Goodbye to Zoom?

For the last couple of months ominous notes have appeared on my computer whenever I've used the Zoom conferencing app, telling me that Zoom will no longer be supported on my computer after December 2025, and saying I could learn more on their web site. So I went to their web site where I read:

In November 2025, Zoom plans to release the final version of the Zoom Workplace app for Windows 32-bit. The anticipated version number of the final release for Windows 32-bit is the last minor release of 6.6.0. Anyone who is still using a device running on a 32-bit version of Windows must prioritize upgrading to 64-bit.

Well, no, I will not prioritize downgrading to 64-bit with its reduced functionality. The reason I bought a computer running 32-bit Windows is that the 64-bit version will not run several programs that I use every day. The 32-bit version of Windows has this functionality, the 64-bit version lacks it. I use Zoom roughly once a fortnight. So if I am forced to choose between programs I run every day and one that I run once a fortnight, I know what I'll prioritise.

The Zoom page doesn't say that the 32-bit version will stop working after December 2025, it just says that that will be the date on which the last update of the 32-bit version will be released, so I hope it will go on working for some time after that. But I suppose sooner or later someone will introduce something that breaks it, and then it is likely to stop working. 

But I think email mailing lists will still work, and I think they is one of the best means of group communication, and long may it continue. If you'd like to keep in touch by that means, come and join us in the Offtopic forum, where stuff that is off-topic in more specialised online forums may be freely discussed. To learn more, click here!

How social networks undermine community and promote extremism

I don't know who coined the term "social media", but in its narrower sense of commercial web sites whose main purpose is to link people with "friends" and "followers", they are becoming increasingly contradictory. 

As Tano Santos and Luigi Zingales point out in their article How Big Tech Undermines Democracy

...social-media platforms purposely seek to undo local communities to maximize profits. The reason is that social-media companies profit from our digital relationships, but not from our “physical” relationships, those that take place in parks, coffee shops, book clubs, and the like. As a result, social media platforms see the physical relationships between people as competing with the digital relations they offer.

The advantage of social media, what makes them "social", is that they have the potential to facilitate communication between people who are separated by physical distance, either through geography or through such things as the Covid19 quarantine. But this potential is often not realised because of the very commercial interests cited in the article. This is like the effect of alcoholic liquor on sex; as Shakespeare notes in Macbeth, in stimulates the desire but takes away the performance.

As for how commercial social network platforms promote extremism, Santos and Zingales explain it thus:

The local nature of physical relationships forces us to compromise. When the pool of potential friends is limited, we can’t be too picky; we must accept what we can find. Being stuck with the locals, our only option is to improve the quality of our relationships. In a digital sphere, where we can instantaneously connect with the entire world, why should we invest energy in making the current match work? By searching a bit longer, we can find a better match. The quality of any specific relationship becomes less important when there is a large pool of readily available alternatives. It is quantity over quality. As a result, digital platforms create shallower relationships among like-minded individuals that are easy to make and easy to drop.

The emphasis on quantity over quality is exacerbated by the gamification embedded in the platform’s design, carefully curated to maximize engagement and the platform’s profits. The number of followers and likes is prominently featured. Thus, users end up maximizing the number of relationships, not their quality. As many others have noted, in a boundless virtual community, the best way to get attention is to be extreme, to radicalize your position, and even to attack others. In a physical community where people constantly interact face-to-face, it is difficult to dehumanize adversaries. Not so in virtual communities. Online people are just avatars like the ones we are used to shooting in video games. Online, we don’t live with the consequences of our actions when we offend others because we do not observe the pain we inflict on them. We only live with the benefits: more retweets, likes, and followers. This is why otherwise calm and lovely people transform into aggressive beasts online.

Commercial social media are also curated to exacerbate the silo effect. Like the concrete grain silos used for holding corn for loading on to trains or ships, users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now confusingly called X, so I'll continue to refer to it as Twitter), Instagram and TikTok are funnelled into silos insulated from those in other silos. 

One of the things that social media were initially good at was linking people to information. Twitter, for example, started off as a microblogging platform. One could not say much in a microblog, but it was very good for linking to longer articles that said more. A blog, after all, was a web log, a log and commentary on web sites visited that one thought might interest others. So many web sites made it easy to post links to them on social media platforms. If you think others will be interested in this, share it on your Twitter feed, or on Facebook or somewhere else. But what do the people who run those platforms do? They adjust their algorithms to ensure that such posts are shown to fewer people. They stimulate the desire, but take away the performance. They destroy the very thing that attracted people to their site in the first place. They don't want people clicking on links to other sites because they fear it will mean fewer eyeballs on ads. But the links are what keep people coming back to their site.

There are, however, some anomalous hangovers from the past, when the social media platforms were more user-oriented than they are now. Sometimes I retweet a link to an article I see on Twitter, and it asks "Do you want to read the article first?" That is a hangover from a time when they were trying to give the impression of being "socially responsible" and at least make it appear that they were trying to discourage users from retweeting clickbait articles that might be fake news. I quite often retweet articles I haven't read, however, because I don't have time to read them now, and want to read them later. 

