Archive - 2016
January 2nd
Resolutions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/02/2016 - 22:24Today was a quiet day with a bit of reading and writing. I still ended up with over a dozen tabs open in my browser at the end of the day, and I’m seeking better ways to organize my thoughts as well as my reading.
Several things I read today were about keeping New Year’s resolutions. Lifehacker had Top 10 Strategies for Making Your New Year's Resolution Stick. Underlying much of their suggestions is SMART criteria: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and Timebound.
I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with ‘SMART’. Are the goals that matter measurable? How do you measure awareness of God's presence? How does time-bound and achievable relate to the coming of God's kingdom? I often talk of about the goal of living each day more fully and more lovingly than the previous.
On Facebook, people talked about maintaining focus which promoted a discussion about the The Pomodoro Technique®. I must admit, I’m always a bit skeptical of any technique that has a registered trademark. One link to help people with this was My Tomatoes.
Another tool that people mentioned was Workflowy. I’ve started using this for note taking, building to do lists and tracking links. It has an ability to share lists. I’ve set up a Sample Shared List. I can imagine using this for Rhizome like activities, book study groups, etc.
I used Workflowy to gather my thoughts for this blog post, and figure I’ll keep experimenting with it, at least for a little while.
In the Episcopalians on Facebook group, Daniel Pigg posted an interesting thought about Nine Ladies dancing and relating it to Perichoresis and the dance between the persons of the Trinity. It fit nicely with the chapter of People of the Way by Dwight J. Zschieile about sharing communion. As I thought about this, I wondered about our shared communities online. I am particularly struck by this in terms of various daily devotions online, few of which seem to have much community around them.
What I’m Thinking 1/2/2016
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/02/2016 - 13:39Last January, I wrote several blog posts about what I was thinking. They fit with some of my current thoughts about Shaping Ava, Continuous Partial Discernment, and The Rhizome - Perhaps 2016.
So, here are things that I’ve been looking at over the past day, part of the rhizome, part of shaping Ava, as part of my journey. One friend on Facebook posted something which seems to me to follow a similar line of thought about trying to be more focused for 2016 and looking for tips. I responded, in part:
Write something every day. Do it digitally. Have a few things that you can fall back on. What did you read online that caught your attention? (If there are a few things, how are they related?) What was the most beautiful thing you saw today? What kind act or compassion did you experience, either as giver, receiver, or observer?
Try to connect with others making similar goals. If you post something on Facebook that I see on this line, I will try to respond. Try to find others to respond to in the same manner.
So, here are a few things that caught my attention. Somehow, I stumbled across the Spiritual Formation in the Episcopal Diocese of Western MA Facebook page. This led to their blog, Sharing the Season in the Episcopal Diocese of Western MA Reflections on Advent and Christmas.
One of the posts was about Barbara Crafton speaking at St. Francis Church in Holden, MA on January 27th. Another was about the possibility of a book study group around Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus. The Facebook page, the blog, and the book are on my reading list.
Also from Western Mass I found a link to The Awakening Conference. It is scheduled for April 28-May 1st in Holyoke. It looks interesting, but probably isn’t for me.
Someone, I suspect from an Episcopalian group on Facebook, shared a link to Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation. I’ll add these to my list of daily meditations.
Someone else mentioned Marcus Borg, another writer to explore. One final link for today is BEST OF RNS: Coloring books for grown-ups: A spiritual practice?
As an aside, I started looking at various daily meditations and poems I receive. I looked to see if I could organize them into a good RSS feed. Unfortunately, some of them are available only as emails. During my search I got back to my old RSS feeds, which I’ve used various tools to manage. Right now, I’m thinking I’ll use Digg’s RSS reader, and I’ve added a few new daily mediation blogs there.
Another blog I stumbled across over the past day or two is Between the By-Road and the Main Road. It has a tag line, “Exploring the intersections between art and learning”, and the most recent post includes Billy Collins poem “Forgetfulness”
For other daily reading, there is Poem A Day from Poets.Org and a word of the day email I get from The Society of Saint John the Evangelist.
January 1st
2015 Blogging Recap
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/01/2016 - 17:43So, I’ve been looking at my blog posts for 2015 and find a few interesting things. Often, I write one blog post a day. Some days, I write more than one, and sometimes I go without putting up a blog post. There have been long periods where I’ve put up a blog post every day. For 2015, I ended up putting up 364 blog post, one post short of an average of one post a day.
