Just as you would teach a preschooler how to cross the street and a teen how to drive, children need guidance in navigating online safely and responsibly. Creating a family contract that defines the expectations and rules of online and technology use is a one place to start. We examined models of contracts that can be amended to suit a family….
Read it all, noting especially #10 in the first list.
[A]…bleak view of the future is misdirected. First of all, solid theological education, steeped in the classical disciplines, has a long history; so does low-quality religious education by unaccountable schools offering credentials to the lazy and unqualified. Churches and future ministers know the difference. The technological revolution may empower dumbed-down schools, but no more so than the dubious correspondence programs of the past.
And not all online ministerial education will be suspect””just as first-rate universities like Stanford and Harvard are exploring ways to offer classes online to a wider audience, so too will solid seminaries. Churches and future ministers will know the difference there as well. I suspect that the next generation will find what the seminary I serve has seen: online programs supplementing rather than supplanting the life-on-life classical theological education.
More important, the sorts of questions raised by student debt and ministerial career instability may help reattach ministerial education to its real-world moorings: education with churches in mind, not just theology. In order to train ministers, Protestant communities must abandon the current system in which future pastors discern, almost in isolation, a call from God and then seek out training ad hoc.
Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five years. Her brother had been in a bad motorcycle accident, she said, and he might not survive.
DeWitt knew what she wanted: for him to pray for her brother. It was the kind of call he had taken many times during his 25 years in the ministry. But now he found that the words would not come. He comforted her as best he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to invoke God’s help. Sensing her disappointment, he put the phone down and found himself sobbing. He was 41 and had spent almost his entire life in or near DeRidder, a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt. All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.
As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop. After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network called the Clergy Project, created for clerics who no longer believe in God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.
Consider the facts. In the past forty years there has been an explosion of leadership programmes, courses, institutes and studies….At the same time, respect for leaders has fallen to an unprecedented low. In 2011 only 15 per cent of Americans expressed trust in the government to do what is right most of the time, down from almost 70 per cent in the 1960s. 77 per cent said they believed that the United States has a leadership crisis. Sharp declines in confidence can be traced, sector by sector, in leadership in politics, business, finance, the media, sports, education and faith-based organisations. A mere 7 per cent of American corporate employees trust their employers to be both honest and competent.
Something large is happening, not just in America but throughout much of the world. Kellerman traces it to three factors. First is the long, historic march to toward ever-greater democracy. Second is the collapse of traditional authority structures within the family that took place in the West in the 1960s, sending ripples throughout society in the form of “the death of deference.” Third is the impact of instantaneous global communication and social networking that has led to the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, Wikileaks and other assaults on the citadels of power. In the hyper-democracy of cyberspace, everyone has a voice, all the time.
Reporting six months ago on the announcement of an initial public offering by Facebook, this paper sounded a warning to the social networking site. “An increasing number [of users] are likely to feel bruised as they are confronted with the bitter truth that they are mere fodder for a machine that means business,” wrote our consumer correspondent. A marketing expert added: “It takes clever leadership and in-depth understanding of where you can introduce business elements without destroying your value for users.”
Last week, stock in the company slumped to a new low. Many investors jumped at the first opportunity to offload their shares, reducing the value of the company to £34bn, from £104bn at its debut. To some who use Facebook, it was just desserts.
In many ways, the rise and potential fall of Facebook can be seen as a metaphor for the internet. It was invented in 2004 by a team of college students to fulfil a need that nobody knew they had, and quickly became one of the biggest companies in the world. It went “cash flow positive” in September 2009 with an annual advertising revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars. But although the internet has been around for longer than Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, still nobody really knows how to use it. Or to “monetise” it, as the reports in the past week’s business pages put it.
Sheryl Fancher likes to tell social media nightmare stories that make ministers cringe.
Like the one about a pastor who posted derogatory remarks about church members on his Facebook page without realizing his account was set to public.
Ouch….
For 30 days, Mr [Joe] Garner turned to Craigslist to see if he could find ways to get the food, transportation and shelter he needed on a trip around the US.
