Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

Web/Tech

Hacking the motion sensors on MacBooks

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Apple’s new MacBook Pro computers have motion sensors built into them so as to "park" the hard drive if it falls off a surface, preventing damage to the computer.

But some creative people have been writing software that uses the motion sensor for other purposes:

  • This video demonstrates an alarm system for your Mac.
  • This guy wrote some software that turns your motion-sensing Mac into a Jedi weapon (light-sabre noises when you move your Mac through the air!)
  • This website shows you some software someone wrote to manage two "virtual" desktops, allowing you to smack the side of your laptop monitor to view the desktop to that side. Check out the video to see what this does.
  • Someone else used the motion sensor to create a seismograph. You probably can’t detect earthquakes, but toe taps show up!

More examples of decentralization and hackability that result in functionality that the original creators never thought of. Collaboration is cool.

Web 2.0 / Church 2.0: humanization

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From a somewhat recent post by Hugh MacLeod:

Web 2.0 [aka the Blogosphere] is about the humanification of the web.
So you wonder why blogs are important? Humanification.

Web 2.0 is finally convincing companies that their sanitized, lifeless websites with their stock photography have to go, being replaced by something far more human. Of course, many companies still don’t get it. Like Coke, apparently: ("Coke boldly goes where every other clueless, control-hungry company has gone before.")

Church 2.0 is about the humanification of the church, I think. Of course the church has always been very human, at its core. The body of Christ is made up of people, despite all the confusion. But in recent years there has been an effort to de-humanify the church, at least in the sense that we believed progams and processes were more important than actual people. The problem with this kind of approach is that while it may streamline things and look more efficient, it’s also crushing the soul of the church.

Professionalism and officialspeak are on their way out, and genuine humanness and humility are making a comeback, thankfully.

Church 2.0: Emergence / chaos theory

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I’m continuing my Church 2.0 posts (Web 2.0 thinking applied to church leadership) today by talking about the concepts of emergence, chaos, and nonlinearity.

Termitecathedral450_1
The title of this post is likely confusing for some. I intend to talk about emergence and chaos as phenomena, and relate those phenomena to the Church 2.0 series. As such, it doesn’t have any direct link to the Emerging Church Movement (if I capitalize it, am I making it into a denomination?). Incidentally I think Emerging Church is a great name, because of what emergence means. But this post is about emergence and chaos, not the Emerging Church Movement proper. Capiche?

Emergence refers to the process of a complex pattern forming from simpler rules. The termite "cathedral" on the left is an example of emergence in nature. None of the individual termites planned the structure, it just "emerged" from their collective termiting (or whatever it is termites do).

The Internet itself is an emergent phenomenon – there is no central database of links, no planning committees that decide what cool new web pages there should be. It’s simply a massively decentralized network, yet a structure emerges as pages get linked to from other pages. This is why even though anyone with Internet access can get to my blog they’re far more likely to end up on this one.

Emergence means that the end result cannot be reliably predicted from the initial conditions. It implies unpredictability and nonlinearity (1 plus 1 may or may not equal 2). Chaos theory is all about studying apparently random systems and finding their inherent, though hidden, order. All these concepts relate closely with one another:

Emergence = functionality/order without specific design
Chaos theory = "hidden" order in what looks random
Nonlinearity = 1 plus 1 doesn’t equal 2

In Web 2.0 thinking, emergence means you can’t predict the end result when you start the project, many times because you’re creating systems that are "hackable", or scalable – systems that are fueled by user participation, and because you can’t control how users participate (entirely), you can’t predict what the thing will look like in the end.

[Read more…] about Church 2.0: Emergence / chaos theory

Church 2.0: Rich user experience

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This is the fourth in a series of posts on Church 2.0, applying the ethos of Web 2.0 to the church in the context of a missional ecclesiology (that’s a mouthful). The series is especially based on this Web 2.0 Meme map.

Web 2.0 is all about rich user experience. This means there is, more than ever before, a focus on how your website/product/book/podcast/whatever will affect the user. No more arrogance in assuming you just have to put something up there and people will mindlessly feed on it, no matter the quality.

In Church 2.0, we’re not necessarily talking about simply "putting on a great show" from the platform. There are plenty of places to go and see a great show, and if we think the church is simply supposed to mimic a great entertainment experience, we shouldn’t wonder why the spiritual life of our congregations is thin and tepid.

Experience is different from entertainment, especially when you’re talking about experiencing God. Entertainment means I watch the show, I consume the offering. Experience means I participate in the show, I am the offering.

So rich user experience for Church 2.0 relates to making a concerted effort to help people actually experience God. It’s not enough to preach really well, sing really well, or have a tightly-rehearsed band. If people do not have opportunity and space to encounter the living, relational, creating and redeeming God of the universe, we’re just putting on another dog-and-pony show. Experiencing God has to be the basic goal.

This involves getting hindrances out of the way instead of thinking we can somehow "bring God down" by our own efforts. The truth is, God has already come "down" (Jesus Christ), and continues to be "down" (Holy Spirit), enlightening, invigorating and empowering his people. The presence of God fills the atmosphere around us, but there are things that hinder us from walking in the knowledge of this reality. The task of the church leader is to recognize these hindrances and work to provide space and time where those things are removed for a time, point the way for people while they engage with God, and train them to remove those hindrances themselves so we can walk in a more constant understanding of God’s ever-present presence.

Rich user experience in Church 2.0 means we realize worship isn’t some religious game we play. It is heaven actually mingling with earth; the true and living God revealed in Jesus Christ, really speaking to and working in his people, comforting and confronting, cherishing and commissioning. In this way, you could say the church actually has the richest user experience of them all: the killer app is Jesus.

Next up in the Church 2.0 series: emergent behavior/chaos theory

Nutmeg pandemonium

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If you have an email account, you’ve probably gotten spam from people with odd names, with strange non-sequiters in the subject line. I got one today that made me laugh:

Nutmeg pandemonium

So if "Nutmeg Pandemonium" was the title of an upcoming movie, what would the plotline be, and who’d be starring?