Month: December 2012

In an earlier post, I recommended that school staff, including teachers, who were willing, trained, and supervised be allowed to carry guns for the sake of the schools’ safety. Shortly afterwards, the head of the NRA made a public recommendation that every school be provided an armed guard. In my post, I had pointed out how an armed guard would be ineffective. Since LaPierre’s statement, many critics have also done the arithmetic on the idea and shown its impracticality.

Yeasterday, Ron Paul weighed in with the libertarian insight that turning the schools into a TSA-type guarded compound would be an unacceptable advance into an Orwellian nightmare. Although I agree with this much, his statement also went so far as to disapprove of arming the staff themselves, claiming instead that “real change can happen only when we commit ourselves to rebuilding civil society in America, meaning a society based on family, religion, civic and social institutions, and peaceful cooperation through markets.”

Paul’s statement needs a couple of corrections.

First, armed citizens do not constitute a police state; instead, we are freemen who fear neither the state nor one another. Allowing teachers the freedom to defend themselves is just basic Americanism.

Second, society did not massacre the children at Sandy Hook and rebuilding society will not stop the next massacre. Paul is certainly right about the value of freedom for improving civil society, but that is really a different issue. Evil men will always try to prey upon the weak, even in the best of societies. The weak must be protected by the strong.

The idea that we have moved into participatory culture has attracted the attention of social scientists for about ten years. For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology housed the foremost thinker and writer in the area, Henry Jenkins, who was the director of their Comparative Media Studies Program until his recent move to the University of Southern California.  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has poured $50 millions into the topic. Microsoft is currently researching and reporting on the topic, and participatory culture has become something of a buzzword within such fields as education, library science, and political activism.

And yet, for all that, it has not attracted much attention in Christian literature. The closest thing to it has been occasional references in the emerging church movement to participatory music and worship, actually ancient ideas. Furthermore, the emergent movement self-consicously sought to adapt the church to the postmodern culture; but Ryan Bolger, Associate Professor of Church in Contemporary Culture at Fuller, has opined that participatory culture is actually the next stage after postmodernism. So even the emergers don’t recognize the scope of the changes.

For Christians to take a closer look at participatory culture will have two specific values. The first one is obvious: a correct understanding of a culture is an essential element to effective communication and ministry. The second value is a little less obvious: since this cultural trend is so effective at garnering participation, what can it teach Christian ministries who need more participation?

Definition

To introduce the idea of participatory culture, I will relate an example from media scholar Henry Jenkins:

Ashley Richardson (Jenkins, 2004b) was a middle-schooler when she ran for president of Alphaville. She wanted to control a government that had more than 100 volunteer workers and that made policies that affected thousands of people. She debated her opponent on National Public Radio. She found herself in the center of a debate about the nature of citizenship, about how to ensure honest elections, and about the future of democracy in a digital age. Alphaville is the largest city in the popular multiplayer game, The Sims Online. (Found here.)

A generation has arisen that understands itself not only to be a consumer of media content, but also a creator. Through blogging, Facebooking, multiplayer gaming, YouTubing, and various other online activities, a culture of participation has become their natural way of thinking and living. Jenkins (p.7) defines a participatory culture as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Facebook immediately comes to mind as a setting where these things are true, but it is only one in a sea of others.

What has Changed?

“Participation” is nothing new, especially in church life. The Protestant Reformation emphasized that worship was for participants rather than spectators. The black church in America developed a style of worship often described as “call and response,” which expressed an African cultural tradition of participatory communication (See Sundermeier, The Individual and Community in African Traditional Religions, 49-50). The Charismatic Movement highlighted the New Testament teachings regarding every member’s responsibility to identify his spiritual gifts and to use them in ministry.

The new culture, though, has lifted participation to a new level, primarily for three reasons:

• Lowered cost. The cost of internet access, computers, and recording devices is near zero in many cases, cheap in most others.
• Mentorship. Abundant help from around the globe awaits any inquirer who wants to participate in something.
• Audience. Anything offered up has hundreds of millions of potential viewers, so there’s a good chance of attracting a few who express appreciation and feed the ego.

The effects of this culture change have been profound. Jenkins reported, “According to the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, more than sixty percent of American teens have produced media, and a significant portion have distributed that media content online.” Most of those who were teens then are adults now.

Free Software as an Example

The participatory culture is not limited to kids uploading photos to their Facebook pages. There is a comparatively little-known movement called FOSS, which stands for “free/open source software,” which marshals the labor of thousands of volunteers to provide computer software at little or (usually) no cost to the end user.

The biggest entity in this movement is Ubuntu, which is one “distribution” (or variant) of the GNU/Linux operating system. After Microsoft and Apple, Ubuntu is the most widely used desktop operating system in the world. It boasts 20 million users and a goal of 200 million by the end of 2016.

