An enchanting hour of poetry drawing on the ways family and religion shape our lives. Marie Howe, poet laureate of New York State, works and plays with her Catholic upbringing, the universal drama of family, and the ordinary time that sustains us. The moral life, she says, is lived out in what we say as much as what we do — and so words have a power to save us.
The pope is fully illuminated. The ubiquity of screens in eight short years.
(courtesy of NBC News via @d_mcg)
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
The response to this week’s show with Seth Godin has been overwhelming. And, we’re finding that a lot of folks are listening to the unedited interview right after they finish listening to the produced podcast. So why wouldn’t I offer it up to our Tumblr friends to reblog/download/share!
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Our Latest Radio Show + Podcast: Opening to Our Lives: Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Science of Mindfulness (» download mp3)
“It doesn’t actually take any more time to say good-bye or hug you know, your children or whatever it is in the morning when you’re on your way to work. But the mind says, ‘I don’t have any time for this.’ But actually that’s all you have time for, is this because there’s nothing else than this…So when your four year-old can’t decide which dress she wants to wear, that’s not a problem for you, unless you make it a problem for you. That’s just the way four year-olds are. And the more we can sort of learn these lessons the more we will not be in some sense running towards our death, but in a sense opening to our lives.”
Scientist and author Jon Kabat-Zinn has changed Western medicine through his work on meditation and stress. He’s clinically demonstrated the benefits of ancient traditions of mindfulness and meditation. And he’s adapted these for people who are healthy or living with chronic illness, for Olympic athletes and corporate cultures.
In this week’s On Being podcast, Jon Kabat-Zinn offers wise perspective on inhabiting the ordinary and extreme stresses of our lives. Technology may function 24/7, he points out, but our minds and bodies do not. He has practical and spiritual tools accessible to everyone — for slowing down time and “opening to our lives.”
And, for this week’s show, our host Krista Tippett recommends reading: 
Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness
by Jon Kabat-Zinn
There are a couple of minutes in this podcast in which we hear Jon Kabat-Zinn conduct an introductory meditative experience for employees at Google. This spiritual technology is immediately effective and at the same time an engagement for a lifetime. It is about “coming to our senses” in the fullest sense of that phrase. This book explores these ways of living in more depth.
Internet Everywhere: The Future of History’s Most Disruptive Technology (live video)
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
In “Alive Enough?,” the director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Sherry Turkle, cautions that technology is not alienating in and of itself, but that we must mature as our ever-expanding relationship with technology grows. And, she says, we can and must lead examined lives with our digital objects — actively shaping technology to human purposes.
Well, at this year’s World Science Festival, some of the pioneers (including Vint Cerf) of these disruptive technologies examine “the Internet’s brief but explosive history and reveal nascent projects that will shortly reinvent how we interact with technology — and each other.” And they give us a view of what technologies and interactions are in our future.
The live webcast starts at 1pm Eastern. Our producer is there and will be live-tweeting this panel of dynamic thinkers from NYU’s Skirball Center. Watch the live video stream with us and let us know if there’s anybody you’d like us to interview for On Being.
Q:Recently there was news story about a new technique being used in photograpy; the new method allows a digital picture to be taken. Later it can be downloaded on the computer and focused on different points. The name of the process starts with the letter "N". Can you tell me the name of this new process?
Anonymous
Good morning, Anon—
Although this is definitely not our area of expertise (we do news through the lens of theology, human experience, and storytelling), I actually know what you’re asking about. The technology is called plenoptic, or light field, photography. Joshua Topolsky describes it this way in his review of the Lytro camera for The Washington Post:
“When normal cameras take a photo, they measure the color and light coming through the lens to produce an image. The Lytro camera not only sees color and light but can understand the direction the light moves in while snapping a photo.
Instead of simply grabbing one point of the light in a scene, Lytro analyzes all the points of light and then converts them to data. Once the image is stored, it can be processed and reprocessed after the photo is taken.
What does this mean, exactly?
Basically, it means that you’re able to take a photo and then refocus the subject in it after the fact. It means that if you take a picture of a friend in the foreground and there’s something exciting happening down the street, you can use Lytro’s custom software to refocus on the background, or almost anything else in the scene that you captured. It’s hard to explain, but it’s amazing.”
You can see how this works and play around with images on Lytro’s photo gallery. Check out these examples in which I changed the depth of field by first focusing on the near and then focusing on the distant end of the tree, with one click:
The resolution of the photos has a long way to go. It’s rather poor, but apparently there’s hope. Here’s Eric Cheng, the director of photography at Lytro, explaining the technology and the company’s new camera.
Hope this helps!
Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Shared Paradise: Church of Kopimism Reshapes Society with File Sharing
by Robert M. Geraci, guest contributor
There’s a new flying spaghetti monster in the spiritual marketplace: the Church of Kopimism. The newly “established” religion has become the talk of the internet, in part because of its transparently “unreligious” outlook and in part because of the group’s social perspective. The Church of Kopimism, which received official recognition as a religious denomination in Sweden, objects to what it calls the Copyright Religion and advocates free sharing of information by and for all. Though it lacks any particular resemblance to established religions, Kopimism has “beliefs and rituals,” which are held sufficient to establish it as a legal religious organization.
