Reading Len Sweet's Viral: Part 4
The worst thing about this section can be summed up very easily: way too short.
It's so short that I almost don't want to get too deep into it, because I'd rather you just read it. Ironically, this section was also jard for me to pull quotes from, because the section is dependant upon the reader following Len's train of throught. If I were involved in Len's publishing plans, I would release this section as a stand alone ebook; it's the right size for a little short, effectively communicates his idea, and is a message that desperately needs to be heard.
This is the "I" in TGiF: the i stands for iPhone. You can tell that Len had a passionate message to get to here, because he almost completely jumps over the connection to Apple, the tech company. There is a ton that he could have done to set up the technology side of this section, but he didn't really need to. In effect, it's almost like this:
We all know Apple got it right. And we all know how they did it. Great, let's go with that and move on to the deep stuff.
Just as this whole section completely resonates with me, it may be the hardest for people that are struggling with the digital change to get through. A quote from the section:
- We have forgotten that autobiography is a nineteenth-century term. Earlier centuries were not preoccupied with individuality or interior life. When they told life stories, it was not to explore their selfhood but for didactic or propaedeutic purposes
Too easily and quickly, our culture tends to think that the way things are is the way they have always been. Culture is evolving so quickly now that we forget things are new. We forget that there was a time before cell phones. That there was a time color tv. Seriously... that concept just sounds like a fantasy land to me. My mind has almost completely erased the idea of having to watch TV at a specific time... I got my first TiVo in college and with the advent of Netflix and Hulu, I can't imagine making a schedule around when TV shows air.
Len is going way back with this quote, that autobiography is a new term. Even newer is the concept of churches having business meetings. That's the thing that blows my mind... something that was so integral to my home church was really something new created because the "leaders" of the modern church were often businessmen... since, you know, being in charge of a business in the secular world meant you'd make a good leader in the church world. But I digress...
In short, Len's message is this:
We need to stop slicing and dicing the message of the Gospel. Instead of inspecting and tearing about detail by detail, we need to take the message whole. We need to approach God, faith, and the Scriptures as an apple, bite into it whole.
Use caution when reading this chapter. It will disrupt you. It will cause you to think. And then maybe you can take a big bite.
Things I underlined this time:
- In fact, cell-phone technology has played a major role in reducing the number people who live on less than a dollar a day from 29 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2004.
- Almost one-third of entertainment dollars are spent on video games.
- For the last two decades, when more people were playing increasingly violent video games, violent crime in USAmerica and the European Union decilined, in contrast to what the critics predicted.
- Gamers don't procrastinate and overplan before they go on a "world saving mission."
- Dedicated Apple users have brain activity that mimics that of religious piety.
- Even the Bible got partitioned and became a sum of its chapters and verses, not the summit of experiences and relations between its stories and songs, histories, and letters.
- In a holistic and imaginative reading of the Scriptures, surprising interconnections and unexpected parallels are constantly being discovered. You miss those insights and connections when you piece out the Bible as if you were seperating an orange.
- Albert Einstein liked to say that if you can't solve a problem, make it bigger, not smaller.
- We cut it up into manageable bites called chapter and verse, and this became the alien template on which we feasted on the Word. But the Bible wasn't written in chapters and verses.
- The whole brained life has its challenges and challengers. But if you want the whole Truth, you invest in it, no matter the cost. Lifting up mere truths can kill the spirit. But lifting up of Truth draws us to God and gives life to the soul.
- My burden in this book is for Gutenbergers to release the reins of power so that Googlers will not be forced to find God outside the orange world of partitioned faith. It is time to unite the two so long divided - for oranage to be wed with apple.