical concern about anything is rooted in two basic assumptions, so basic they can be hard to notice. The first is the conviction that, even if we don’t know all the details, there is a better and a worse way to live, a right and a wrong, actions that are good and actions that are evil. The second is the conviction that our lives ought to be shaped by what we find to be good, right, and beneficial to ourselves and our community.

Aristotle points out that these basic convictions are not automatically or continually held by people. He doubted they could arise in people who had been poorly raised and asserted that young people are too driven by passions to benefit from discussions about ethics. Likewise, Plato puts foes in his essays who shrug off ethical concepts like “justice” and “honesty” as inapplicable or even meaningless in the “real world.” Plato and Aristotle say, in other words, that people must choose to be ethical amidst the ease of being unreflective. They have to care about being good to even recognize an ethical dilemma, and lots of people don’t care (or only care in fits and spurts). So we have—as Plato and Aristotle had—a society with lots of good, bad, and thoughtless behavior thrown together.

If you do care about being good, though, the news from Plato and Aristotle is positive. Your concern for ethical behavior will certainly make you more prone to act well, and by acting well, you will, according to Aristotle in particular, “lead the life that is by nature pleasant.” You may not have all the answers to the ethical dilemmas of the information age, but you do have all the tools you need to figure them out.

Columnist Charley Honey of the Grand Rapids Press interviewed me about the role of news media in providing a prophetic voice for local communities. We had a discussion about this years ago and Charley thought it was timely to return to our conversation in the light of the challenges facing print newspapers and the rise of digital news operations. — qs

What is at stake if newspapers die?
By Charley Honey | The Grand Rapids Press
December 12, 2009, 4:50AM

The prophet Amos didn’t mince words when he passed along the bad news of God’s fury: “I will send fire upon the walls of Gaza that will consume her fortresses.”

I can just hear the complaints. “Amos, all you ever do is cover the bad news. How about a story when the Lord ISN’T mad?”

But that wouldn’t be news. Amos, you see, was a hard-bitten reporter, telling the people what they didn’t want to hear.

Today, the Old Testament prophet would have plenty of bad news to report — including the sad, slow death of the newspaper.

Oh, but that’s not bad news at all, you may object. Newspapers have done such a crummy job they deserve to die. Good riddance to the fact-fudging, propaganda-peddling, tree-killing American newspaper — and take your liberal bias (or capitalist agenda, whichever it is) with you!

For all the angst about the demise of news-on-a-page, a lot of people aren’t that broken up about it. They welcome the final edition of old-school journalism and the rise of online commentary, citizen journalism and interest-driven Web stories.

They also don’t expect to pay for it. To a recent Press poll asking readers if they would pay for online news, a resounding 89 percent said no, along with comments about using the paper to line their birdcage.

Even accounting for the anonymous snark factor, it was not an encouraging response for papers trying to figure out how to survive.

As a reporter who started out typing his stories 30 years ago, I regret the struggles of print journalism. But I am alarmed by what could be the decline of good journalism, on the page or online, unless someone wakes us up to its true value.

Citizens need information

Given a choice of government without newspapers or newspapers without government, Thomas Jefferson said he “would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Substitute “good journalism” for “newspapers” and you’ve got today.

Democracy can’t work well without informed citizens. Who informs them? Good journalists monitoring elected officials, investigating corruption and sitting through boring school board meetings.

In the Watergate scandal 30 years ago, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein showed how tedious, determined reporting can change the course of history. In the brave new online world, who will pay two reporters to spend months uncovering stories like that?

Amos would have made a great Washington Post reporter. He was what communications expert Quentin Schultze calls a prophetic journalist — one who “afflicts the comfortable to wake them up and move them to action.”

“You’re not gonna like it, but here’s what’s happening,” says Schultze, an author and professor of communications at Calvin College. “Critical journalism takes a moral stance on behalf of the community.”

Communities need news

But the advocate journalist also raises up what is good about communities as well as where they fall short, Schultze says: “No community can survive unless it has pride.”

This is what’s at stake in keeping skilled journalism alive — something sacred about community, democracy and the way we relate to each other.

“When a newspaper dies in America … a sense of place has failed,” writes Richard Rodriguez in Harper’s Magazine. Newspapers mirror communities back to their residents who are curious about those around them, Rodriguez argues. He fears that sense of place will die along with newspapers, leaving us with “one and a half cities … Washington D.C. and ‘American Idol.’”

And we’ll all live in trivia nation, tweeting and blogging about Tiger, Balloon Boy and the White House gate-crashers. Health care? Bor-ing!

I am not against moving my trade online. As Schultze rightly says, it’s where young readers live. I like my news crinkly with coffee; my students surf theirs on laptops.

But good reporting isn’t free like in Amos’ day. If we value news, we must find a way to make today’s prophets profitable.

I recorded this audio interview with Barbara Trepagnier, author of the book Silent Racism, on October 9, 2008, in Grand Rapids, MI. Duration: 13 min 01 sec

Barbara Trepanier

Dr. Trepagnier suggests that “silent racism”—racism by people who are simplistically labeled as “not racist”—fosters institutional racism.  She believes that heightened race awareness is more important in changing racial inequality than judging whether individuals are racist or not.  According to Trepagnier, the categories of racist/not racist are outdated and should be replaced with a continuum that more accurately portrays racial reality.  Read about her book at Amazon.

Andy Rau of Think Christian interviewed me about my book An Essential Guide to Public Speaking: Serving Your Audience with Faith, Skill, and Virtue. Duration: 30 min

The interview addresses not only how to speak skillfully but also how to do so virtuously and faithfully. Both the interview and the book explain Augustine’s concept of “servant speaking” (speaking that serves the audience). Why is much “Christian” public speaking uncivil and poorly crafted? How might all speakers love their audiences as their “neighbors”? Listen to the interview. Find out more about my book on Amazon.