Would strangers he contacted online be happy to help?
Finding enough qualified men and women to protect America’s cyber networks stands as one of the central challenges to America’s cybersecurity. Even in the computer age, people are essential. In the field of cybersecurity, they are also lacking.
Cybersecurity breaches cost America billions of dollars a year. Meanwhile, cyberattacks on America’s critical infrastructure increased 17-fold between 2009 and 2011. To defend the cybersecurity of both private businesses and government agencies, it is time for a serious geek surge.
Many parents and clinicians now reject corrective therapy, making this the first generation to allow boys to openly play and dress (to varying degrees) in ways previously restricted to girls ”” to exist in what one psychologist called “that middle space” between traditional boyhood and traditional girlhood. These parents have drawn courage from a burgeoning Internet community of like-minded folk whose sons identify as boys but wear tiaras and tote unicorn backpacks. Even transgender people preserve the traditional binary gender division: born in one and belonging in the other. But the parents of boys in that middle space argue that gender is a spectrum rather than two opposing categories, neither of which any real man or woman precisely fits.
“It might make your world more tidy to have two neat and separate gender possibilities,” one North Carolina mother wrote last year on her blog, “but when you squish out the space between, you do not accurately represent lived reality. More than that, you’re trying to ”˜squish out’ my kid.”
The impassioned author of that blog, Pink Is for Boys, is careful to conceal her son’s identity, as were the other parents interviewed for this article. As much as these parents want to nurture and defend what makes their children unique and happy, they also fear it will expose their sons to rejection. Some have switched schools, changed churches and even moved to try to shield their children. That tension between yielding to conformity or encouraging self-expression is felt by parents of any child who differs from the norm. But parents of so-called pink boys feel another layer of anxiety: given how central gender is to identity, they fear the wrong parenting decision could devastate their child’s social or emotional well-being. The fact that there is still substantial disagreement among prominent psychological professionals about whether to squelch unconventional behavior or support it makes those decisions even more wrenching.
I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
Our brains are superlatively evolved to adapt to our environment: a process known as neuroplasticity. The connections between our brain cells will be shaped, strengthened and refined by our individual experiences. It is this personalisation of the physical brain, driven by unique interactions with the external world, that arguably constitutes the biological basis of each mind, so what will happen to that mind if the external world changes in unprecedented ways, for example, with an all-pervasive digital technology?
A recent survey in the US showed that more than half of teenagers aged 13 to 17 spend more than 30 hours a week, outside school, using computers and other web-connected devices. If their environment is being transformed for so much of the time into a fast-paced and highly interactive two-dimensional space, the brain will adapt, for good or ill. Professor Michael Merzenich, of the University of California, San Francisco, gives a typical neuroscientific perspective[:]
”There is a massive and unprecedented difference in how [digital natives’] brains are plastically engaged in life compared with those of average individuals from earlier generations and there is little question that the operational characteristics of the average modern brain substantially differ,” he says.
Meet the social media “nones.” A new survey finds that Americans, while mostly religious, generally do not use social media to supplement worship and mostly keep their faith private online.
The Public Religion Research Institute survey found about one in 20 Americans followed a religious leader on Twitter or Facebook. A similar number belonged to a religious or spiritual Facebook group.
The results seem to defy the familiar story of prominent religious leaders using social media to build a following ”” and a brand.
Wondering just who everyone is on Facebook? Well, wonder about 83 million fewer of them. Via Mashable, Facebook revealed in their 10-Q that 4.8 percent of the site’s worldwide monthly active user accounts are “duplicate,” meaning “an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.” The rest are deemed “false” and fall under two headings ”” 1.5 percent are “undesirable,” used for terms of service violating activities like spamming, and 2.4 percent are “user-misclassified” meaning an account wherein “users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet.” No matter how cute it is, little Fido’s profile might be deceiving people! So all told, 8.7 percent of Facebook’s users do not correspond to actual people. But considering it has 955 million users, that adds up fast.
