Flourishing

This is part 2 of our series based on The Economist’s special report on the ways wireless technology is altering society. In the last post I wrote about how these technologies are allowing us to be physically mobile in a way that hasn’t been possible before (through advancements in laptops, smartphones, etc). In this post I want to explore how sociologists are mapping the ways that relationships and society is changing.

I’ll be interacting with “Family Ties,” on page 11 of The Economist’s section by the title, “Nomads at Last.”

Basically, it seems that the techno-bedouinism we’re talking about is transforming our social cohesion. Here it is in summary form: we’re getting closer and closer to those we already know. That closeness, however, is almost precluding social interactions with people we don’t know.

The article gives a surprising example that may ring true to many of you. Norwegian sociologist Richard Ling was standing on his front porch saying goodbye to some friends who had been visiting his home. Up walks the plumber he had called to come and fix a broken pipe. It just so happens that the plumber was talking with his wife (on his phone). With not so much as a “by your leave,” the plumber walked directly into Ling’s home pausing only to remove his shoes.

What was happening here evoked a response from Ling (as a sociologist) that might be lost on me until after the fact. He was excited. On display before him was one of the fundamental tensions of life in a nomadic society. In one moment, the plumbers interaction with his wife (mediated by a phone) was in competition with his (unmediated) communicating with Ling. For an even more bizarre example, remember Rudy Giuliani answering his mobile phone and talking to his wife, while addressing the National Rifle Association. It was one of those, how shall we say, campaign-ending moments despite the awkward applause following his painfully protracted farewell.

In Linger’s situation and Giuliani’s we see mediated conversation (with a close relative) trumping unmediated conversation with a total stranger. The same happens every time you’re behind that dude in Whole Foods who simply cannot get off his phone while he coordinates the next two hours of his life with all the precision of a team of Recon Marine’s calling in a air strike. The goal? Getting the kids here, here, and here while picking up this, this, and this for dinner.

What is more, the data substantiate Mr. Ling’s experience. Using data from Norway he established that 50% of mobile-phone calls and text messages go to the same three or four people, all of whom are typically within 6 miles of the caller. Further validation comes from a study at Middlebury College (in Vermont) that found that undergraduates were calling home, on average, ten times per week. Growing up is hard to do.

A say byproduct of the new, high levels of cohesion and connectedness between friends and relatives is that it is increasingly difficult to meet strangers. In the parlance of sociology, strong ties (such as relations and close friends) are reinforced and weak ties (such as strangers and acquaintances) are further weakened. You know how awkward the church meet and greet is. We may all be member of the church community, but where that community is large enough to have total strangers sitting near one another all the weight of societal trends is pulling against our ability to form relationships.

Not only is this sad, but it is a challenge that ought to be addressed by the Christian community. Many mocked when last year the Vatican released its ten commandments for motorists, or some such thing. While to many Protestants it seemed, on its face, ridiculous a reading of the document shows that Catholicism is seeking theological engagement with the technology that is shaping our society. This is, of course, the church’s role. By way of criticism it might be apropos to suggest that the Vatican is a wee bit late in addressing the motorcar, but in principle it is a fantastic and important corrective word.

Its mid-morning. You pull (or walk) up to your favorite coffee shop, independent or chain. Claim that favorite table or give glare at the guy who’s hogging it. Give greetings to the barristas and the folks you know dotted around the furniture-strewn room. Pull out the laptop (or blackberry). Saunter up to the counter and place an order for a tall latte. (I’m boring. So sue me.) If this is familiar to you then the latest edition of The Economist has a section dedicated to you and other urban nomads (aka, “techno-bedouins”). I prefer the latter since its so melodramatic.

Are you an urban nomad? The chances are that if you’re a graduate student (or even a professional or faculty member) you either are or occasionally are. Wireless communication is altering the way that we work. But more than that, its changing the ways we relate to one another and re-shaping the fabric of American society.

Urban planners have noticed significant variations in traffic patterns over the last thirty years. (See “The New Oasis,” 9). Alan Piraski has studied traffic patterns over thirty years and has observed three distinct and shifting patterns. In the 1980s (when work was in the city and domestic life was in the suburbs) there was a “classic diurnal flow.” Into work at 8 am and back out at 5pm. In the 90s jobs shifted away from cities (leaving many city centers severely depressed economically) and out into the suburbs creating a “circumferential pattern,” workers using beltways to get from their subdivisions to the office parks also located in the suburbs.

