[lab]oratory

The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University reports that the Millennial generation is just as generous as previous generations when it comes to philanthropic giving. Any suggestion that Millennials are less giving than other generations is not tied to their generation, but correlated to any number of other factors.

This is good news for anyone involved with young adult ministries!

Here’s a lengthy quote before you go read it all:

The study of more than 10,000 individuals across five generations examines differences in giving trends, including motivations for giving, types of causes supported and amount donated. While those in the Millennial generation (born after 1981) are generally less likely to give and tend to give less when they do make a donation, the study found that this trend is associated with income, education level and religious attendance, rather than generation. All other factors being equal, the average giving level of Millennials was roughly equivalent to that of other generations.

“There’s a perception in the nonprofit world that young people aren’t as philanthropic, so this is great news,” says Shaun Keister, Ph.D., annual giving consultant with Campbell & Company. “A lot of the members of the Millennial generation are still in school or have lower salaries because they’re at the beginning of their careers, so this suggests that their giving may rise along with their earning power.”

Other key findings of the Center on Philanthropy study included:

• Members of the Millennial generation are more likely than any other generation to cite the “desire to make the world a better place to live” as a key motivation for their philanthropic giving.
• Members of the Silent generation (born between 1929 and 1945) are more likely to cite “need to provide services that the government can’t or won’t” as one of their most important motivations for giving.

Individuals in all generations who attend religious services at least once a year are more likely than those who never attend to support both religious and secular organizations.

OK, so this picture isn’t really about net neutrality, but it gets at the main point. This is our future if you want to pay what you pay for Internet now and get only “200 websites in all!” The least expensive option offers what you already get on TV: ABC, NBC, Disney.

If this plan takes off, it will cripple the user-driven nature of the web that we have in (for example) Wikipedia, Facebook, and Blogger. To reverse Clay Shirky, “There Goes Everybody!”

Keep the net neutral! Equal access for all!

Whenever people try to predict the future, the result is usually really hit and miss. Rolf Skyberg has five important tips for predicting the future. Here they are in short:

1. give it your best shot
2. use details to color-in your predictions
3. or, just tell them the raw facts and let them decide
4. be careful, the analogy you choose will be taken literally
5. this is your opportunity to craft their world-view

Mostly best summed up as “the future will follow current trends and not be more of the same.” This is as good material when looking at church statistics as when predicting technology trends.

Last week, this study upset a lot of people. Christian Research reported, through twists of statistics, that Muslims will outnumber Christians in the UK by 2035. As typical, some have gone hysterical in one direction or another.

The more moderate might take the position of this Telegraph article, “The Church isn’t dying … but it needs to evolve.” George Pitcher looks beyond the hysteria (conservatives predict doom, liberals cry foul) and looks for an Anglican Third Way:

But at the risk of summoning discredited spirits, there must be a third way. It’s part of the Church’s genius that it evolves contextually in our society while maintaining eternal constants. It needs to meet its new-millennial people where they are, rather than where they used to be. It needs to redevelop the pluralistic and tolerant voice that has been at the heart of Anglicanism at its best.

Give it a read!

From the editorial blog of America magazine, referring to Dean Hoge et al., Young Adult Catholics: Religion in a Culture of Choice ( University of Notre Dame Press, 2001):

Hoge ended his book with a strong plea for a “preferential option for young adult Catholics.” For such an option to be real and not just empty rhetoric, it needs to be translated into diocesan and parish budgets, ministerial personnel, imaginative programs. Resources and energies should be directed toward helping young adult Catholics feel wanted, welcomed and actively involved. Being welcoming to young adults must mean more than hospitality at the parish level (they are not there, anyway!) but entail a vigorous outreach beyond the parish. In the Hoge sample, young adult Catholics complained of the absence of programs and activities for single young adults.

Here’s a good blog post on the relation of Christianity to ancient theater. From the article:

“The Roman Empire believed in keeping the masses fed and entertained. When Christianity challenged paganism, entertainment was often at the expense of the Christians who were brutally killed as sport. In the third century, when the emperor, Constantine, became a Christian, the amphitheatres were closed.” Tall and thin, with only a slight stoop, Dad meanders toward the proscenium, more at home in a theatre than anywhere else. “Ironically, it was the Christians who reignited public theatre six centuries later, using pageants to enact Bible stories.”