One effect of this that I have noticed is that fewer and fewer people respond  to things I post on social media, so they aren't social at all. I have something over 1100 "followers" on Twitter, but if I post something only 10-30 people see it. The more important it is to me, the fewer the people who see it. And in most cases the people who do see it never respond. A post may occasionally get a "like" or two, but at least half these "likes" are from bots with fake names, no profile information, and no followers. If Twitter were a real social medium, then there would be social interaction, but there isn't. It is antisocial.

I'll put links to this article on Facebook and Twitter, and it will be interesting to see how many people see it at all, and, of those, how many interact with it in any way, by "liking", sharing, commenting etc. 

Again, Santos and Zingales explain this thus:

...digital [networks] are designed and regulated by the platform owner: They are centralized. The reason is that digital relationships are built and maintained in a space that is controlled by a platform, and this control confers the platform with the ownership of the relationship. We can’t take our X (formerly Twitter) followers with us to a different platform, nor can we access our followers without X’s permission, which can be withdrawn at any time without cause. In contrast, X can advertise to our followers and connect them with other followers. We don’t own our followers—X does.

Not only are most digital networks centralized, but they also have another motive to create and maintain the network: to monetize it. Their economic motives fuel their interest in undermining physical networks. All else being equal, customers are indifferent between a digital relationship and a physical one, but platforms aren’t. They profit from digital relationships but not physical ones. In their effort to subsidize digital relationships and undermine physical ones, these platforms are even willing to pay us to remain glued a little longer to the smartphone and not go to the bar with our friends.

Facebook is much the same. It is forever offering me new "people you may know", but there is very little interaction with people I already know. It doesn't show me what they post, and it doesn't show my stuff to them. Or perhaps it does, but they don't like it, and they don't like me, and if I knew what they really thought and they acted on what they really thought we would unfriend each other. So far from being a "social" medium, it promotes the feeling of:

Everybody hates me, nobody loves me
I'm going to go and eat worms
Big fat juicy ones, little itty bitty ones
See how the big ones squirm.
First you bite their heads off, then you suck the juice out
Then you throw the skins away
Nobody knows how I can thrive
On worms three times a day.

I recently had a look at some of my Facebook "friends" that I hadn't heard from for a long time. Some had died, and their last posts were usually from other people saying that they had died, but Facebook never showed me those, so I didn't even know they had died. But if they had posted some trivia just before they died, Facebook would probably have been more likely to have shown me that. But posts with news of their death weren't monetised enough. 

Other friends had probably just dropped out because they found that having their relationships and friendships manipulated by the platform socially unrewarding. It increased the desire but took away the performance, and eventually they found the lack of performance unrewarding and left.

Back to the danger to democracy...

Once again, Santos and Zingales indicate that

Without information, political participation dwindles, and vested interests have an easy time capturing local administrations because most people don’t vote or don’t vote in an informed way. A captured democracy functions poorly, reducing incentives to participate and the trust in the democratic process. If, as Tocqueville hypothesized, local communities are the gymnasium of democracy, then these trends do not affect just local administrations but also national ones.

State capture is not something peculiar to South Africa, though the Gupta affair was a good example of how vested interests can manipulate social media to undermine democracy. 

But it can also work the other way, as we have recently seen when the Western "mainstream" media were captured to channel Israeli government agitprop after 7 October 2023 (and probably before that as well), social media platforms were used to keep alternative viewpoints alive. Even though social media platforms are manipulated, it is possible to some extent to find workarounds, though that requires a great deal of time and energy.

And back in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were a lot of non-commercial social media platforms like BBS (Bulletin Board Service) networks, Usenet newsgroups and email mailing lists that were not captured by vested interests. BBS networks, in particular, were run as a kind of private-enterprise socialism, email mailing lists still exist. If any of my friends would like to communicate online without the commercial manipulation, contact me through the OffTopic forum here.

The death of conversation?

In the last four days I've spent quite a lot of time writing a couple of blog posts on topics that I thought were important, here and here.

As I usually do, I announced them on Twitter and Facebook.

Nobody bothered to retweet them, nobody on Facebook bothered to even "like" them, much less click on the link and read them.In fact I doubt if Facebook even bothered to show them to my friends. Facebook, after all, is concerned to show us only the really important stuff, like "X sent you are request in Hidden Chronicles" and "Y sent you a request in Slotomania".

Paper.li, which collects and organises Twitter tweets with links and shows them in a readable form, didn't show the first one of them either (I'm going to retweet it every day until it does).

So when I saw this link, shown in Paper.li and Twitter, I retweeted it. Now everyone is connected, is this the death of conversation? | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian:

As our meeting places fall silent, save for tapping on screens, it seems we have mistaken ubiquitous connection for the real thing.

And I think it's worse than that. Simon Jenkins is talking about viva voce conversations, actual face-to-face, voice to ear ones.But it's reached the online conversations as well.

Twenty years ago we used BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems). They used amateur networks run by volunteers, computers with monochrome screens and no graphics, dial-up lines where 1200 bits per second was considered normal, 2400 fast, 9600 leading edge and 14400 out of this world. But we had real conversations, and talked about real things. And we managed to talk to people on the other side of the world, whom we could never hope to meet face-to-face, (though we did sometimes contrive to meet some of them -- I had lunch with three online friends in a Chinese restaurant somewhere in New Jersey in 1995, and met a couple of others in Moscow a week earlier. I still see them on Facebook, but we have much less to say for each other, because Facebook doesn't encourage real conversations like the BBS networks used to.