With his 2006 book, Piraski noted that traffic patterns had become increasingly complex. In many cities, such as Atlanta (hard to believe) or Portland, the number of car trips had actually stopped increasing. Traffic remained heavy, but was spread over wider ranges of time. People are now tending travel in “daisy chain patterns,” leaving the house in the morning, dropping the kids off at school, going to the office for a bit, running some errands, working from a home office or third location (like the Borders I’m sitting in as I write this). Individual travel patterns change every day.

That traffic patterns have altered this significantly over the past thirty years demonstrates the degree to which technology is influencing us and the communities in which we live. The question begged by this trend is how are we to evaluate it?

Sociologists are concerned that the diffusion of people into various third places (like coffee shops) may mean that we’re spending time with others, but time that is “psychologically evacuated.” There are eleven people sitting in the cafe at Borders (where I’m writing this article). That’s eleven people who are physically present but psychologically largely absent. We’re all here reading, typing, texting, and (annoyingly) some are even using their phones. We’re not looking, talking, or interacting with each other at all. Some scholars suggest that we simply have not developed to a point where such situations make us happy. There’s the psychological and neurological arousal created by being with others, but none of the rewards. Bummer.

I live this life. Moving around campus with my phone and my laptop. Sometimes in my office (which I find sort of confining) or sometimes in a coffee shop or food court, even the library. I talk on the phone, email, use facebook, but rarely text. I even roam off campus to Borders, Starbucks and to independent coffee shops like Rochet.

I bet you largely live this life, given that I often see faculty, professionals, and grad students in these places. What’s it like for you? Check out The Economist and give me your thoughts about how these trends are contributing to or detracting from a rich experience of life as communal beings.

Next Post: What About the Stranger? How technology is making us closer to those we know but further alienating us from the stranger in our midst.

“The way that leaders have loosened their ties to churches in their own communities–in the places where they live and work–is deeply troubling. It signals the loss of one of the few social settings where the average “Joes” used to rub shoulders with the powerful, and where the powerful kept in touch with the concerns of average folks.” - Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite.

A recent op ed piece in USA Today by Mchael Lindsay laments the departure of evangelical elites from local churches.

Lindsay spent five years interviewing some of the country’s top leaders. These included two former U.S. presidents, 100 CEOs and business executives, Hollywood icons, accomplished artists and renowned athletes, all of whom openly identify as Christians of the evangelical variety.

During the course of these interviews, Lindsay discovered that some 60% of these cultural leaders were not involved with a congregation in any meaningful way. Some of them were members, a designation that often did not translate into meaningful participation in the life of the community of faith. Others had actively disengaged from church life and sought spiritual development through other means.

Several CEOs, for example, noted their frustration that churches seemed intent on maximizing inefficiency. Churches, some claim, are “unproductive,” and “focused on the wrong things.” A substitute for such a frustrating experience can be service on the board of an organization such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the very zenith of evangelical groups. Why mess around with a church when you can function in the boardroom of a global organization?

In some ways this is a natural expression of the evangelical impulse that favors efficiency and also of our preoccupation with impact. To many evangelicals small is irrelevant and local is vanilla. We prefer our leaders to be icons who inspire global movements with strong brands and multiple spin-off products for our niche market. A church, after all, may only be able to reach a community, but a satellite broadcast can reach millions around the globe.

That this is a natural expression, however, makes it neither helpful nor right. And this development shows that the (already weakened) fabric of evangelical ecclesiology may be at the point of unraveling.

Evangelicals have launched hundreds of invitation-only programs and organizations for everybody from business leaders in Manhattan to diplomats in Washington. This is a good thing, a means of seeking to contextualize the Gospel and Kingdom values to a specific place or profession. It’s my job, after all, to help do just this at Wake Forest so I’m not knocking it. However, these innovations mean nothing should they serve to sunder individual believers from the community of the church. The very robustness of these groups is based on the bedrock of a visibly community of people united to Christ through baptism and sharing life together as they follow Christ.

Let’s face it, Following Christ 2008 is a conference for people who may well one day fit into the constituencies outlined above. And certainly if and when you find yourself working in DC or on Wall Street, you will want some time of fellowship with others similarly situated. But that fellowship, as helpful as it may be, will fail to meet the full scope of our spiritual needs.

For the purpose of meeting these needs, God instituted the church. That evangelical elites are abandoning the church is worrisome not only in that it perpetuates the divorce between average Joes and elites, but more so in that it is a trend toward the abandoning of God’s primary redemptive vehicle. Does the church do some silly things? Sure. Does it sometimes seem like we’re trying very hard to show people the door? Yes. However, all of this doesn’t change the fact that the church is foundational.