This weekend, NBC kicked off its expensive coverage of the London Olympics by cutting out the part of the opening ceremony that commemorated the victims of the July 7, 2005 bombings, in favour of a soft soap interview with Michael Phelps, the record-breaking swimmer. Then, when Phelps swam (and lost) the next day, it waited eight hours to televise him in action.
What, if anything, goes through the minds of people who make such decisions? We know because the broadcasting network that has infuriated me and others, by refusing to broadcast popular events live, has been honest. It thinks that Americans are interested in live US athletes, not the foreign deceased, and it needs to recoup the $1.2bn it laid out on the London rights.
As a result, NBC’s coverage of the Olympics has been less like a sports broadcast than a surrealist farce in which the characters affect to know less than the audience.
Read it all (subscription required).
Parts of Twitter became inaccessible a day before thousands of fans are expected to start tweeting about the Olympic Games.
The Twitter.com site was unreachable for almost an hour, and continued to suffer intermittent faults thereafter.
The service was still accessible via its mobile site and other applications.
Triana Lavey was about to undergo a radical transformation. And she was doing it for a radical reason.
She wanted to look better online.
With the help of Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, she was changing her chin, her nose and the shape of her face.
Lavey is a 37-year-old television producer in Los Angeles. For work and socially, she spends a lot of time on Skype, Facebook and other sites. She said she didn’t like the face staring back at her from her computer screen.
I’m sending this in from New Orleans in hopes that it will be helpful in the testimony for Resolution DO69 regarding the Social Media Challenge to the Episcopal Church.
I believe it to be 100% necessary that we in the Episcopal church as staff, clergy, and congregants, engage ourselves and our communities by using social media. It’s usually free, it’s usually rapid, and it can be fun and informative. Can many of you fathom doing business without using email? Often, social media is checked more frequently than email.
Twitter gives the impression of being obsessed with mindless trivia, from Justin Bieber’s latest heartfelt tweet to LeBron James’ reflections on winning the NBA championship.
But Atlanta-based Twitter executive Claire Diaz-Ortiz learned something surprising from an examination of the most popular tweets: Spiritual tweets were whooping up on the mundane.
“We came upon data that religious leaders were completely punching above their weight on Twitter,” she said.
A Portsmouth nun has turned to social media to convey her religious messages in between spending time in silence.
Sister Elizabeth Pio, 41, has begun using Twitter on behalf of the Sisters of Bethany, an Anglican order who spend hours each day in silent reflection.
@bethanysister posts about prayer, saints and current events, including Euro 2012 football matches.
Is that an unintentionally funny headline or what?
Religious groups have long vied for prime parcels of land, planting churches on town squares and monasteries amid isolated mountains. But now they’re targeting real estate in a less tangible sphere: cyberspace.
For the first time in its history, the international nonprofit that doles out generic Internet domain names such as “.com” and “.edu” will allow more specific web address extensions like “.church.”
One Simple Decision, created by Virtual Driver Interactive Inc. (VDI), one of the nation’s largest driving simulator manufacturers, seeks to modify driver behavior by showing drivers what can happen if they have a crash while driving under the influence or texting while driving. It combines simulated driving and interactions with police, judges and emergency medical personnel in an intense, 20-minute experience featuring a real judge, actual sheriff’s deputies and EMTs.
Harry Mochel, now 19, of Rye, N.Y., experienced One Simple Decison about a year ago at a private driver’s education school in Rye. “I’d been driving for a little while already,” he says. “My parents had heard about it and said you should try it.”
He says he was “driving” along on the simulator. “It tells you to start texting, so I took out my phone and started texting,” he says. “I ended up crashing into a stop sign and got into a head-on collision. It’s crazy to see how easy it was.”
Not long ago, estrangements between family members, for all the anguish they can cause, could mean a fairly clean break. People would cut off contact, never to be heard from again unless they reconciled.
But in a social network world, estrangement is being redefined, with new complications. Relatives can get vivid glimpses of one another’s lives through Facebook updates, Twitter feeds and Instagram pictures of a grandchild or a wedding rehearsal dinner. And those glimpses are often painful reminders of what they have lost.