The BBS software, again, mostly written by amateurs, got the transmission of real conversations down to a fine art, and was way better for the purpose than anything you see on the Internet. It was "obsoleted" by Windows 95, which made it more difficult to connect to a modem by hiding its communication program several layers deep, and not installing it as a default. But it was not really obsolete, it was just far in advance of anything you see today, and sidelined because it was run for pleasure and not for profit.

And the point of this rant is, that as someone once said, we live in a world of communication without community. Well, he said it about 20 years ago, and now it is worse, because we live in a world of connectivity without communication. We have all these marvellous tools for communication, and we no longer have anything to say to each other.

I sometimes look at my blog stats to see what brings people to look at my blogs, and there is a clear pattern, trivial nonsense is much more attractive and popular than anything that tries to say anything. I once had a firewall called ZoneAlarm, and it kept telling me that "Google Installer is trying to access the Internet" I had no idea what Google installer was, or why it was trying to access the Internet, but I felt that if it was trying to access the Internet from my computer it should at least have the courtesy to tell me that it was doing so, and tell me why. So I wrote a blog post about this, asking if anyone knew (nobody did). Now everyone wants to read that post, which I wrote in a couple of minutes, but nobody wants to read anything I took real trouble over. .

I read a Tweet from a friend that says, "

Loading Tweets seems to be taking a while.

Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup."

Oh well, if Twitter gets over its hiccups before I finish writing this post, then I'll tell you what he said. But my reply was 'What the heck are "community stations" and "independent ports"? Is MetroRail going #socialist at last?'

His Tweet mentioned "community stations" and "independent ports" but I didn't have a clue what they were. We used to have the SAR&H (South African Railways and Harbours) about 25 years ago, but it was privatised, and  split up into Transnet, with subsidiaries Spoornet and MetroRail and PortNet and a few others..

MetroRail was the suburban train services, so "community stations" sounded as though they were turning all the stations into independent stations run by the local community -- a nice socialist idea. And "independent ports" sounded like they were dropping the "net" from PortNet, and making each port independent. But in a tweet without a link, it really isn't possible to tell. (In joke: at about the time this privatisation was happening someone suggested that they were going to privatise the Dutch Reformed Church and call it GloNet -- which is Afrikaans for "only believe").

So tweet something trivial, and everyone will retweet it. Post a link to something important, and no one will. Post a platitude on Facebook and everyone will "like" and "share" it. Post something that is important to you, and no one will, because Facebook won't even show it to them.

And no, my only request in Slotmania and Hidden Chronicles as that people please stop sending me requests. 

Who is Raymond A. Foss?

Who is Raymond A. Foss -- or, What is "community"?

Whenever I look at the social blogrolling site MyBlogLog, I see the footprint of Raymond A. Foss, who seems to be a member of the "community" of every single Christian blog registered with MyBlogLog.

If you look at his profile page you can see that he is in fact a member of 2487 "communities" on MyBlogLog, and that he has 5629 family, friends and contacts.

But when I visit the blogs whose "communities" I am a member of, I hardly ever see Raymond A. Foss among the "Recent Visitors" to those blogs.

A few months ago my wife was watching a TV programme, I think on the BBC, called The human footprint, which was about the effect that the average human being has on their environment over their lifetime, and one of the things they noted was that the average inhabitant of the British Isles knew about 1750 people in the course of their life.

I decided to try to make a list of all the people I've known -- family, friends, colleagues at work, casual acquaintances. I include people I've met and that I remember having had conversations with, even if I've only met them once or twice. I've got nearly 700 listed for far. I don't do this all the time, just in odd moments while waiting the kettle to boil for coffee and times like that.



The idea of someone having 5269 friends and contacts just boggles the mind. And especially since Ramond A. Foss never seems to interact most of the people that he has listed in this way, or with the blog "communities" he has joined.

Raymond A. Foss is not the only one, however.

Another one who joined a lot of Christian blog communities and then rarely or never visited them is Called2Bless.

I mention these two because I keep seeing their pictures (avatars) every day, in the "communities" they have joined, but rarely if ever interact with.

And things like this make me wonder what is community, and what do people think it means?

It's not confined to MyBlogLog, but can be found on every social networking site. Several times a week I get e-mails from people who claim to have seen my profile, and say that they want to be my friend, and ask me to send a photo. I usually just delete them unread. If they really wanted to be my friend, they would read my blogs, and write intelligent comments on some of the articles, and it would become clear that we have at least some common interests, something to talk about.

Over the last 20 years I have had several "friends" I have made through electronic networking, through BBSs, and later Usenet and the Internet. Some of them I have never met in the flesh, but have kept in touch with them for 10, 15 or 20 years. In some cases I have met them, and we've continued our electronic conversations face to face. In that way there is a community, a network of friends and relationships, because there is interaction between people. And its those kinds of relationships that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are designed to foster and facilitate. But some people seem to want to call "friends" people they have never met and show no desire to communicate with.

Another example of this false "community" and false "friendship", where people claim friendship with not communication or interaction comes from another social blogrolling site, BlogCatalog.

