Forcing time offline gives you freedom
By Rosie Perera | June 25, 2010 at 1:20 am
Ever have a day like this?
I find it happening more and more often. It can be an addiction, an obsession, a compulsion, an enslavement to the need to check for one more new message, follow one more rabbit trail, play one more move in Scrabble, find out one more factoid, write one more blog post, before getting down to work.
I’ve recently learned of a useful tool called Freedom which blocks the Internet for a set period of time that you specify in minutes (up to 8 hours). It works pretty well. It blocks all Internet access: that includes email, websites, automatic software updates, etc. The program will not let you cancel it, so you’re pretty much stuck until the time is up. Even killing the process doesn’t restore Internet access. The only way around it is to reboot your computer, but that’s enough of an impediment to keep the distractions at bay while you get some work done. My only critique is I wish it were more flexible about input format for times: allowing longer time periods (up to 24 hours) and allowing time formats like 8:30 for 8 hours and 30 minutes, rather than making you do the math in your head (let’s see, how many minutes are there in 7 and a half hours?).
Despite the domain name, it runs on both Mac and Windows: http://macfreedom.com
Sometimes having all the freedom in the world to roam about online is actually more of a bondage. It breeds indecisiveness if you’re researching something — too much information! It opens you up to distractions. Just as submitting to Christ’s lordship brings freedom (John 8:36, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”), so voluntarily limiting your infinite access to cyberspace for a time can bring relief from tyranny.
OK, one more blog post done. Now back to real work. (But this is my real work! Part of it, anyway.)
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tech-addicted parents
By Rosie Perera | June 14, 2010 at 12:17 am
(Photo credit: CBS)
Thanks to The Huffington Post for bringing to my attention a recent New York Times article and CBS segment on the problems of tech-addicted parents who pay more attention to their BlackBerrys or their iPhones than to their babies. Somehow we don’t seem to notice or are more forgiving when adults do that to each other, but when we do it to our kids, look out! If parents don’t unplug from gadgets which disrupt quality time with their children, we will see a new generation of kids with behavior problems associated with neglect. Envision a new parallel program to Al-Anon: Tech-Anon, for adult children of parents who were iPhone addicts.
What’s next? CrackBerry babies?
(I could not find the original source of this photo which is reproduced all over the Internet.)
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Getting quoted in publication…cool!
By Rosie Perera | June 9, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Al Erisman quotes me in the latest issue of Christianity Today in an article about technology: The Face-to-Face Gospel and the Death of Distance. Thanks to Don Lundgren for the heads-up about this!
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Technology to fill the spiritual void?
By Rosie Perera | June 2, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Source: http://www.socialsignal.com/image/wwj-buy
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
How NOT to search with Google
By Rosie Perera | May 19, 2010 at 7:33 pm
I am frequently amused by the ways people find me on academia.edu, where I have a page describing my research and writing on faith and technology, among other things. Academia.edu lets me see what keywords people have been using on Google when they find my page. Some of them are what I’d expect, and it’s gratifying to know people are looking for me in particular, or something to do with faith and technology, and are finding my paper on Technology and Christian Spirituality. Some of the examples of good Google searches which have landed people on my page are:
Perera’s technology sabbath
technology spirituality
rosie perera regent
Christian technology “fine arts” Wolterstorff
Why are these good searches? Excellent relevant keywords. No extraneous fluff words (they are not necessary and don’t help narrow down a search). And some people know how to use phrases in quotes to be even more precise in their searches.
Now how should you NOT use Google? Here are some examples of bad search strings:
1) reserarch paper on what does christian spirituality mean to me
2) give me some questions on the topic christians versus technology
3) suggested titles for research about christian spirituality
4) ideas for a spirituality paper
5) What relevance does martin Heidegger’s critique of technology have in this “connected” age? Begin by describing what his understanding of the “essence” of technology is, and how he envisions the “dangers” it creates for us.
6) the problem of technology and christianity
7) technolgy “ontology of the age”
I’m going to rip these to shreds one by one. First of all, it’s clear that Googlers 1-5 have a school assignment and are looking for someone else’s work to help them either come up with a topic for their paper or even write part of the paper for them. I don’t have a problem with using the internet for research but the laziness with which these searchers are asking their questions leads me to suspect they are hoping for more than just inspiration and information, and they don’t have good research skills.
