#DigiWriMo : Posthuman Christianity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/02/2015 - 21:15I found Sherri Spelic’s #DigiWriMo post about Author, Audience and Parts of Speech an interesting place to start my thoughts for this evening’s #DigiWriMo post. Part of the reason I’m doing #DigiWriMo this year, instead of #NaNoWriMo, which I’ve done other years, is out of the hope of finding a more engaged audience.
Yet when I think about my audience, I am perplexed. It feels like I live in several very disjoint worlds. An audience that lives at the intersection of these worlds is probably very small indeed. Yet I’m looking for ways to build audience, to build community, and bring these worlds a little closer together.
The tagline for an article in Upworthy about teens teaching seniors about technology starts, “In our fast-paced digital world, the generation gap has never been wider.”
Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center is publishing articles on Political Polarization in the American Public.
We’re seeing similar divergences in religion and in the culture wars. It is something I run across in my daily life. Perhaps, after Bowling Alone, we are now becoming more and more disconnected from people not like us.
Last spring, I went to a conference at Yale Divinity School on poetry in worship. I told my co-workers I was taking a few days off for personal time, but didn’t tell them what I was doing. On the signup form for the conference, I had choices for various positions of church leadership, and “other:. I went to the conference embracing my ‘otherness’.
I came away from the conference feeling called to explore the possibility of becoming an ordained Episcopalian priest. I was very circumspect about who I discussed that with initially.
Now, here I am, participating in discussions about digital writing and pedagogy, something most of my friends from various circles are unlikely to discuss. Certainly, it is a not topic for the homeless people I talk with on the street or the elderly folks I visit at the nursing home. I can bring it up at times at work, but mostly I get glazed over stares. At the same time, since it is an avocational interest of mine, I can only speak on a fairly superficial level about Deleuze, Foucault, or so many others whose ideas are finding their way into mine.
My eldest daughter is starting a master’s program in gender studies in Japan. We often have great discussions over Skype about queer studies, and I’m struck how far these discussions are from the discussions I’m having online, even with Episcopalians, about the role of homosexuals in the church.
And then, being the old geek that I am, I’m spend time talking with my transhumanist, posthumanist, singularity focused friends, and I have to wonder, how does Anglican Theology and posthumanism relate, especially when it comes to talking with folks in a typical Episcopalian parish, homeless people on the street, or elderly folks in nursing homes.
Sunday provided some insight into this. For my religious friends, it was All Saints Day, a time when we think about communion of saints, about our connectedness, our community as members of the Body of Christ. It was also the beginning of #DigiWriMo, a time when I am sharing my thoughts and writing with others online. It is also about building community, about building audience.
As I thought about this blog post, as I thought about references to posthumanism, and wondered what posthuman Christianity might be like, it seems like the connections between #DigiWriMo participants, no matter what their faith system is like, may be the closest metaphor I’ve found yet for the digital body of Christ.
Whatever construct or framework you want to look at things from, it seems like the need to build audience, build community, has never been greater.
#DigiWriMo : Mapping
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/02/2015 - 07:36This morning, I want to explore some of the #DigiWriMo discussion on cartography. I’ll start off with Kay Sidebottom’s blog post, Me, mapped. In it, she references Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman. Kay focuses on Braidotti’s idea, “A cartography maps what it means to live at this moment in time. It is a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present.”
There is a lot worth exploring in this idea and others have been sharing some interesting thoughts. But first, I want to take a detour to learn more about Braidotti. According to Wikipedia, she is influenced by Deleuze, which is no surprise for a group I stumbled across via others interested in Deleuze. Wikipedia also mentions she is influenced by Foucault, and I can imagine discussing this with my eldest daughter who would say, “Who isn’t influenced by Foucault?” Of course, if I mention either Deleuze or Foucault to most of the people that I run into a typical day, I suspect most would not know either name, except maybe for friends who live near Foucault’s Furniture Appliance in Wallingford.
Maureen Crawford added a comment referring to “Peter Turchi's book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.” I took a little time out to explore Turchi’s work and am adding him to the ever growing list of things to read. On post about him was in Believer Magazine; more stuff I want to read. There are also some videos of Turchi that I want to explore.
Maureen went on to write her own blog post, Musing on Maps and Minds. She writes:
“Terra Incognita – isn’t that the essence of our exploration of identity?”
She then goes on to explore Turchi, “Miles Harvey author of, The Island of Lost Maps”, another book I should read, and so much more.