BlogCatalog has an equivalent of MyBlogLog's "communities", which it calls "favorites" (and used to call "neighbourhoods"). These are blogs that you want to mark for return visits.

But it also has "groups", for people who share common interests.

I recently started a group there for Orthodox Christian bloggers, because I looked for such a group and didn't find one, and thought it might make it easier to maintain contact with people who share a common interest. Soon after it started shamirdevnath joined. Shamir Devnath does not appear to be an Orthodox Christian, and his blog did not appear to have any recent posts on Orthodox Christianity, so I rejected his membership. Three days later he joined again, so I banned him. Shamir Devnath belongs to 1217 groups on BlogCatalog. I've no idea what the average size of a group on BlogCatalog is, but the Orthodox Christian bloggers group has 10 members so far, though it is fairly new, so more may join. But if all those 1217 groups had an average of 10 people, that's 12170 people. How can someone like Shamirdevnath relate to so many people? As far as I can see, it's impossible. So why is he (and again, there are many others like him) so keen to join groups in which he clearly has no interest, and has no desire to interact with?

Also on BlogCatalog I get e-mails several times a week telling me that so-and-so has added me as their friend. Half of them are people I have never heard of, never interacted with. According to the BlogCatalog widget, they've never even looked at any of my blogs, much less commented on the posts. Why on earth do they want to add me as their "friend", when I don't know them, and they don't know me, and apparently don't even want to know me. If they wanted to know me, at least they could read my blog.

Back to MyBlogLog: soon after I joined, they introduced a new feature -- that members could send a message to all the members of the community of their blog.

There was an outcry from some people, who complained that they would be inundated by "spam". The loudest squeals came from someone who had joined over 9000 "communities", but if they didn't want communication from them, why did they join them in the first place?

Don't get me wrong -- I like social blogrolling sites like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. I wish all the blogs I am interested in would join them, because it would make it easier to keep track of ones that deal with topics I am interested in. But when people join communities they have no interest in, it dilutes the usefulness. If everyone joins everything, there is no point in anyone joining anything.

What kind of world do we live in, where people want to join groups that they have no interest in, where they want to call people their "friends", but have no communication with them?

The kinds of things I have mentioned above indicate to me that we live in a seriously dysfunctional society, and this dysfuction is not confined to one country or one group of countries, or one culture, but seems spread throughout the world.

Nearly twenty years ago someone wrote "The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development - a stage of communication without community" (Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn't what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. p. 241).

That was a book about postmodernity.

But now we seem to have reached post-postmodernity, where we have reached an even more dangerous stage -- a stage of community without communication.

Blogging in decline?

It seems that blogging is in decline. According to the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog thingies in the side bar many people who used to visit this blog no longer do so. Well, that's probably just because I write boring stuff. But it seems to be happening elsewhere as well.

A while ago there was a bold new attempt to provide links between blogs and the mainstream media in the form of Twingly. This would enable one to see at a glance who had blogged about a particular news item, which was quite useful. I hoped it might grow and spread to more newspapers, but the only one that I knew that adopted it was The Times in South Africa, and even they seem to have dropped it now. Perhaps it's the worsening economic situation, and The Times and other media are retrenching. But even if that is the case, the fact that links to the blogosphere are the among first to go is significant. Two years ago people were predicting that the mainstream media were in trouble, that blogging was taking over. Now, it seems, the blogosphere is no longer perceived as a threat.

The process is even more advanced in Usenet newsgroups, where participaation has dropped enormously, and what remains is usually just cranks and fanatics. But beven the bloggers are disappearing, or flocking to join the ranks of twitterers.

So the better our tools for communication become, the less we are able to make use of them.

What a friend we have in Whatsisname

In the last two days I have been informed by BlogCatalog that four people have listed me as their "friend". I don't actually know any of them, and as far as I can tell (and Blog Catalog is supposed to tell you these things) not one of them has actually visited any of my blogs.

On BlogCatalog I am told I am a friend of 30 people, and probably about 20 of them I don't know at all, and they have never visited any of my blogs. By contrast, I have three people listed as my friends. Two of them I have met in the flesh, and the third, whom I haven't actually met, I have been communicating with on line for nearly 20 years.

BlogCatalog is a social blogrolling site; it is primarily a way of seeing who has visited your blog recently, and keeping track of the blogs of people you know. In that, it performs a useful function, but it gets a bit counterproductive when people add as "friends" people they don't know and who don't know them, and in whom they have no interest and with whom they have no desire to communicate.

Another similar social blogrolling site is MyBlogLog. Instead of "friends", they have "contacts", but the principle is the same, and so is the abuse. MyBlogLog allows you to categorise contancts into "Family", "Friends" and just "Contacts", but again, it really makes little sense to list as contacts people with whom you have no contact, and no desire to be in contact.

I list as "contacts" or "friends" only people I actually communicate with. At a minimum, I would say that they should have left at least three comments on my blog, and I should have left at least three comments on theirs. But preferably they should also be people I communicate with outside the blogosphere, either by e-mail or face to face.