Christianity and theater historically have an on-again-off-again relationship. Medieval friars tended to discourage theater attendance, as did the later Puritans. Amalarius of Metz wrote about the Mass as drama. Later, Christopher Wren popularized the auditory church architecture, bringing in theatrical features to worship such as galleries and proscenium arches.

Today Christians have varying views of movies, typically shunning violent and sexual films but endorsing other movies as a means of evangelism.

“Theatre is action – it presents an action. You are allowed to reflect and hopefully take a better action. Theatre gives us reflection. That’s why there will always be theatre,” Dad says, looking out at the water, shielding the sun from his eyes.

Liturgy, along with theater, is a cool medium, of its nature demanding participation from its audience. There is no passive theater-goer. There is no passive church-goer. As the article points out, these media invite reflection, action and new life.

Bob Giloth reports on the Social Citizens blog, journaling the societal changes due to technology. The millennial generation, that Giloth and the blog focus on, are the generation born 1978-1993, those who come of age along with the public Internet. He quotes Social Citizens:

“Millennials are hands on ‘experience seekers’ who don’t trust the reporting of others… Millennials are generally opposed to hierarchical structures.”

My hunch is that opposition to hierarchical structures is not opposition to the structure itself. Rather, it is opposition to hierarchies that prohibit participation. Structures that encourage participation (the so-called blogosphere, YouTube, etc) promote hands-on experience.

We need to have the structures. Without them, there is no client-server or peer-to-peer relationship at all, only isolated PCs and users. But, the structures must change so as to get out of their own way and enable greater participation.

At the same time, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is offering a press release on the spiritual lives of millennial Catholics:

Among Catholics attending Mass at least once a month, the Millennials are just as likely to believe the basic Catholic tenet that Christ is really present in the Eucharist as pre-Vatican II Catholics.

Among this same group, the Millennials are the most likely to observe Lenten practices. More than nine in ten of them abstain from meat on Fridays in Lent (91 percent) and receive ashes on Ash Wednesday (91 percent).

Among those attending Mass at least once a month, Millennial Catholics are more likely than older Catholics to say they are at least somewhat involved in parish life, are among the most likely to consider their faith the most important part of their life, and that receiving the Eucharist is “very” important to their sense of what it means to be Catholic.

When the time comes, I’m looking forward to Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody, which is “about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures.” From what I’ve read of it so far, he seems to be preaching us the sermon on the mount that the forerunner Marshall McLuhan promised forty years ago.

As Artistole said, humans are zoon logikon: rational animals, or talking animals. Social behavior is a part of our own created-ness (Gen. 2:18) and clearly a part of the redeemed life in God (Rev. 7:9). May all our churches take cues from McLuhan and Shirky and get ready for the millennial Christians. Here comes everybody!

While googling to find material for the previous post, I ran across this editorial from the March 1986 edition of FidoNews:

    =================================================================
                                 EDITORIAL
     =================================================================

                           THE FREEDOM TO COMPUTE

                                Mike Guffey

     Professor Loren  Graham  of  M.I.T.  recently  wrote  an  article
     entitled  "The  Kremlin and the Computer".  He depicted life with
     state controlled computing.  His observation that  George  Orwell
     had  it  all backwards in "1984" is shrewd.  He noted that Orwell
     thought technology would allow "Big Brother" to maintain control.
     Who would have guessed the Soviet Union would turn the tables and
     retain control  by  the  suppression  of  technology,  especially
     computer technology?

     If   America's   government  relied  on  keeping  the  population
     uninformed to retain power and control, things would be different
     today.  What if your government didn't permit computer access  to
     large amounts of accurate data,  didn't permit free communication
     between computer users?  What if your government would not  allow
     widespread   use   of  personal  computers  for  fear  of  losing
     "control"?  How long could your government hope to genuinely keep
     pace in the information age?