In the study of religion, we long ago gave up on creating a taxonomy that would — once and for all — allow us to demarcate the sacred from the profane and religious groups from secular. Nevertheless, there is something profoundly unreligious about Kopimism, and it is hard to overlook this glaring reality. Whether it is because the group lacks even the slightest reference to the supernatural or whether its patently political aims overdetermine it, few commentators seem willing to accept Kopimism as a legitimate religion. Indeed, it took several efforts before the Swedish government accepted the group, apparently out of concern that Kopimist practices lack a real form of “worship.”
In today’s world, there are lots of ways in which secular groups and practices have co-opted the religious. Calling them “authentic fakes,” David Chidester claims that these do authentically religious work despite the fact that they emerge from non-religious sources. But Chidester’s authentic fakes seem ever oriented toward a search for human meaning, especially through a connection with transcendent ideals. The Church of Kopimism shows no particular effort to create a meaningful life experience. Instead, just as Pastafarians struggled against the teaching of Intelligent Design in U.S. public schools, the Kopimists are enmeshed in the politics of file sharing.
At least since Stewart Brand’s declaration that “information wants to be free,” there have been techno-enthusiasts who have resisted the control of copyright holders and digital rights management. They believe that information ought to be widely distributed, and apply this principle to information that they can possess and disseminate via the internet. As such, a battle has been waged for more than a decade over the illegal distribution of music, videos, and even good old-fashioned e-books. The Kopimists declare that the search for knowledge is sacred and that copying is sacred because it increases the value of information; in their view, the copyrightists are sinners and the file sharers are saints.
The legitimation of Kopimism spread rapidly across the internet, thanks largely to mainstream coverage by the BBC and other news sources, and yet few know what to think of the group. Is it a joke, a political statement, or a legitimate religion? The brief notoriety of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism certainly provides a precedent for humorous, politically-minded new religious movements, but Kopimism is not like FSM. After all, the latter purports faith in a supernatural entity (“your Noodley Master”) and claims to compete with other religious beliefs, whereas Kopimism has nothing to say about traditional religions: the antithesis of Kopimism, Copyright Religion, is a faith whose adherents join, at best, unknowingly.
While the precise status of Kopimism is open to question, the movement does engage in one of the principle discursive efforts of religious life: social organization. Kopimism is a reflection of social distortion caused by media technologies, and an attempt to build a worldview that accommodates it. That information can be (very nearly) free indicates to some people that it “wants” to be. Among those who feel that the mere presence of online communication indicates that data must be shared, the present social reality must be undone and a new order established.
Like other religions, Kopimism takes part in the re-ordering of society. Religious discourses both legitimate and de-legitimate social orders, as Bruce Lincoln has argued; as such, faith in technology can be the impetus for new kinds of social structure. Brand and his followers in the Whole Earth Network and subsequent groups are a perfect example of how faith in the technology can be the lynchpin for a utopian social discourse. The Church of Kopimists is, unquestionably, a part of this effort. While Kopimists may pay only lip service to their status as a religion, they carry on the work of dismantling old social structures and building up new ones in the hope of an information-rich paradise.
Robert M. Geraci is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College. He is the author of Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality.
This essay is reprinted with permission of Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Why I Cried When Steve Jobs Died
by Jennifer Cobb, guest contributor
Image by Charis Tsevis/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
It took me by surprise that I cried when Steve Jobs died. I was surprised to feel so moved by the loss of someone who was essentially a modern industrialist. But of course, his acumen as a businessman was not what I was mourning. Jobs’ work has moved us in ways that the work of his contemporary Bill Gates never has. Gates’s influence on our culture has been just as powerful, but has not touched as profoundly. Why?
The vast digital domain that we think of when we imagine information technology is essentially non-physical in nature. It is, by definition, incorporeal. But like all incorporeal things – our thoughts, our dreams, our faith, our souls – it relies on bodies for manifestation in the physical world. The digital needs the analog to express itself.
And this is what Steve Jobs did better than anyone else. He built beautiful bodies for our digital dreams. He understood before we did that we craved elegant containers for our disembodied hearts and minds. Every device he ever created, from the Apple 1 to the iPhone, was an expression of his deep, aesthetic commitment. And here he stood on the shoulder of giants, from Aristotle and Aquinas up to modern information theorists who assert that the best code is the simplest and most beautiful. As Keats so famously wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Job’s aesthetic began with the analog form of the device and then, quite naturally, extended into the digital function — the UI or user interface. The icons. The navigation. The information architecture at heart of the Apple OS. Analog and digital, form and function, hand in hand. Jobs was not just constructing bodies; he was giving them very particular and beautiful expressive capacities that are connected to something radically new in human experience; they plug us into a shared digital landscape filled with us and everything we bring to it.
Technology is our connective tissue. It joins us, hearts and minds. Jobs enabled this connection in a new way. He did not create the content that fills the devices he designed. He left it up to us to write songs, create art, make movies, write blog posts and emails and essays, send tweets and texts and build websites.