Much the same sort of thing can be said of Twitter, where I am sometimes informed that someone new is "following" me, and when I have a look, I discover that that person is "following" (seems more like "stalking" to me) several thousand other people. Twitter isn't even a social blogrolling thing. It's where I let my wife know that I have or haven't bought black plastic rubbish bags at the supermarket so that she can know whether she does or doesn't need to get some on her way home from work. Actually, I have great difficulty in getting my wife or other members of my close family to read Twitter, so it seems that there isn't much point in it, and the only people reading it are people on the other side of the world whom I've never met, and am never likely to.

And to such people I would say, don't follow me on Twitter -- read my blog(s), and comment on them, then at least we'll be communicating. If you don't want to read my blogs, if you find them boring, or irrelevant to your interests, then there is no conceivable reason why you would want me as a friend or a contact.

My wife watched a TV programme a few months ago that mentioned that the average person knows about 1750 people in their life time. Out of curiosity I've tried to list all the people I've known to see if I can reach 1750. I've almost reached 500. It boggles the mind when people are apparently "following" over 8000 people on Twitter, or list over 8000 "contacts" or "friends" on social blogtolling sites.

One social commentator remarked that " The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development - a stage of communication without community". [1] But I think Anderson underestimated it. It certainly isn't community, and there doesn't seem to be much communication either. It seems that the more tools we have to communicate, the less communication actually takes place.

I've ranted about this before, so perhaps some people are finding it boring (another reason why you don't want me as your friend). So perhaps I should end this rant with something positive, some hints on how to get the best out of social blogrolling sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog:

• Log in to social blogrolling sites you belong to, and don't log out. If you are logged out you won't show up on the widget on other people's blogs, so they won't know if you've visited and so are less likely to pay your blog a return visit.
• Put the "Recent visitors" widget somewhere on your blog. Visitors can then find other blogs that they might find interesting, since if they are interested in your blog they will probably find the blogs of frequent visitors to your blog interesting as well.
• List your interests ("tags" in MyBlogLog) so that others can find your blog more easily.
• Don't list people as "friends" or "contacts" unless you actually know them and want to communicate with them. And above all don't list anyone as a friend if you haven't read their blog.

___

References

[1] Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn't what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. Dewey: 909.82. Page 241.

Facebook - caution or conspiracy?

I've already commented that I've found Facebook too much to cope with Notes from underground: I can't face Facebook any more!. Since they introduced third-party apps it changed from being a useful tool into a burden and a distraction and I now look at it maybe once a fortnight or less often.

Then Anja Merret blogged about it, pointing out that the terms of service implied that you virtually relinquished copyright to anything you posted on Facebook, so that if, for example, a professional photographer posted some of their work on Facebook, Facebook could use it for advertising, selling or anything else. Several commentators said or implied that Anja Merret was succumbing to conspiracy theories and that the threat to privacy on social networking sites like Facebook was overrated, but it seems that Syria takes these threats seriously, and has banned Facebook, seeing it as too vulnerable to Israeli espionage.

When Facebook started, it became popular because it did one thing, and did it well. It was a tool for students in tertiary educational institutions to keep in touch with their friends. The first time I tried to join it I wasn't allowed. Retired staff members of such institutions simply weren't eligible.

Then Facebook opened to the general public. It had some uses, but it also had some severe shortcomings. One of the shortcomings was the idea of "networks", which worked fine when it was limited to academic institutions -- one could limit a group discussion forum to members of a particular institution, for example. But when it was opened to the general public, the concept needed to be rethought, and it hasn't been. If, for example, one wants to have a group for the South Africa network, members of the Pretoria network can't join it The Pretoria network should be part of the South Africa network, the smaller being part of the large, but on Facebook it isn't.

Some people got carried away by Facebook. Some members of the rec.arts.books newsgroup on Usenet migrated to a Facebook group called "The prancing half-wits", which deprived the newsgroup of some of its best contributors, and made much of their discussion inaccessible. As a medium newsgroups are far better for interactive communication than web forums (even though they were originally intended for one-to-many communication rather than many-to-many), because navigating to the forum on Facebook is a much more complicated process, and there are too many distractions along the way. I check newsgroups at least once a day, but the Facebook forums I look at once in six months, if that often.

But the rot really set in when Facebook allowed third-party applications.

This diffused things too much, and instead of making it easier to keep in touch, made it more difficult. For example, there are several apps for recording books you have read. The result is that you may have several bookloving friends, each using a different app. Instead of keeping in touch, you are separated. But they will all invite you to join their app, so if you do, you would have to enter each book you read six times. I gave up. I'd rather use Bibliophil or LibraryThing for that. Their approach is to do one thing and do it well, rather than Facebook's clumsy and cumbersome "one size fits all".

Others are also jumping on to the social networking bandwagon. Plaxo, which was a synchronised address book tool, has expanded into a social network, and may do it better than Facebook, though their interface is a bit slow. But if there are too many social networks, things are likely to become just as diffused as when there are too many books applications on one of them. I still prefer Tribe.net, though it didn't take off like Facebook.

And for interactive communications, mailing lists and newsgroups still remain more effective than web forums, whether hosted by Facebook or anyone else. Even blogs are better in some ways for that. It's much easier to find what people have posted on blogs than to find what they have posted in Facebook forums.