#1 - if you’re supposed to write a paper on what something means to you, you probably won’t find the answers to that online; it would also help if you could spell research
#2 - Google is not a person to whom you ask for things (”give me some…”), and on, the, and topic are all throw-away words that do not help the search at all. In fact “on” and “the” are probably among the small words that Google just ignores (so why waste your time typing them). The word “topic” is probably included in the search but including it means that you are limiting the results to pages which include the word “topic” which is probably too restrictive in thise case.
#3 - “suggested titles” — lazy searching; you’ve got to find the ideas and come up with titles yourself based on smart relevant keyword searching
#4 - totally lazy — I’m willing to bet nothing useful came of that search
#5 - I kid you not! Someone actually typed (or rather probably copied and pasted) this entire thing into Google to try to search for the answer to a question on an exam. Aside from the lack of academic integrity this betrays, such a search is virtually useless. The more words you put in your search the more restrictive it is. When there are not quotes around a long phrase, and no AND or OR between the words, Google defaults to AND as the Boolean operation combining the search terms. In other words, that long search would result in only web pages that mentioned each and every word in those two sentences (not counting short words like “of” and “the” which are ignored). Quotes around single words would be ignored by Google.
#6 - we’re getting warmer here; but the, of, and and could have been omitted to save typing time, since they are all going to be ignored by Google anyway; the rest of the keywords are good choices; they are specific and relevant
#7 - good use of combining search terms and quoted phrases, but again spelling things correctly is a must; Google is pretty smart about suggesting correct spellings if you mistype something, but it’s still better to get in the habit of good spelling for more accurate search results
OK, off my soap box! 
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Information Needs a Compass, Not a Clock
By Rosie Perera | May 18, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Sorry, nothing new and original by me today. I hope to get around to writing up a review of Barbara Brown Taylor’s talk, which was excellent (and not as much about technology as I’d thought it would be from its title). But for now, here’s a great article by a blogger I’ve begun following lately who writes on faith and technology: Information Needs a Compass, Not a Clock
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
“Biblical Narrative in the Age of Twitter”
By Rosie Perera | April 24, 2010 at 6:25 pm
Those of you in the Vancouver area might be interested in this upcoming free public lecture at Vancouver School of Theology by Barbara Brown Taylor:
Tuesday, May 11
Biblical Narrative in the Age of Twitter
Free Public Lecture #2, 12:30 pm at VST’s Chapel of the Epiphany
In an age when both young and old communicate in twenty-word sound bites, what hope is there for the long and looping narrative of God’s presence with humankind?
Barbara Brown Taylor teaches religion at Piedmont College and is an adjunct professor of spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary. She is the author of twelve books, including An Altar in the World.
Her first memoir, Leaving Church, met with widespread critical acclaim, winning a 2006 Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association. Dr. Taylor is an at-large editor for The Christian Century and sometime commentator on Georgia Public Radio.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
My friend’s journey towards being more skep-tech-al
By Rosie Perera | April 5, 2010 at 5:41 pm
I have a friend named Leif Hansen who has been an inspiration to me in the struggle between wanting to spend less time online and yet feeling drawn to it. Both he and I have a love-hate relationship with technology, and we both go through periods of wanting/needing to take significant time away from it in order to rejuvenate our physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, physchological, relational selves. He’s just written a great blog post about his plans to take two weeks off from geeking out and move back towards the direction of spending less time in front of screens for the long term. It’s ironic that he’s posting this reflection online, but it’s understandable. He’s preparing his readers and social networking contacts to have less communication from him in the future. I don’t have to prepare you, faithful readers, for that, since you already know I don’t post here very often. I’m glad I don’t feel the compulsion to blog that often. But I could definitely take a leaf from Leif’s book and spend less time online in general. Maybe next week…
Here’s Leif’s post:
Skep-Tech: 10 Reasons Why I’m Moving Away From Being So Screen-centric & How I Hope to Do it
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
New policy
By Rosie Perera | March 30, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Due to the increase in spammers trying to register as subscribers on this blog, I have instituted a new policy. If you want to register to be able to post comments, you will need to send me a personal email. You can find my contact info on the About page.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Earth Hour - 27 Mar 2010 @ 8.:0PM-9:30PM
By Rosie Perera | March 26, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Thanks to blogger friend Conrade Yap for the wording of this message: We have heard about learning to unplug our computers once a week. We have also heard about fasting for a good cause. What about unplugging our dependence on electricity for 1 hour? The purpose of Earth Hour is to promote public awareness about global warming. For 60 minutes, lights will be turned off to symbolically remind people that energy is precious, and the threat of global warming.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
« Previous Entries