This Christian Life

So, is this some psych experiment from GA Tech? They should get an A if it is...it's freakin' me out!! :)

I know, isn't it convincing? I'm in this industry and I can totally see it happening.

Anybody else out there watch it yet?

Makes me want to be even more careful and conscious of the choices I make......

maybe i'm the cynic in the group. but the music and the guy's tone of voice were the only things really freaky to me. i mean, is it so scary that the NYTimes would go out of business? i know, i know. there are privacy matters at stake too, but the 2014 scenario isn't too much different than we have right now. what i mean is, the world (and any human-created media therein) is going to be what humans make of it. because of the presence of (what we Christians call) sinful nature, every medium will have some good, some bad. there is porn on the web, and there is thischristianlife. just as in 2014, some will make good use of the information, others won't. the death of the Institution does not mean the death of Truth.

Nate, it's not scary to me that the NYT could go out of business. That's been a hot topic for 10 years with the expansion of the internet. What freaks me out is probably the believability of the proposition they're making. With it being so easy to see and believe, I think I'm just scared looking into the future. Maybe that's it more than anything. When do we get to "see into the future" so clearly? Even if they're wrong, it's still freaky.

I think another thing that sort of gives me the heebie-jeebies is what they say at the end. Paraphrasing here... "all of the news in the EPIC is trivial and not really worth anything... but that's the choice we made."

Is that what is meant by this verse?

For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 2 Timothy 4:3

You're absolutely right, the scenario is troubling. But isn't it just like the scenario today, only to one more degree? Have you watched the evening news lately? It's almost all trivialities; car chases are leading stories, celebrity gossip is mixed in with poorly-covered world politics, and commercials for The God Of More Stuff are laced throughout, further trivializing the content. Information is ubiquitous, and almost all of it is designed simply to sell a product, be it FoxNews whose product is a Republican president or Seventeen Magazine whose product is lip gloss. It seems to me that we have already chosen news which is "trivial and not really worth anything." The rise of sensationalism brought us that. The Googlezon and EPIC machines would be simply an extension of that which we have already created, just as the internet is an exaggerated projection of human interests now.

I think I just figured out what my real rub here is. It's this: the video follows the history (and future history) of the technology which will disseminate the information we choose; I would argue that the more noteworthy chain of events occured with sensationalism and market capitalism's destruction of unbiased information. Instead of the video starting with 1989's World Wide Web inventor, it could have started when we first began selling soap on the radio news programs, or when cable news started being 24hrs/day and desparately needing content, or when the NY Post starting being sold next to the Times on newsstands.

With EPIC, instead of large companies choosing our crappy information for us in order to sell products, we'll choose it ourselves.

The world is what we make it. The internet is what we make it. EPIC will be what we make it.

Peace.

Touche, Nate. Excellent analysis. I have nothing more to say!

that's funny. i was thinking a couple times throughout the day, I bet Paul is thinking of something i didn't and is gonna have this blasting repudiation to my post. ha! i worried over nothing.