Why I avoid YouTube, Podcasts etc

I never watch YouTube or other online video stuff. I never listen to Podcasts (don't even have a speaker connected to my computer). I hate it when people refer me to such things online, or when they fill their blogs with multiple photos and videos. I now avoid Facebook, because I'm overwhelmed by demands to look at things that require me to download and install yet another bandwidth-consuming (and possibly privacy-threatening) "app".

Why?

The end-of-the-month broadband blues, that's why.

Read this article: The cap that chokes.

We switched to broadband nearly two years ago, just after my BBS computer finally crashed. We calculated that by giving up the extra phone line, broadband would cost about the same as we were paying for dialup (about R750 a month), and we wouldn't have to rush to get everything done on the Internet before 7:00 am, and then wait for callmore time to kick in again at 8:00 pm before looking again. At least if someone referred to a web site in an e-mail or newsgroup, one could look at it any any time of day, instead of saving it up for the evening.

Or so we thought.

What they didn't tell us was that the 2 Gig cap would mean no access at all for half the month. We increased it to 3 Gig (the max). Last month we ran out on the 26th. The month before we ran out on 21st. At least for the last couple of months e-mail still worked, but before that even e-mail was cut off. That doesn't apply to web-mail addresses, of course, like Yahoo or Google mail -- they are still cut off.

And if someone refers to a web site in an e-mail message, sometimes it's not a matter of waiting till callmore time in the evening to look at it, but waiting till Internet access comes back at the end of the month.

It makes blogging impossible. It makes online calendars virtually useless, if you can't check your appointments for half the month. And then the first three days of the month are spent catching up -- trying to read the comments on one's blog (and the complaints that one hasn't responded to someone's comment), reading other people's blogs, deleting spam, marking Usenet trolls as read, putting all the real e-mail into the "to reply" folder.

And that happens even when I do avoid videos, YouTube, podcasts and the like. I wonder how anyone manages to use them. Some people must be looking at those YouTube inserts in blogs, or listening to those podcasts, but how do they manage it?

Hope for African blogging?

During the last month I've written about the dearth of African bloggers on anything but technogeek subjects (here and here).

Now comes an exciting review of some African blogs, which I hope may encourage more people to get into blogging, and blog about something other than electronic gadgets, marketing and entrepreneurship.

The ikon in an age of neo-tribalism

The following article was originally published in Ikon, Vol 1, No 1, Winter 1969. I am republishing it simultaneously in this blog and also as a regular web page. Readers should remember that it is nearly 40 years old. See the end of the article for explanatory notes

The most fundamental division between Christians has been that between East and West. The differences between churches of the West, 'Catholic', 'Protestant' and even 'Pentecostal' have been almost insignificant by comparison.

The Reformation has been seen as one of the most formative experiences of Christians in Western Europe. It changed not only the Protestant churches, but in the Counter Reformation the Roman Catholic Church experienced a similar process. But the Reformation took place in the context of social and economic changes in Europe, and one factor that had great influence on the Western churches was the invention of printing.

Marshall Mcluhan, one-time Professor of Literature of the University of Toronto, has made a study of the effects of different communications media on society. Before the Renaissance, he claims, the culture of Europe was primarily aural. Communication was through the ear rather than the eye. Written documents were in manuscript and could reach wider audiences only by being read aloud in public. The Christian art of both East and West was similar in pattern and style. Both East and West used ikons - generally in mosaic - to proclaim the Christian gospel. The mosaic ikons in 13th century Italian churches do not differ markedly from those in the Byzantine churches in Greece and Asia Minor. The pictures were standardised, and followed a set pattern. Later, when in the Eastern Churches the ikons came to be painted on wood, the style changed to accommodate the new medium, but the theology remained basically the same.

The West, however, moved from an ear culture to an eye culture. The ear has no 'point of view' - sounds come from all directions and are accepted as an inclusive environment, in which several things happen at once. The eye, however, does have a 'point of view'. Western art came to emphasise perspective, which made the beholder the point of reference for the picture. This was also true in architecture. As Mcluhan puts it, the watchword of the Renaissance was 'a piazza for everything and everything in its piazza'.

The invention of printing played an important part in extending the new visual stress in the West. Printed books meant that more people could have copies, more people could learn to read. The portable book could be read in privacy and isolation from others. Reading became a private, individual activity rather than the public, communal one of the manuscript culture. The private, fixed point of view became possible, and literacy conferred the power of detachment, non-involvement. The Protestant idea of 'private interpretation of the scriptures' presupposes a visually-oriented culture. In the Eastern churches the Scriptures are still read in public, and the ikons in the churches bring the heard word to life. The liturgy is a communal public action. In Protestant churches the liturgy loses its meaning. Public worship is based on the word. Instruction becomes more important than participation. People go to church, not so much to participate in the worship of the body of Christ, as to be instructed, edified, uplifted. In the Roman Catholic Church a similar process follows, but it is not quite so obvious. The old liturgical forms remain, but they take on a radically different meaning. Again the individual, with his private point of view, becomes the centre. The worship as a communal action disappears, and is replaced by private devotion. 'I' make 'my' communion.