She includes one of my favorite quotes from T.S. Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. ”
I first came across the quote at the end of Barbet Schroeder’s movie, “The Valley (Obscured by Clouds)”, which also seems to fit into the discussion here.
As I write this, I remember working MOOs back in the 1990s. MOOs, not to be confused with MOOCs are text based virtual worlds. You added onto your world by using the @dig command, which would create a new space and link it to the current space.
How do we map what we currently know? How do we discover new things? How do we link them to what we know? What tools are there to help with this?
I hope to explore this in more detail when I’m not rushing off to work.
#DigiWriMo: Stranger Danger, Will Robinson
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/01/2015 - 19:50One of my goals for #DigiWriMo is to be more engaged in other people’s blogs and hopefully to have others more engaged in my blog. Years ago, I used to participate in various blog swaps and I work as a social media manager, so there is nothing really new about this for me.
One person who has been really good at this, at least in the early moments of #DigiWriMo is Sarah Honeychurch. She’s been commenting on my posts, thank you Sarah, and responded to Joanne Fuchs tweet about blogging once a week, “I find having a supportive audience in events like #DigiWriMo helps me.”
So, I went over to Joanne’s blog, where her most recent post was Yes, Virginia. You Can Ask Your Own Questions!. Joanne sounds like the sort of teacher I would want my inquisitive eighth grader to have. Joanne was talking about helping students form questions around “letters from service men from different wars”. It fit nicely with the story I heard Arnie Pritchard tell Friday night about This Business of Fighting based on his father’s letters.
Joanne also reminds me of Paul Bogush and I wonder if they’ve met. As an aside, another participant of #DigiWriMo this year is Geoffrey Gevalt. I read his bio and looked at the Young Writers Project. It made me wonder if Geoffrey knew Steve Collins and Youth Journalism International. I sent Steve a Facebook message to see if they knew each other. They should.
All of this is prologue to the key focus of this evening’s #DigiWriMo post. The other week, my daughter Fiona texted me, letting me know that there was some guy at her school teaching the kids about Internet Safety. Now I want the internet to be safe as much as the next guy, probably more so, since my job is social media manager for a health care organization, but I often find a lot of the internet safety talks, at best, misguided. They focus on online predators and stranger danger, and less on more important issues like cyberbullying or how you can help online friends in times of danger.
Stranger danger: I’ve never met Sarah, Joanne, or Geoffrey face to face. Yet if I ever get a chance to, I will jump at it. They sound like my kind of people. I have met lots of other people face to face after getting to know them first online, including my wife. Knowing how to judge and get to know people that you meet through the media, whether it be online, or any other form of media is an important skill. It applies equally to getting to know authors, musicians, journalists, politicians, and others.
Yes, online predators are a danger, but I believe a greater danger may be accepting uncritically what various media personalities are saying. Learning how to think critically about what we experience through various media can address both of these dangers.
Later this week, I will be speaking at Career Day at my daughter’s junior high school. I will be talking about being a social media manager, and what it takes to do that well. Perhaps key areas I’ll focus on include the value of meeting the right people online, collaborating with them, and how to better judge what we consume online.
#DigiWriMo Who are you? Rabbits, AltCVs and more
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/01/2015 - 08:50Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit: the beginning of my first blog post of each month, to bring back a little bit of the childhood playful hopefulness. It seems especially apropos today at the start of #DigiWriMo. I expect to be staying with the metaphors of journey and narrative through much of #DigiWriMo and so I envision the narrative today to be about the start of a journey.
It is as if we are all standing around the starting line. We’ve introduced who we want to think we are, as opposed to how traditional CVs introduce ourselves. It feels a little bit like the kids dressed up for Halloween last night in their hopes and aspirations.
This week, I went to the funeral for the mother of a friend. She was 95 and loved music. In her final days, he heard his mother say, “Who, are you? Who? Who?” She was a Who fan and was singing one of her favorite songs. The minister at the funeral talked about that great question, “who are you?”
Last night, I thought a little bit more about who I am. Our town has “Truck or Treat”; Halloween at the local volunteer fire department. They started it the year of Hurricane Sandy, the year my mother died. I was running for State Representative and was supposed to be there campaigning. Instead, I was there mourning. I was there as members of my community helped one another out after the storm, and as much as I thank my neighbors and volunteer firemen, they may never know how important that first Truck or Treat was. This year, they were asking how my wife, who is recuperating from sinus surgery is doing.
