The internet is a cold and lonely place haunted by the shadows of reality as they flicker on its empty rock walls. Like Plato’s cave we have a shade of the world like a distant blurry foreign film flickering before our eyes but we are senseless and incapable of interpreting it. Too much time spent in a dark place makes a person blind, like those pale white fish in the deepest ocean caves who exist alone and in the black.
There is no koinonia here. There is no celebratory, spirit-filled communion of the flesh. There is word but the word never becomes flesh here. It remains distant and unachievable somehow. There is no community here…just a digital copy of it. There is no accountability here and little healthy fear. Words fly with ease that would fear the light of day were they behind actual lips and in actual mouths.
Don’t get me wrong I love the tool of the internet. I love social networking. I do not love it when it becomes social augmentation. The deepest and most personal pains meant for the closest friends and the ears of our beloveds make their way with ease onto the billboard that is this place. I wonder if it is ironic that I use the medium to critique the medium. Speaking of medium we must always remember the words of that brilliant Canadian writer and journalist Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”.
When the Word became living compassionate loving flesh the medium was the message and the message was “this is how much I love you that I would willingly let go of my own divinity for your sake. ” When words are posted here in this place, the medium is still the message and the medium is cold, emotionless, cable and wire. The message is cold.
There is no substitute for the called out and intentional gathering of people in the agora, the public square. The place where we can look at one-another and bear one-another’s pain. To act as God in the lives of others and wipe away tears in anticipation of the day when it will happen once and for all. To laugh and embrace and love one-another.
I love the written word more than I should but I love the word enfleshed even more.
Harnessing Chaos 
Was it Aaron Sorkin or David Fincher who was being interviewed by Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” recently? He said that he believes that Facebook is to socializing what Reality TV is to Reality.
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I saw that episode and thought that comment was very profound and insightful. Aaron Sorkin I think.
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“The Medium is the Message” is a main theme discussed by Neil Postman in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” He takes the view that the medium limits the message. For example, smoke signals have the advantage of broadcasting a warning over a large area but one cannot do philosophy via smoke signals. As you are pointing out, a digital medium cannot possible enflesh eye contact, smell, emotional signals, etc..
But I have a question for you: Where is community as you are defining it? Postman points out that our entire Western culture is driven by the limitation of the medium of Television. We want to be entertained rather than informed or educated.
Using an old argument from Aristotle: Goodness is only possible for those who have been trained (educated) to discern the mid point between two extremes. Anyone can accidentally hit the center of a circle given enough tries but it takes a knowledge of mathematics to calculate the center, the trajectory, etc. to intentionally hit the center. Only those who have worked out this goodness are capable of enjoying friendship based not on advantage but on a desire to see the other enjoy goodness. The communities we form in our culture (religious and otherwise) are bound together by the pleasure that they give the participants, not the goodness they encourage.
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The human community will always be primarily self-serving, this is why i believe the community enlivened by the Spirit of God is required for what I am describing…but now we enter the arena of metaphysics and it is difficult to prove this.
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My question doesn’t convey the thought I had in mind. I wanted to extrapolate from our agreement that a virtual relationship is a ‘broken cistern’ toward the idea that virtual relationships probably thrive in our culture because of similar broken cisterns promoted by show business.
I think Neil Postman does a good job of parsing the development of our leaking water pots from roots in the Enlightenment, etc.. He wants to prove that Huxley (Brave New World) was more accurate in his prediction of trends in the west than Orwell (Ninety-Eighty-Four): We have willingly given over the quest for self-actualization to those who will give us that comodity virtually.
I am happy to avoid a metaphysical proof regarding our dependence upon the Spirit of God. Your reference to the ‘word made flesh’ echoes what any Greek or Roman philosopher would accept as a given: The Logos is the enlivining source of both gods and men. However, like the Athenian audience of Paul, they would scoff at the ideas of the early christians regarding the resurrection, etc..
Laying that issue aside, we still have in Greek philosophyicl and Christian theological thought a helpful analysis of why it takes wisdom to create the community you are describing and what has gone wrong with the idea of community.
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I am on holidays but I found some time to find a computer and jot down some of my further reflections on our interchange in this thread.
I wanted to suggest a clarification of your reply here:
“The human community will always be primarily self-serving, this is why i believe the community enlivened by the Spirit of God is required for what I am describing.”
I am sure that you will not disagree that the ‘community enlivened by the Spirit of God’ is still a human community which means that it, too, will be self-serving although moving along of sanctification from the influence of the sinful nature. If Balaam or Samson serve as any kind of example, they illustrate what happens when self-service is combined with intreating God. But they are examples of an era where truth comes from an inspired individual where in our own era truth comes in various forms: TV Evangelists, Lawyers, Judges, Experts, etc.. If we keep this in mind, we can see how the ‘medium’ determines what will be perceived as true.
Balaam fulfills the role of an oracle similar to oracles in other budding civilizations such as the Oracle at Delphi in Greece. Here as well the oracle was used to incite those who consulted her against threats to the city state such as the example of the oracle who added ‘down with Sparta’ after her prophecies because she was requested to do so by the leadership of Athens. In a literal sense the ‘medium’ becomes the ‘message.’ What the people know of the gods is only available through the ‘medium’ or ‘oracle.’
There was a transition in Athens to rhetoric as a ‘medium’ which is helpful in the sense of how truth changes. When Socrates claimed that he heard from a god even though he could not decorate his words with a glorious rhetorical style, he was condemned as one who endangers youth. The testimony of the Oracle of Delphi that Socrates was the wisest of men meant nothing to the 280 who gave a guilty verdict.
In our own day, as I said, there are different mediums or authorities that folk look to as they try to organize their experience of the world. These authorities represent the ‘orthodox’ or ‘right opinion.’ But the experience of Socrates still stands as what can happen when we do not recognize the prevailing authority. It would be like trying to cite an ecstatic experience in a court of law: It is dismissed as ludicrous where in another culture at another time, there would be a means of sorting out whether or not the experience was valid or not before it was dismissed.
What I have been thinking about in particular is the loneliness that is experienced by the individual who is honest about his experience of the mediated world such as the character John Savage (Brave New World) or Oedipus. The honesty sends folk like these into a social tail spin. Like the boy who declared that Emporer has no clothes, he stands alone and embarassed not to mention bewildered.
But the good news is that the honesty is worth its declaration. In a sense, we reject the medium and are set in a place beyond the medium where we must organize our experience of the universe for ourselves. It would be like putting away all artificial mediatioins of time and experiencing nature in the raw. Some things like the wheel don’t need to be re-invented. But what is re-invented or rediscovered as ‘true’ is going to have to be retained during a long and painful process where we gradually become (honestly) reintegrated into a social environment.
I felt tremors of loneliness and fear when I sat in church this morning but I was given a new confidence as I watched friends of mine who are in the process of integrating themselves in the same social environment (church) where I felt lonely. I have known these people for about fifteen years. The man who taught the Sunday School class on the Gospel of Mark is integrating his direct experience with Jesus and a historical experience. The man who led the worship service once described himself as an ‘exile’ but today delivered a passionate pacifist approach to Remembrance Day. It is a remarkable story how we each were drawn to the same church community. I felt hope for the human community this morning because I saw how we each in our own way were trying to open ourselves to the enlivening of the Spirit of God.
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