Jobs was a perfect reflection of our times. He made stuff that is so attractive, so enchanting, that he created a vast global desire for his products. His medium was technology and the context was capitalism. He made a lot of money for himself and for many other people. But by all accounts, the money wasn’t the point. The money was simply a validation of the fact that his vision was spreading throughout the world. And that vision was that the digital and the analog could be a thing of beauty when married with skill and vision.
The danger in the global mourning of his gifts is that we become so enchanted with the devices that we get lost in the interface and forget that the real point is what lies on the other side of the threshold. The devices are doorways into a larger, enchanted world of our shared creativity. They are not ends, they are beginnings.
Jennifer Cobb is a business consultant specializing in marketing and strategy for public and private sector organizations. She has a degree in ethics from Union Theological Seminary and is the author of Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World. She lives in Berkeley, California and blogs regularly at The Spruce Blog.
We welcome your original reflections, essays, videos, or news items for possible publication on the Being Blog. Submit your entry through our First Person Outreach page.
What Is the Path to Integrating Technology into Robust, Meaningful Living?
by Krista Tippett, host
We’ve been paying attention to Sherry Turkle for some time, as a thinker and observer on technology in terms of the human self, spirit, and identity. I love the philosophically witty title of one of her books: Simulation and Its Discontents. She is a social scientist through and through, an immensely serious researcher into what she calls the “subjective” side of technology. For over three decades, she’s been analyzing the inner effects of the digital tools that are transforming our days — how they affect our attention and relationships, our sense of reality, and even of “aliveness.”
Earlier this year, she made waves with her book Alone Together. That title itself has become a catchword for the ironic capacity of communications technologies to alienate us from one another. Alone Together was reviewed in that vein as well — as a call to unplug our tablets and phones, our players and laptops. And yet, as I read Sherry Turkle and listen to her speak, I hear her saying something far more thought-provoking and indeed hopeful:that each of us can find practical and meaningful ways to shape technology to our purposes, towards honoring what we hold dear in life.
I once heard Sherry Turkle insist to an interviewer, with some exasperation: “I’m not saying, ‘unplug.’ I’m saying, ‘reflect.’ I’m saying, ‘converse.’” And here is the starting point for the conversation she would encourage all of us to have within ourselves, within our workplaces, and especially within our families: just because we’ve grown up with the Internet doesn’t mean the Internet is grown up. The reality check is that we are meeting the glorious communications technologies of this century in their infancy. It is up to us to mature them, to direct them to the best of human potential, and to develop wise habits for living deliberately and sustainably with them.
Of all the perspectives she sheds on this challenge, none is more sobering than the fact that the adults she’s studied are at least as culpable as any teenagers in giving their lives over unthinkingly to digital gadgets. Far too often, she says, it is parents who are on their BlackBerries at the dinner table, parents responding to email and therefore failing to look up and meet their children’s eyes when they pick them up from school, parents failing to be present with and for their children in ordinary moments that make up the memories of a childhood — on playgrounds, on a nature walk.
Sherry Turkle puts arresting words around what is at stake. On a very deep level, for example, we can fail to teach our children the rewards of solitude — of being able to be at peace in our own company. This is an enduring human challenge. Yet the possibilities for missing it are perhaps more abundant and seductive in this generation. And, as Sherry Turkle reminds us, “If you don’t teach your children to be alone, they’ll only always know how to be lonely.”
Since speaking with Sherry Turkle and taking in some of her strategies, I’ve been more deliberate (not yet perfect) at drawing lines with email between work and home. I’ve taken an idea she offers — of selectively declaring “sacred spaces” like the dinner table as off limits for technology. And while my children grumble, they too are embracing this. I’ve started regularly printing out emails that are substantive or special in some way and putting them in boxes like I did once upon a time far more naturally with letters or thoughts written in the first place on paper.
And as I talk about this in my circles of family and friends, I’m hearing about all kinds of strategies others are devising to make the technologies we love more humanly compatible and even nourishing. With this show, we’re hoping to spark a lively and useful exchange of such ideas among listeners. Tell us and other listeners if you’ve created strategies to lead an examined digital life — to shape it to honor what matters. Please join in!
Evolutionary biologists believe that human lighting preferences are the result of our trichromatic vision—rare in nonprimates—which makes us particularly suited to daylight and the perception of primary colors. There’s an anthropological component as well: For 400,000 years, humankind has been banishing darkness with fire. And Edison’s bulb is, at its core, a burning filament that casts the glow of a flame. Abandoning incandescent bulbs means abandoning fire as our primary light source for the first time in human history.
These lines from Dan Koeppel’s article in Wired magazine, “The Future of Light Is the LED,” nails it. His explanation captures people’s — frankly, my — aversion to the horrible, cold light of compact fluorescent bulbs and the ritual cringe many of us experience each morning when our colleagues turn on the overhead tubes of life-sucking energy hovering above our cubevilles with a perky, “Let’s get some light in here!”
Photo by Daniel Parks/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
