• Kem Meyer asks a great question: Are you promising more than you can deliver?
• Should preachers, like Purdue professors, be on the Hotseat? Justin Wise thinks so.
• Blaine Hogan reflects on the risk (and value) of staying.
• Barton Damer put together a roundup of several of his super-sweet tutorials.
• The first Clash of the Titans trailer is out and it looks like a Troy / Lord of the Rings mash-up to us.
• The Vatican is hosting a conference on the possibility of alien life. Wait … what?
• Out of Ur presents a few church leaders who may have been separated at birth from some well-known entertainers.
• Did you hear the one about the kid whose Facebook status got him cleared of robbery charges?
• Skye Jethani shares 10 reasons why he doesn’t tweet.
• Episode 19 of The COLLIDE Show is finally here. Go give it a watch.
• Oh no! Has Twitter’s traffic plateaued in the US? All signs point to yes.
• As a gift to you this holiday season, Google will be offering free airport Wi-Fi.
• Some churches in Italy are now using automatic holy water dispensers to help combat the swine flu.
• Vimeo is becoming iPhone friendly and it’s about time they did.

Happy Weekend!

This is apparently the world’s tallest fountain and, I must say, the most impressive one I’ve ever seen. (HT: Gizmodo)

What does a water droplet look like in super-duper slow motion? This. (HT: Gizmodo)

How can we spend less but give more this Christmas? Watch this video:

This music video by The Bravery just screams Barton Damer. Sadly, it is not his work. (HT: motionographer)

Finally, if you’re an Apple geek, you’ll love this snippet from the documentary Objectified featuring Apple’s Jonathan Ives.

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Yesterday morning, Jon Acuff of Stuff Christians Like announced an ambitious project: raising $30,000 to build a kindergarten in Vietnam.

18 hours later … well … booyah. The $30k was in the bag thanks to our great God and some truly generous people. Go ahead and read that post, if you haven’t already, because Jon isn’t done. (Neither is God, it seems.) Jon is asking people to continue donating to the cause because there is more work to do.

What blows me away about this whole thing is that it’s an awesome example of how God can use people and potentially trivial media such as blogs and Twitter to change the world. Sure, you can keep blogging about your cat and tweeting about your Starbucks order if you want to, or you could set your sights a little higher.

Thanks for the inspiration, Jon.

(In case you’re wondering about the picture above, that’s me rocking an Echo shirt in Hanoi, Vietnam. I figured it was an appropriate visual.)

Last week, a bit of controversy ensued when a prominent Asian-American church leader took issue with the marketing and branding of the book Deadly Viper Character Assassins and its website. (DJ Chuang offers an excellent debrief here.)

The incident reminded me of the time a friend of mine went to eat dinner with his grandparents. My friend was wearing a hat, which happened to be olive green and happened to feature a red star on the front. To my friend, it was just a hat; the star was just a star. To his grandfather, however, the olive green held a strong military association and the red star was the universal symbol for communism. To my friend, it was a hat. To his grandfather, it invoked old feelings of anger and patriotism, as well as thoughts of oppression, death, and war.

My point in all of this, whatever side you might fall on in either of these disagreements, is that images aren’t necessarily neutral. People from different cultures and contexts may respond very differently to the same pictures, colors, or metaphors — whether it’s a red star, a Chinese character, or something else. You, the designer of a piece, may think that certain imagery is neutral, that you can adapt it for your purposes and infuse with whatever meaning you’d like. Just know that this isn’t always the case.

Imagery has the power to elicit strong emotions in its viewers, but at times it may surprise you which emotions or associations surface. When you create visuals for an audience, do your best to enter the culture or context of the viewer (or invite the feedback of someone who’s already there). Hopefully, your communication efforts will be better for it.

Someone has too much time on their hands. What happens when you tape 10 cameras with projectors to your body and dance? This.

A comical but powerful poem put to some more great typography animation.