So, as I thought of the kids dressed up in the hopes and aspirations, as I thought about my AltCV and #DigiWriMo, as I thought of Peg singing to herself, asking “Who are you?” part of the answer came to me. I am part of a community. I am part of the wonderful community of Woodbridge, with all its quirks and foibles. I am part of the wonderful community of Grace and St. Peter’s where I worship on Sunday mornings, and I am part of the #DigiWriMo community, which I’m just starting to get to know.
At Church today, All Saints Day, we will remember those who have died. We will sing great hymns about all the saints, and we will balance it with four baptisms and a community meal afterwards.
For #DigiWriMo, we will have the chatter that is exchanged at the start of a shared journey. I shared my quote from Christian Wiman, “existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person”. The same applies, I hope, to #DigiWriMo.
Another person shared a quote from Allen Ginsberg, “We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”. Yet another took the idea of the AltCV, and combined it with another. It makes me think, what is the combined AltCV of everyone in #DigiWriMo? We are greater than the sum of our parts as we type on the same dreadful internet.
I am tempted to head off in a postmodern poet philosopher Christian mystic direction and start talking about the relationship between The Body of Christ and the #DigiWriMo group AltCV. Yet before I do that, I return to the quotes of the day and find Scott Johnson’s “Even paradise needs work” and John Spencer asking, “How do we create a sense of place online?”
I’ve often criticized my friends interested in “church social media” on a related thought, “How do we share a sense of the mystical, the divine online?” How do we do it as an inclusive shared experience for the atheist, agnostic, wiccan, Buddhist, Muslim, so many flavors of Christian, and so many other experiences of the divine?
And so, I set out on the first steps of #DigiWriMo, surrounded by a great cloud of believes, to use the older language, or a bunch of really interesting people I look forward to traveling with virtually and learning more about, to translate some of it into the twenty first century digital vernacular.
Slowly, I’m learning more about who I am, as it changes along this journey, and I look forward to more quotes, and more answers to “Who are you?” as we journey together.
The Roads to #DigiWriMo
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/31/2015 - 09:29For the past several years during the month of November, I’ve often participated in National Novel Writing Month. #NaNoWriMo. Over the years I’ve completed two first drafts of novels, and worked on several others. I’ve written the 1,666 words a day to get to 50,000 words for the month. I’ve had friends act as readers of draft, and gotten feedback from them.
It has been a valuable writing exercise, and I enjoyed meeting some of the other #NaNoWri participants and write-ins and dinners, but I’ve never gone back and edited the novels, sought to publish them, or shared them with a wider audience.
In January of this year, I participated in a couple of MOOCs. One was on the poetry of Walt Whitman. It was part of a series, and I later participated in one on Emily Dickinson. They would good courses, but I felt even more disconnected from the participants than I did with #NaNoWriMo.
I also took a course on using Moodles to set up a MOOC. It was very helpful on the technology side; how to configure and administer a MOOC. The community was much more vibrant, and while it wasn’t a focus of the course, we did drift into discussions of pedagogy. It was there that I learned about connectivism, which led me to participate in another MOOC, a different sort of MOOC, a connectivistic MOOC called #Rhizo15.
It was great, and I remain connected with the people I met through that event. There was talk about wandering in that course and I brought in my poetry to it. This brings me to the title of this post, The Roads to #DigiWriMo. It isn’t one path. It is a bunch of paths intertwined.
So let me return to the poetry path for a moment. I decided to make writing a poem a day my 2015 Lenten discipline. It went well, and some of the poems aren’t all that bad. I joined up with a group of Episcopalian poets and met with them from time to time. Through them, I learned that Yale Divinity School was having a conference on poetry and I attended.
It was a deep religious experience for me that has brought back into my consideration a path I had looked at years ago, but not wandered down, the path to possible ordination as a priest. I have met with my priest. We have met with my bishop, and my priest is setting up a discernment committee to explore this path more fully with me. I’ve thought it would be interesting to have a parallel, online discernment group. I set up one part of it on Facebook, and I expect this will intertwine with my #DigiWriMo explorations.
One of the speakers at the Yale Conference was Christian Wiman. I’ve been reading his book, My Bright Abyss. In it, I found a wonderful quote, “existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person”. Mixing the ‘journey’ metaphor with the ‘narrative’ metaphor, it seems like this quote is the starting point, the first mile marker on my #DigiWriMo journey.
I am looking forward to mixing a bit of poetry, novel writing, technology, and explorations into pedagogy and my spiritual journey together with what others are posting in #DigiWriMo. I hope you’ll join me and hang on for the ride!