     These were questions Graham explored in his article.  He  painted
     a  grim  picture of what might be called "retrograde technology".
     He points out some democratic traditions indicating an edge  over
     communist [and third world] nations:

     o A  tradition  of  successful technology developed under private
       ownership and control.

     o Close relationships between creators,  buyers  and  sellers  of
       technology

     o A  tradition  of free access to and creation of massive amounts
       of reliable information about most topics.

     o Excellent communications facilities  necessary  for  access  to
       diverse and far-flung data bases.

     o A tradition of entrepreneurial and innovative freedom .

     Graham   goes  on  to  say,   “So  far  the  pattern  [of  Soviet
     authorities] seems  to  be  to  require  that  all  computers  be
     institutionally  housed  and controlled.  But what [they] may not
     have realized is that they will pay a stiff price…  by severely
     limiting  the rapidity of the growth of the computer culture,  by
     hampering the spread of computer  literacy  among  young  people,
     …by  watching the West become a true ‘information society’ they
     will be doomed to follow…” Graham also calls the  Soviet  Union
     “the  most  secretive  industrialized power in the world”.  These
     observations are based on  a  recent  visit  to  Moscow  and  his
     background in the history of science.

     There  is  no  known “hacker-culture” in the Soviet Union and its
     youth is missing out on the experiences available to millions  of
     American  schoolkids,  hobbyists  and  average  business computer
     users.  Nor does the Soviet Union’s educational system  emphasize
     hands-on  experience  with high-technology hardware.  Even typing
     is not widely taught.

     Graham’s article raises the question about how  long  the  Soviet
     Union can retain a genuinely international status with a decaying
     economy  that  can  neither heal itself with accurate information
     nor give its children a legacy of competition in an  increasingly
     computer-aided  world.  Surely a disturbing question for an aging
     leadership.

     So what about your most taken-for-granted freedom?  How important
     is it to you?  What are you planning to do to protect it?  Unlike
     the gun control or right-to-life issues,  the freedoms you  enjoy
     in accessing as much (or as little) information as you desire are
     seldom  regarded  as  burning  issues.  Are you to allowing it to
     slip away as the communications giants gradually make  the  price
     of information prohibitive?

     In  earlier  times,  free  enterprise  aviation developed rapidly
     because suffocating regulation had not yet  arrived  and  no  one
     thought  to make air corridors into tollways.  Later,  after long
     years of gradually instituted legislation,  many industry  giants
     couldn’t  survive  their  emancipation.  Today  our  situation is
     reversed.  We have started out on overcrowded highways controlled
     by one giant.  Let us hope the giant remains benevolent.  Let  us
     hope  the  giant  doesn’t team up with the federal bureaucracy to
     act on our behalf without our consent.

     Just where does one suggest a constitutional amendment?

Cory Doctorow has published his next book! Little Brother is a young adult science fiction novel about current changes in technology and the information society it creates. The book is Creative Commons licensed, so I thought that I’d post an excerpt from the introduction. There are so many references packed into it that it begs for annotation and hyperlinks. So, here’s a quick-and-dirty start:

When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of the few “counterculture” people who thought computers were a good thing. For most young people, computers represented the de-humanization of society. University students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend “DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE,” prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, “I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME.” Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will.

When I was a 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers — which had been geeky and weird a few years before — were everywhere, and the modem I’d used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism — organizing — was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter with hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). In the Soviet Union, communications tools were being used to bring information — and revolution — to the farthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state the Earth had ever seen.

But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love are being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The National Security Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gotten away with it. Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets, finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access to their databases. The Transport Security Administration maintains a “no-fly” list of people who’d never been convicted of any crime, but who are nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The list’s contents are secret. The rule that makes it enforceable is secret. The criteria for being added to the list are secret. It has four-year-olds on it. And US senators. And decorated veterans — actual war heroes.

The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.

What’s more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where any measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your hands and shouting “Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!” until all dissent fell silent.

We don’t have to go down that road.

If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don’t hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around.

If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech–not censorship–then you have a dog in the fight.

If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you’re part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have.

This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an information society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of liberty? It’s not just a noun, it’s a verb, it’s something you do.

Buy it or download it.

I can’t stay away from mashups of the Bible and Google Maps (1, 2) or beautiful relational maps of proper names in Scripture. Via the ESV Bible Blog, here’s topological graphs of Scripture references. Color coded and even sorted by book: what’s an OCD cleric-nerd not to love?