Chapter2

Recall that Gospel line about putting new wine into old wine skins? There is an eternal truth there, but one we are sometimes reluctant to apply, perhaps because many people do not know much about wine skins anymore! You see, the metaphors change once the culture changes. Why do so many adults still use word processors as though they were typewriters, for instance? Only adults of a certain age will have used a typewriter, let alone wine skins! Word processing is an entirely different cultural form for dealing with text, so different that it really changes the nature of the task of working with text. The culture we live in now has changed fundamentally because of the digital era, but some act as if it had not. The simplest example of a consequence of this fundamental cultural dissonance is the person who 'loses' a digital file – probably forever, simply because the fact that the text was virtual was not fully acknowledged, or rather the consequences of it being virtual were not followed through on. Fifty years back the same person might have misplaced a paper file, with a fair chance of finding it again. Not so with the digital file.

My feeling is that young people of the 'digital native' variety might well be experiencing God and spirituality fundamentally differently because of the different way they have of seeing their world; because our digital culture is so fundamentally different, that is, from earlier cultures. So catechising and 'talking faith' with them must be a bit like the situation of the wine and the wine skins; we cannot pour this new wine of their experience and imagining into the old wine skins. Of course, I hear someone objecting that there will always be eternal truths: God is God, and that will not change. Salvation and Redemption are Salvation and Redemption... But wait a moment! That God is God I cannot deny, and God will remain God, but our human ideas of God can and do change. One of the fundamental changes in human experience in the digital era must be that of the movement from fixed to flowing. Handwritten or typewritten text was fixed. Digital text is a constant flow, as digital experience is a constant flow – that must change the way digital natives think about things, I imagine, including God.

It is no surprise that the effort to give 'hackerism' (if I may use the term) a universally identifying logo has come up with something called the 'glider'. The glider in this case is a set of cells, five of which have a dot in them; these five are contiguous, but the number of cells theoretically could extend without limit in every direction. The logo has just nine cells, but it represents a (theoretically infinite) movement of these five dots following simple rules which are employed by a computer. Wherever they move they will remain contiguous. The game – where the only player is the computer – is called The Game of Life, and was invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970. If you are having difficulty visualising this, just think of a screen-saver where dots continually re-arrange themselves in patterns.

The game has fascinated many a young digital native. And has probably got to the point of stirring a religious question or two – with a few simple rules, the constant flowing existence of these 'gliders' is ensured. Could life, which can seem so chaotic, be like this? Could God be like this? The game suggests a certainty despite constant transformation and fluidity. We could attempt to understand this with just the mind, or try applying the heart to it. I go back to Parker J. Palmer's profound comment: “...the quest for God, which relies on the eye of the heart; ...education...which relies on the eye of the mind”. Hacking with the heart might well be an important task for the religious educator today.

A question of language

(:nl:)