The recent objection to A message to the people of South Africa by the Baptists reflects this cultural background.i The doctrine of individual, personal salvation, which, the Baptists claimed, the Message ignored in favour of a more social conception of salvation, only appeared at the Reformation. It could not have arisen before the invention of printing, when the reading of scripture became a private rather than a public activity. Jesus Christ 'my' personal Saviour is not a Biblical concept. In the Bible, Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world.

In South Africa, most of the evangelisation was done by literate Christians from Western Europe. They found they had to teach people to read before they could proclaim the Gospel to them. But the Africans had no written language - they lived in a tribal, aural culture. This has led to many difficulties in the churches, and the tension between these two cultures has certainly influenced the formation of Zionist Churches, which are trying, among other things, to express Christianity in a form that has meaning for people living in an aural culture.

Many of these problems might not have arisen if Southern Africa had been evangelised by the Eastern churches. The oldest African churches - those of Egypt and Ethiopia - have retained the Eastern pattern. In Eastern churches, literacy is not a prerequisite for hearing the gospel. Indeed, many of the clergy are barely literate. The Gospel is communicated by participation in a Christian community. And this is the only way in which the Gospel can really be communicated. Jesus did not leave a book of teachings - he left no writings at all - only a community filled with the Holy Spirit.

The Eastern Orthodox Christians, when they enter a church building, first kiss the ikons. To the Western, literate Christian, this seems like superstition and idolatry. But idolatry is more of a Western phenomenon. The Western church has its images - statues, which are often very lifelike. Candles are lit in front of them, and personal devotion is paid to them. A statue is three-dimensional; it is a thing in itself. You can walk around it, and it is still there. The ikons of the Eastern churches are two-dimensional. They are not there to draw attention to themselves, but to point to something beyond themselves. They are windows rather than pictures. So if I enter an Orthodox Church at Easter, I might kiss the ikon of the resurrection, and I do this to greet the risen Christ. I might light a candle in front of the ikon for the same purpose. But it is not enough just to light a candle in front of the ikon or to kiss the ikon. So I must light a candle in front of my brother who stands next to me. On Easter morning the whole congregation kisses the priest, and they Exchange the Easter greeting: 'Christ is risen: He is risen indeed'. They kiss the ikons and the book of the Gospel and they also kiss each other, exchanging the same greeting. They kiss the ikons of the saints too, for they are also part of the congregation.ii The Eucharist looks forward to the Messianic Banquet in the New Jerusalem - when all the dead have been raised, when the final victory over evil had been won, and the new creation is consummated.

Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order - Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Now according to Mcluhan the age of literacy, which has so moulded the Western churches and accentuated their schism with the East, is ending. And it is the advent of electric technology that has killed it. Electric light, the telephone, radio and television have made communication global and all embracing. News of events on the other side of the world reach us at the same time as news from the other side of town. Electric technology is turning the world into a global village. Through a medium such as television one can participate in events as much as, if not more than, one could if actually present. The same event might be seen through three, four or five differently-placed cameras - and so the individual point of view is abolished. Sound radio is, paradoxically, more 'visual' and akin to the printed word than television. Radio is the medium for the monologue, the instructive sermon. With the advent of television the whole concept of church broadcasting had to be altered. For radio, the printed script is adequate - the Protestant type of service, with its emphasis on the word is made for radio. On television this appears boring and static. A liturgical service, with its greater sense of participation and involvement is more suitable. With this type of communication, literacy becomes more important. We are moving into an age of symbolism, an age of neo-tribalism. A new generation is appearing whose life is built on mythical and symbolical involvement. This new generation will communicate less through the rationalist perspective of literate culture and more and more through myth and symbol.

Modern theology is at present dominated by the demythologisers, and the demythologisers are the last fling of a literate era - the culmination of the Protestant refusal to understand things in terms other than language. These bourgeois theologians of the age of literacy tell us that 'modern man' can no longer accept concepts like incarnation and resurrection and that we must demythologise the account of the resurrection of Jesus. But despite the modern, or rather not quite modern theologians, modern man finds it only to easy to believe in resurrection - and if they are told that they can no longer believe that Jesus rose from the dead, they will nevertheless proclaim that 'Che Guevara lives!', 'Camilo Torres is not dead!', and 'Chairman Mao will live for 10000 years!'

Here in South Africa we are still clinging to the age of print. Verkramp politicians have sworn that we will not have television. We still cling to sound radio - a medium that reached its zenith with Hitler and Mussolini. Social researchers must find South Africa a fascinating field for study, a living fossil in a new world shaped by a new medium of communication.

Whether we like it or not we are moving into this new age, but it is an age of opportunity. It is an age when myth and symbol can easily be understood, and when the pre-literate myths and symbols of Christianity can once again be understood. And new myths and symbols can be found to express the Gospel in the new ikonic age. In every age the Church is to be the ikon of the New Jerusalem, the new human community of a world set free from sin and evil, injustice and oppression.

Epilogue

As I noted at the beginning, I wrote this article in 1969, when I was 28 years old. Quite a lot of things have changed since I wrote it, including me, and so if I were writing it today, I would not write it in the same way, though I generally stand by what I wrote back then. So I have written these notes to explain how some of the changes of the last 40 years might have affected what I wrote then.

