Friends or Fish? The Erosion of Privacy in an Online World
By Rosie Perera | November 9, 2010 at 4:21 pm
My latest article for Comment Magazine has been published and is available online:
Friends or Fish? The Erosion of Privacy in an Online World
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Triumph of technology
By Rosie Perera | October 15, 2010 at 4:09 am
I watched with great excitement, along with the rest of the world, as the 33 Chilean miners were brought up to the surface after being trapped for 69 days 2000 feet underground. The rescue was extremely well planned and perfectly executed. The whole event could have ended in tragedy, but because Chile took its time to do things right, and solicited advice and assistance from other countries, it went without a hitch. The technology used to extract the men from their cave was amazing. It boggles the mind that the rescuers were able to drill a hole through solid rock down half a mile in less than two months, and bring all 33 men safely up to the surface in less than 24 hours. The pièce de resistance, showing true PR genius as well as a cool use of technology, was placing a camera down below so we could all watch the rescue taking place in real time from both ends. This goes down in history as one of the greatest triumphs of hope, determination, ingenuity, and technological achievement. And for many involved…faith.
Granted, the whole situation wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for a catastrophic failure of technology. But this event has led to a commitment on the part of Chile to examine the safety of all its mines and make changes. And I think the spirit of the people is strong enough to make it happen. Bravo Chile! This was a moment the world will not soon forget.
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Taking a Digital Sabbath
By Rosie Perera | September 22, 2010 at 2:43 pm
This seems to be a growing theme that keeps popping up in my peripheral vision. Maybe I’m more in tune to it and my network of friends knows I’d be interested, so they tell me about all these things. But I do sense that it’s an idea which is catching on.
The latest episode of the CBC Spark podcast had a segment on Taking a Digital Sabbath. It’s the second segment, and you can listen to just that alone (scroll down a bit for it):
Spark 120 - September 19 & 22, 2010 | CBC Radio
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Social Media Fasts
By Rosie Perera | September 12, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Dave Parry of AcademHack (blog) wrote a post on Social Media Fasts the other day. His point was that they are a good idea but they shouldn’t be mandated from above. I agree. I prefer the idea of the voluntary week-long Technology Sabbath that students in a couple of dorms at Seattle Pacific University took in 2001 (article).
A friend of mine recently quit Facebook (for a second time) after ten days of posting his “Ten Reasons Why I’m Leaving Facebook.” His reasons were well thought out. They included an admission that he is an addict, a decision to embrace “social poverty” (focus on fewer friends so that he can engage more deeply in those friendships), a choice to wear “one less mask” (we often create a false persona in our Facebook presence; though one of his friends commented that we share aspects of ourselves more universally among all our groups of friends when we share them on Facebook rather than segmenting ourselves; that’s true, but we are more likely to hide aspects that we don’t want to share with everyone, so we’re not truly being real with any subset of our FB friends), the freedom to write more handwritten letters, and the desire to “unclutter” his eye (we are bombarded by images and advertisements all day long; he is right to want to give his brain a rest by abstaining from yet another source of such input). I wish him luck in this second attempt. One friend told him he’d better not do it again as she’s getting tired of re-friending him each time he comes back, and she won’t do it a third time.
I’ve taken breaks from Facebook before, too, though I have never been as drastic as to delete my account. I’ve merely deactivated it for a period of weeks. When you reactivate it, your friend network is restored intact. You’ve missed out on whatever events and status updates happened in your absence, but you’ve also had a break from all the stupid invitations to play FarmVille or pass some meme on to all your friends, hundreds of ads, and whatever else has been sucking up your time. I highly recommend doing this every once in a while. It hasn’t cured my addiction, but it flushes out the garbage from my brain every so often, which is healthy.
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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.)
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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.)
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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!
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Technology to fill the spiritual void?
By Rosie Perera | June 2, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Source: http://www.socialsignal.com/image/wwj-buy
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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! 
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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
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