John Calvin notes:

“[L]et us learn, from her single title of Mother, how useful, nay, how necessary the knowledge of her is, since there is no other means of entering into life unless she conceive us in the womb and give us birth, unless she nourish us at her breasts, and, in short, keep us under her charge and government, until, divested of mortal flesh, we become like angels. For our weakness does not permit us to leave the school until we gave spent our whole lives as scholars. Moreover, beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for….” Institutes 1: 4

There is nothing wrong with being involved with a myriad of evangelical organizations that relate to your specific vocation. However, it can never be a substitute for your membership and participation in that new community called church.

Carey McWilliams once described Los Angeles as “a collection of suburbs in search of city.” The 29 March 2008 edition of The Economist featured a nice piece, “Tackling the Hydra,” describing LA’s attempts to change itself into a “normal city.”

I have never been to Los Angeles, but descriptions I have read make it sound reminiscent of that Southern hydra, Atlanta. In fact, some have said that Atlanta is making a good faith effort to take the prize for miscreant urban planning.

That being said, LA is trying to change. The change comes in the form of what is being called a “neighborhood revolution,” designing self-contained suburban neighborhoods. We’re talking multi-story condos with shops on the ground floor and parking in the basement. Put these near public transportation, so the theory goes, and people will make the shift to a less automobile-centric style of life. This, after all, has been the bane of multiple large cities like LA and Atlanta.

Developers have been putting subdivisions near highway onramps and watching as folks jump in their cars, having filled them up with $4/gallon gas, and jump on the highway for a 1 hour commute. Now they hope that putting a condo development near the local train station will encourage folks to jump onto public transport. Let’s hope it does.

In order to do it, the city will overcome the bane of public transportation: free public parking. The city of Los Angeles forces businesses to provide a set number of parking spaces (based on a schedule, no less). This makes sense if you assume the car as the sole means of transportation. According to story: “This raises the cost of doing business and hugely lowers the cost of driving.” Free parking has, in fact, been called “a fertility drug for cars.”

My personal experience bears this out. I have lived a couple of places where I used a car very little and multiple places where I used it a bunch. Without fail, the single greatest incentive to jumping of the bus was the high cost (both in time and money) of finding a parking place and leaving my car there.

The early trends are not all that encouraging. Approximately 29,000 people live in LA’s historic downtown area, many in stylish lofts located near SoCal’s finest public transit system. Survey data show that just 11% took public transit, 17% walked, the rest drove.

With gas prices continuing to rise and the economic outlook foggy (at best), it might just be the time to begin suggesting a reformation of the way we structure our cities. Not that there haven’t already been myriad calls for change. The unfortunate reality is, however, that calls for change only really start to get traction when the pain of remaining the same seems overwhelming. Urban planners and psychologists, it seems, have this one thing in common.

I was listening to an interview of Thomas Friedman on my iPod yesterday while running around our neighborhood. He was talking about the latest edition of his book, The World is Flat (I think its version 3.0 by now).

In the course of the interview, he made a passing (almost throwaway) reference to the impact of our increasingly efficient search functions (like, for example, the Google). His phrase was something like, “we’re now a search culture.”

This got me thinking. Hmmm, how can I put this, why read? I mean, if I can search a book to find the specific information that I want, why spend hours digesting bits of information that might not be what I’m looking for?

The advent of “spotlight” with with Mac OSX.4.11 meant that it no longer is all that important to have a taxonomically-complete archiving system on your hard drive. If you want to find a document or file just click the little magnifying glass in the top right hand of the screen, enter a keyword, hit return, and watch spotlight pull it up for you. No more asking yourself whether this document was personal or business, etc. The same goes for email.

Obviously, this could really make paper-writing a lot more simple. How many of us spent our senior year in college stuck in the library, index cards in hand, reading for our senior thesis? What about grad school? Maybe 80% of what we read probably never made it into the final paper. So, why read it?

I’m interested in your thoughts about this. What are the hidden costs of a searchable society? We already know that the Google has been wrangling to put electronic versions of classic books in a searchable format online. Is this good, bad, or neutral? If you’re a graduate student or faculty, what impact has the rise of searchable wikis (like, for example, the bane of all serious writing, wikipedia) had on the quality of the research and writing submitted to you by undergraduates? We’re all in this together as members of the university community and the professions, so let’s talk about it.