My Technological Job Moment

This has just not been my week, technologically speaking. I would never compare my life to Job in the ‘real world;’ this past week, a five-year-old girl was killed in Raleigh, after being prostituted by her mother for an undetermined time – unbeknownst to her father. The economy is allegedly recovering while an analogous recovery in employment is apparently not necesarry. Chronic hunger – euphemistically deemed ‘food insecurity’ by those fluent in policyspeak, is on the rise. And that’s just in America – to say nothing of Palestine, or Darfur.

So no, if I were attempting to compare myself to Job in The World Outside, I’d be tragically unaware. But in cyberspace, at the intersection of Big Corporate Business and Big Tech, I feel like I’ve had a steady stream of little nanobot robot servants coming to me, rattling off some techno-calamity, breathlessly finishing “…and I alone have lived to tell you!” Allow me my lament:

Metavista: Navigating the Age of Imagination

I wanted to share some thoughts from Metavista, an impressive new offering from Colin Greene, Martin Robinson and Authentic/Paternoster publishing:

A global world means a multicultural, pluralist, interdependent and interconnected world in which we will all be constantly and profoundly affected by new developments in information and communication technology, by the continued democratization of knowledge, practical skills and generally available know-how, and by internationally operative business, managerial and organizational techniques.

This is not a world to be feared; it is simply one that will be continually reimagined – and  it is time for the Christian church also to look afresh to its internal culture, its construal of the biblical narrative, and its supposedly gospel-oriented prophetic role in the contemporary world. Only by doing that can the Christian church move out beyond the decaying and collapsed structures of Christendom, forestall its persistent fefusal to indwell the biblical story, and overcome its loack of polical and ecumenical capital and cogency in a fast-changing world. Only in this way will the church become suitably skilled and equipped to negotiate a new role for itself in the new metaspace, or metavista, that is opening up before us.

Offical Metavista blog (quite under-exposed and worth reading)

MetaVista video interview on Allelon: Part One & Part Two & Part Three (I wish these were embeddable)

Bill Colburn’s review of Metavista

Andrew Perriman on Metavista

Prodigal Kiwis on Metavista

This Just In: Robots Can Read Our Minds

…taking a break from the Future Headlines for a moment. This one is real.

(HT: Bill Colburn)

Hark! The Singularity Is Near!

(Guess we’re living in an age of spiritual machines…)