Pentecost

One thing I would have added were I writing it now would be the ikon of Pentecost, which illustrates some of the differences. I noted that in Western Renaissance and post-Renaissance art there was an emphasis on perspective, stressing the single, indiovidual point of view. The Orthodox ikon of Pentecost, on the other hand shows multiple perspectives. It does not show what we would have seen had we been there, but rather what most people did not see. It shows the apostles sitting in a semi-circle, receiving or waiting to receive the Holy Spirit.

The semicircle is incomplete. It shows people who were almost certainly not present on the occasion -- St Luke holding the scroll of his gospel, which had not been written yet. St Paul, who was to be a persecutor of the churtch before he joined the circle. And because it is not a closed circle, but an open semicircle, the viewer is part of it, the circle of the apostles extends to embrace the church in which the ikon is.

In the centre of the floor is a window, and while the floor is horizontal, the window is vertical, in a dual perspective. It shows an old and weary king, Cosmos, representing the world. Like the stable in C.S. Lewis's book The last battle the inside of the upper room is bigger than the outside, because it contains the whole world. The apostles are sent into all the world, not out to all the world. And as we look at it, we see Cosmos as our own reflection in a mirror -- we are part of that old and weary world, waiting for the good news of liberation, and we are also part of the circle of the apostles, charged to take the good news into all the world. The ikon therefore has a great deal to tell us about mission.

Other differences

Here are some of the other differences, and some explanations of some of them, and some background information.

• I was moved to republish this old article after reading an article in Matt Stone's blog "Joureys in between", called Tribalization and Cultural Identity. Reading Matt's article made me realise that many concerns now being expressed in emerging church circles were similar to those we had back in the 1960s.
• One of the changes in me since I wrote the article is that when I wrote it I was an Anglican, and I am now a member of the Orthodox Church, for reasons that should be clear from what I wrote in the article. I wrote the article for the first issue of Ikon, an "underground" Christian magazine started by me and some friends. Ikon ceased publication in 1972 when all the editors had been banned by the South African government.
• In 1968 I returned from England, where I had studied at the University of Durham. An experimental drama festival was held at Durham, with participants from all over the UK, and from some of them I learnt about the works of Marshall McLuhan, such as The medium is the massage, Understanding media, and The Gutenberg galaxy. Not everything that McLuhan wrote about media was true or useful, but some of it was, and it helped me to appreciate some of the differences between Orthodox and Western Christianity.
• In 1968 I attended a seminar on Orthodox theology for non-Orthodox theological students at the World Council of Churches Ecumenical Study Centre in Bossey, Switzerland, ending with Holy Week and Pascha at St Sergius in Paris. It sparked an interest in Orthodox theology that grew over the years until I joined the Orthodox Church.
• We now have words to describe what I wrote about then. What McLuhan called "preliterate" would now be called "premodern:, and much of what I thought would subsequently happen is now called "postmodernity". But back then we did not have those words.
• The death of literacy did not occur. Back in the 1960s the idea of the personal computer was quite remote. McLuhan, with his talk of the "global village" foresaw globalisation, and that it would also be both global and tribal. Computer communications have spread rapidly over the last 20 years, and people who would never had typed their own letters have learned to do so. E-mail, computer discussion forums and SMS have meant that more people are using written communication than ever before.
• In his article Matt Stone also raises questions about the relation between tribalisation and globalisation, which are not really dealt with in the article above. I hope to return to them in a later blog posting.
• For more background, and for a tracing of developments from the 1960s to the present, see my article on Christianity, paganism and literature
  

Simpler, better, faster...

Simpler, better faster...

Some will remember that that was, until recently, the advertising slogan of the Standard Bank of South Africa.

But it seems that they realised that they couldn't deliver on their commitment to make banking "Simpler, better, faster...", and so, perhaps in a rush of honesty to the head, they acknowledged that they had just made it more involved.

And that was certainly the experience of their clients -- a few years ago you could go in to the bank, speak to the manager about a problem, and the manager would see to it that it was solved. But no one solves problems any more; they just address them or give them attention. That makes it "simpler" (for them, not for the customer), so you go in to discuss a problem but you don't get to see the manager, instead you see a "consultant" who knows zilch about solving problems (or even addressing them) but is trained to sell you "products" that you don't want and don't need. So from the customer's point of view the process is certainly more involved, because the "consultant" doesn't know how you can cancel your mortgage insurance once your mortgage has been paid off, and says you must contact someone else. So their new slogan is "Inspired, motivated, involved..." They are certainly inspired and motivated to make banking more involved.

And what were they thinking of when they began calling bank accounts and insurance policies "products"? One pictures them rolling off a production line and plopping into a bin and being taken in a lorry to be sold at corner cafes.

And bureaucratese and politician-speak are as bad as bizspeak. We are being swamped by a tsunami of jargon and buzz words.

I hope that when they've finished moving the goalposts and levelling the playing fields we'll be ready for the World Cup in 2010, but I wonder if it will happen by the end of the decade because it certainly won't be by the end of the day.

And they're always putting initiatives in place -- somewhere on a shelf in a locked strongroom where they'll never see the light of day, much less be implemented.

And computer geekspeak is even worse.

I'm longing for the day when I can once again buy an unenhanced keyboard, with the function keys on the left, where they made typing simpler, better faster...