For 2015, my average blog post was just shy of 300 words. My total for the year was slightly over 100,000 words, or the equivalent of two NaNoWriMo first drafts.
Each blog post was directly accessed an average of 473 times, based on the blog software data. There are times this varies from Google analytics data, and this data doesn’t really say how often a blog post was read, because often people come to the front page of the blog or to one of the category pages. In such cases, they can usually read up to five posts on a single page, but I don’t know how may they really read. It’s probably fair to say that for 2015, my average blog post was read around 500 times.
My most popular blog post for 2015 was My Cartoon Superheros. It tied to an effort to fill Facebook with comic book heroes for one reason or another.
The next three most popular posts were related to #rhizo15. While I don’t have nice statistics to support this, I believe these were also the posts that received the most comments.
Not included in these statistics is that many of my most popular posts were written in previous years.
So, the plan for 2016 remains similar to my plan for 2015. Try to average a post a day, with an average post of 300 words and each post read an average of 500 times. I expect more of my posts will be about poetry and religion and less on politics and technology which have often driven much of my traffic. My hopes are that in spite of this shift I’ll have more readers and more engagement for 2016. I especially hope that my posts will have more impact, along the lines I described in Shaping Ava.
What are your blog and social media plans for 2016?
Shaping Ava
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/01/2016 - 10:33Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Happy New Year! We perform our rituals, say our incantations in hopes that, somehow, this year will be better. For a day, we forget the quote attributed to Einstein, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, and make the same resolutions.
This year, I’ve been seeing a quote attributed to Mark Twain making the rounds, “New Year's Day--Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”
Last night, we had a YouTube Riff Off. This is a game we play where one person plays a song on YouTube, and the next person riff’s off of that tune, selecting some other tune the first tune made them think of. We go around and around as one tune leads to another and one mood gives way to the next. It is interesting to observe what emerges.
We started off with Auld Lang Syne and went to songs about children growing up, Cat’s Cradle, Circle Game. We went to the sending off phase of Black Parade and Carry on my Wayward son, to remembrances, in “Will you remember me”, “Box of Rain” and “Ode to Billie Joe” The Riff off culminated in a nod to religious coexistence in The Kennedys’ song Stand.
Perhaps it reflected some of the themes for the coming year, as Fiona potentially heads off to school and I explore more deeply my religious calling.
Afterwards, we watched “Ex Machina”. I’ve been interested in AI’s for a long time and remember a saying that AIs would end up looking like their creators. Back then, the folks working on AI were nerdy engineers. In Ex Machina, the guy creating the AI is a reclusive genius. The software for the AI is the large search engine he has created and made his fortunes off of.
It is an idea that has fascinated me for a long time. What if our search engines and social networks are the new AIs, or at least the source of information for these AIs about social behavior? Seem unlikely? It’s already happening.
IBM'S Watson Can Figure Out A Lot About You—Just By Looking At Your Social Media
IBM Is Using Watson To Psychoanalyze People From Their Tweets
Matters Of The Mind: Mass. Computer Scientist Creates Technology To Read Emotions
So, are we now just pawns, nodes in some giant AI? Are the results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign already predetermined? Does it matter who gets elected anyway? Are we just amplifying echoes in the social media echo chamber when we like or share messages about Trump, Bernie, or Hillary?
Can we shape Ava? If so, how?
It seems easy to be discouraged when you look at all the issues our country and our world faces. Will what I write help shift the direction of climate change? Will what I write help bring an end to oppression; to racism or sexism?
I chose to remain optimistic. I think Robert Kennedy’s quote provides some insight.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Here, we could go off into a long discussion about whether sharing posts that reflect our political or religious views counts as standing up for an ideal. We could talk about slacktivism and whether we are just going back to paving the road to hell. Yet that, too, most likely leads to hopelessness and inaction.
Instead, I think David Foster Wallace presents a more useful way of looking at it in his commencement speech, This Is Water
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
Perhaps this is the real challenge, for the new year, for each day, in shaping Ava, to challenge the default settings, to pay attention, to be aware, not only to the trending topics on Facebook or Twitter, but to the simple things around us, the beauty of the squirrel running in the woods, probably the same squirrel that has been raiding your bird feeder, the common humanity of the homeless guy you see on the street.
Happy New Year.