According to their web site,  Ubuntu is the product of “thousands of individuals and teams” who work on software development, design, bug stomping, local community groups (LoCo teams), language translation, documentation, testing, support to new users, and the Brainstorm website (“Anyone can suggest new ideas and the community votes on which ideas are the most important”).

The sponsoring organization, Canonical, holds an Ubuntu Developer Summit  annually (the last one was in Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago) that sees participation not only in person, but also via IRC, live streaming, and microblogging. Participants work together worldwide using a collaborative text editor called “etherpad.”

Understanding

Whence the desire on the part of so many to contribute so much? A number of scientific studies have been made  and the motives are found to be understandably diverse; but, broadly speaking, the majority fall into the category of wanting to contribute to something good.

As we seek to increase participation among those to whom we minister, there is a temptation to consider original sin insurmountable and recalcitrance to be incorrigible.  Yet here we see a remarkable level of self-giving among a class of humanity with no identifiable Christian commitment.

If we refer back to the earlier bullet points, we can see how such participation reflects Jenkins’s description of a participatory culture.  Summarized, we can say that this is how people, as people, behave under given circumstances.

Conclusion

If indeed  our younger people have grown up in a participatory culture, we should expect a certain impatience on their part with a church structure whose inner workings has high barriers to entry, a paucity of readily available mentorship, or precious little feedback when attempts at participation are made.  It may be that technology can be incorporated in adaptation to culture, but the issue is deeper than that.  Although the tech revolution has given us this culture shift, the motives for participation are greater than just the desire to play with toys.  Tech itself is very often a distraction more than a help, but understanding the participatory culture and fostering it in whatever ways may be found effective bids fair to unleash a torrent of creative power for the work of Christ.

I would summarize what I’ve been hearing from the mass media since Friday as

When in trouble
When in doubt
Run in circles
Scream and shout

Angry people, grieving people, ignorant people, and conniving people are throwing dust in the air and shouting Somebody do something! Just what is to be done is a secondary concern (except among the conniving). The main theme has been that we cannot accept this, so we must do something.

Since the shooter used a .223 caliber Bushmaster, many speakers have called for banning assault weapons. Hopefully they are speaking from mere ignorance. A hurting person can be excused from saying ill-advised things at a time of emotional upheaval. The suggestion remains, however, ill-advised. Most of those favoring this move cannot tell you what an assault rifle is and how it differs from, say, a deer rifle. For this reason they cannot tell you how the elimination of these weapons would make a school massacre less likely. But assault weapons look scary, and that’s enough for such commentators.

The truth is, eliminating assault weapons (if they could be defined) would not have affected this massacre at all. One feature of an assault rifle is a high-capacity magazine, which means you don’t need to reload as often. But what’s the hurry if you intend to shoot kids and teachers in a school? A simple revolver would work just fine. Kill the teacher first, squeeze the trigger five more times, stand at the door so that the first graders cannot leave, reload (it takes about 20 seconds for an amateur, but someone who has practiced a lot can cut that in half easily), then squeeze the trigger six more times, then repeat, etc. Schools are a mass-murderer’s dream come true: countless easy targets and nobody can shoot back.

The chattering classes also love the word “semiautomatic.” You can just hear the thrill of excitement when they call a rifle a “semiautomatic rifle.” It’s like when a Bible college undergraduate first learns the word “supralapsarianism.”

For those who may not know, a semiautomatic is simply a gun that you don’t have to cock before firing. As a boy, I hunted birds with my uncle, who carried a semiautomatic shotgun, and my father, who carried a pump-action shotgun. I carried a single-shot .410 and I may have killed as many birds as they, simply because I aimed more carefully. When a covey of quail flew up, Daddy probably got off as many shots as Uncle Max, even though he had to cock his shotgun before each shot. (A pump-action is pretty quick.) Being able to squeeze off rounds more quickly (with a semi) doesn’t obviate the fact that you still have to aim the #@$% gun if you’re going to kill anything. Even a simple revolver can be fired repeatedly without cocking it. The quick action of a semiauto adds nothing to the success of a school massacre.

Schools are already locked down, with visitors required to sign in. That doesn’t work, either. I needed into a high school recently and, since my appearance fits the profile of a safe person, kids hanging around inside just opened the door for me. (School had ended for the day some minutes earlier.) Signs were everywhere telling me that all visitors had to sign in; I ignored them. When I’d found the teacher I’d come to see, he showed me a door near his classroom where I could park my truck and come right in. “It’s probably unlocked,” he said as he walked over to check it. “Yeah, it’s unlocked; just park out there and bring your stuff in this door.” They’d have to turn the place into a prison to control all the access points. And how secure are those points when 3,000 kids are trying to get in and begin the day?