“I frequently hear, ”˜I heard from somebody else who read it on Facebook that my son just got married,’ or, ”˜My daughter just had a child, and I didn’t even know she was pregnant,’ ” said Joshua Coleman, a psychologist in the Bay Area who wrote a book about estrangement, “When Parents Hurt.”
“There are things that parents assume all their lives they’d be there for, then they hear in a very public third-hand way about it, and it adds a layer of hurt and humiliation,” he said.
The remarkable success of evangelist Billy Graham’s Crusades for Christ did not come from his preaching alone, but also the immense amount of preparation and follow-up that went into planning each revival.
Now, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is taking that experience and harnessing it to save souls through the Internet in a way that perhaps only such a large and established organization can.
Josh Joseph grew up in a sprawling, extended Roman Catholic family, was educated in Columbia parochial schools and knew from a young age that a church vocation might be in his future.
“Having the privilege of going to Catholic schools, always being involved in Catholic church, it was something I thought about,” said Joseph, who graduated from St. John Neumann Catholic School and Cardinal Newman.
But when it came time to decide about entering the priesthood, Joseph looked not only inward but outward, to the social media platforms that are so much a part of his media-savvy generation.
Is your doctor a technophobe? Increasingly, the answer may be no. There’s a stereotype that says doctors shun technology that might threaten patients’ privacy and their own pocketbooks. But a new breed of physicians is texting health messages to patients, tracking disease trends on Twitter, identifying medical problems on Facebook pages and communicating with patients through email.
So far, those numbers are small. Many doctors still cling to pen and paper, and are most comfortable using e-technology to communicate with each other ”” not with patients. But from the nation’s top public health agency, to medical clinics in the heartland, some physicians realize patients want more than a 15-minute office visit and callback at the end of the day.
Far from Silicon Valley and East Coast high-tech hubs, Kansas City pediatrician Natasha Burgert offers child-rearing tips on her blog, Facebook and Twitter pages, and answers patients’ questions by email and text messages.
Many of LinkedIn’s 161 million members worldwide, who use the site to form professional connections, were also bombarded Wednesday by e-mail from unfamiliar parties urging them to click on links to verify e-mail addresses. LinkedIn and eHarmony join the list of several major websites, including retailer Zappos.com, that were hacked in recent months.
Wednesday’s cyberattack on LinkedIn, which affects as many as 6.5 million users, came on the heels of a discovery that LinkedIn’s mobile app on Apple devices tracked users’ calendar events and synched them to its server without users’ knowledge, a practice that could violate Apple’s privacy regulations.
The encrypted password hash codes, which can be deciphered to uncover users’ passwords, could give the hacker access to users’ accounts once the codes are cracked, according to IDC tech industry analyst Al Hilwa.
Faced with slowing growth in its advertising business, Facebook is considering throwing open its social network to children, in the hope that their parents will pay for games and other content on the site.
The plan is also designed to limit the company’s legal risk over the already-widespread use of the site by minors, millions of whom might be on Facebook after lying about their age.
News that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, pictured, is considering legitimising and expanding the use of the site by children comes as Facebook shares fall further below their flotation price. The stock slipped below $27 in early trading in New York yesterday, compared to the $38 at which they were sold to new investors two-and-a-half weeks ago, as investors continued to fret about slowing advertising income from its website and the even narrower options for monetising traffic on its mobile site.
…the most important step is the most obvious and fundamental one: understanding the threat in a comprehensive, serious manner. Every member of a board or executive suite is duty bound to protect the institution against material risk, whether they currently possess particular expertise or not. And yet, how many companies have a concrete plan in place to deal with a hack? How many conduct independent audits of their cybervulnerabilities? The answer, many in my position fear, is too few.
Some say we are outgunned. But in my view, it is less a matter of being outgunned than being simply outdated ”” in our thinking and in our vision. Yes, there is an army of computer saboteurs, spies, thieves and nihilists who wish to do us harm. But we have an army, too, or at least the makings of one, which can draw from the best of law enforcement, intelligence, business and academia.