While we’re talking about banning the weapon — has anyone considered how easy it would be to drive a car onto a school playground? Anybody sick enough to shoot first graders multiple times is sick enough to drive onto a playground and mow them down.

In anything like a free society, the only solution is to maintain the ability to stop a massacre if it begins. You cannot always stop one from beginning.

Some conservatives are repeating the idea that there should be an armed guard at every school. I have to wonder if these kibitzers know anything about handgun combat, or any combat at all? Apparently not. Does a sicko like this Lanza kid want to pull a massacre at a school which has An Armed Guard? He simply walks up to the guard, draws a weapon, and kills him. It’s easy to do unless the guard already has a gun in his hand and is alert because the attacker looks unusual. And how formidable is the average guard? These days, they’re only on the premises of most places for insurance reasons and to operate a buzzer to let people in. They are obviously not combat ready.

Or suppose, like Lanza, the killer intends to die with his victims? He starts shooting children at the far end of the property and the overweight and aged guard (in another building) begins huffing and puffing his way to the sound of the shooting. Twelve people are already dead and the killer is reloading his revolver for the third time. Fatso comes through the door and, out of breath and trembling from excitement, he levels his semiautomatic handgun and empties it in the direction of the killer. Out of fifteen rounds, one of them manages to hit the thug and the murders are over. Instead of twenty dead, it’s only twelve. Not much improvement, and that’s a “best-case” scenario. Give the perp slightly better weapons and the foresight to watch for the guard and the improvement diminishes to near zero.

A effective measure would be to have many armed guards in every school, all of them combat ready. I am referring to the school staff themselves. Those who are willing can be trained, tested, and supervised. (Hoplophobes, read that sentence repeatedly until you understand it.) When the school is filled with capable handgunners, punks like Lanza cannot get far. Such scum might open fire at a school, a mall, or a bus station, but the school would be a place, like a gun store or a police station, where an evil doer is the least able to work his will.

Nobody’s telling the truth about the fiscal cliff — at least, nobody in the federal government is.

The true condition of Washington’s finances is beyond repair. Any number of accountant-types on YouTube can show you in simple terms how the debt and the deficit (those are not the same thing) are out of control. There’s not enough money anywhere to eliminate the deficit and pay the debt.

All this talk about reducing spending is equivalent to a clown juggling tennis balls: it entertains, but it makes no difference. Remember when Romney said he would eliminate Big Bird? That’s about like going into a forty-acre field, plucking a blade of grass, and crowing “Now we’re making progress; this field is finally getting mowed.” They’re spending $1 trillion a year more than they’re taking in and the entire PBS costs $445 million, Roughly 1/2,000th of the overspending. (PBS is much more than just Sesame Street.)

Obama wants to increase taxes on the rich. Why? If taxes on rich people went even so high as 100% it could only fund 1/3 of the annual overspending, and it would obviously increase unemployment. Taxing the rich won’t help the problem.

As anyone knows who has managed a business or a family budget, spending has to be reduced to whatever one can afford. The problem, of course, is that politicians get elected and re-elected by offering people stuff that someone else pays for. As a rule, only such thieves can be elected, so any who display economic sanity will eventually be defeated at the polls.

The immediate responsibility falls to the Supreme Court. Most of what Congress authorizes is unconstitutional and it’s the Court’s job to declare it so. That would prevent elected thieves from running the credit card bill up another trillion. Most of the entitlement spending would thereby be phased out.

The next step would be to streamline the tax code so that businesses have the incentive to advance and the ability to predict their futures. Eliminating the minimum wage laws would address unemployment decisively. Tax revenues would stabilize and the budget could be set accordingly.

None of this will transpire, of course, so we will certainly go off a fiscal cliff. Not in January, to be sure — that’s just political theater — but eventually America will collapse financially.

Have a nice day.

Two Middle East mothers are sitting in a cafe
chatting over a plate of tabouli and a pint of
goat’s milk.

The older of the two pulls a small folder out of
her handbag and starts flipping through photos.
They start reminiscing.

“This is my oldest son, Mujibar. He would have
been 24 years old now.”

“Yes, I remember him as a baby,” says the other
mother cheerfully.

“He’s a martyr now, though,” the mother confides.

“Oh, so sad, dear…” says the other.

“And this is my second son, Khalid. He would have
been 21.”

“Oh, I remember him,” says the other happily.
“He had such curly hair when he was born.”

“He’s a martyr too…” says the mother quietly.

“Oh, gracious me…” says the other.

“And this is my third son, my baby. My beautiful
Ahmed. He would have been 18,” she whispers.

“Yes,” says the friend enthusiastically, “I
remember when he first started school…”

“He’s a martyr also,” says the mother, with tears
in her eyes.

After a pause and a deep sigh, the second Muslim
mother looks wistfully at the photographs and,
searching for the right words, says . . .

“They blow up so fast, don’t they?”