Remember LiteBrite? This video brings back some great childhood memories. (HT: shape+colour)

1) Technology is neutral; it’s what we do with it that counts.

In other words, Marshal McLuhan was wrong when he said, “The medium is the message.” The message of the Church — the gospel — doesn’t change when our media and methods do. The message stays the same whether it’s preached, printed, broadcast, blogged, or tweeted because technology is neutral.

2) To reach this media-saturated, ADD-riddled, MTV-raised generation, we’ve got to …

In other words, media and technology have shaped younger generations in such a way that the Church needs new strategies and methods to reach them. The old ways won’t work because people can’t hear/see/pay attention to the old ways.

Well … which is it?

Can you see the contradiction of those accepted concepts? For one reason or another, that contradiction wasn’t entirely apparent to me until I read Amusing Ourselves to Death (Amazon link - $9.75!) by the late, great Neil Postman. Despite the fact that the book was published in 1985 and therefore doesn’t have much to say on the Internet, it’s incredibly relevant in its analysis of the power of media and technology to shape culture.

Postman provides an overview of the history of public discourse and the effects of the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, and the television on the world. In each of these cases, the tools with which we communicate alter the content of what we communicate, though we tend not to recognize it. “You cannot use smoke [signals] to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content,” Postman asserts. Print communication, then, is a medium that enabled and encouraged philosophical discourse. TV and the Internet, both of which are driven by entertaining snippets, are decidedly not conducive to philosophical discourse, but rather to sports and sex and shoot-outs and car crashes.

Postman’s point is that living in a world in which TV and other technology have changed the discourse also changes us. With the utmost conviction he declares, “Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.”

With all that in mind, I encourage you to read Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s challenging, smart, accessible, witty, and relatively short. I also encourage you to abandon Belief #1, that technology is neutral, while continuing to seek out new means of meaning a generation for whom the discourse has changed. One caveat: the best way to reach an ADD-riddled generation may not be through means that encourage or inflame their ADD.

I’m under a massive deadline for our upcoming issue so please forgive my brevity. A couple quick thoughts:

• I’m really curious to see what $130 million gets you these days, especially in terms of architecture and integrated media and technology systems.
  
• If in ten years a real estate developer comes along and builds a finer facility than the new First Baptist campus, will First Baptist start another capital campaign because “the finest facility in this area should be one that glorifies almighty God”?
• This isn’t fair, and it really has nothing to do with First Baptist, but it’s what I’m asking myself this morning … Of all the ways to glorify God with $130 million, where does a building rank on that list? I honestly don’t know. Of course, the leaders at First Baptist must follow the leading of the Spirit as they understand it, so I hope the best for them.
  
• It occurs to me that new or renovated buildings are good at solving building-related problems. If you have building-related problems, do what you can to fix your buildings. However, new or renovated buildings are bad at solving problems that are non-building related. (Please don’t read into that a critique of First Baptist Dallas. I’m not the least bit familiar with their specific circumstances.)

OK, that’s all I’ve got for now. Happy Monday, gentle COLLIDE readers.

• ChurchRelevance talks with “Sim Church” author Douglas Estes about virtual church.
• GeoCities has officially shut down. Let’s have a moment of silence…
• See a church branding/identity process from start to finish.
• Google Voice now lets you use your existing cell phone number.
• John Dyer has a great post on philosophies of technology and their relation to Twitter.
• Mashable has some pretty sweet social media pumpkin carvings.
• Brett McCracken wrote a great for Biola Magazine called “Prayer for Generation Tweet.”
• Google officially launches its OneBox online music service.
• A cool analysis of the color design in the famous “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” cartoon.
• Church Marketing Sucks has a great overview about both Cultivate and Story.

Happy Halloween (Fall Festival, Harvest Festival, Reformation Day, etc) Weekend!

This intense little film combines stop-motion, stills, video, and 3D animation to partially blow our minds. (HT: motionographer)

And now for some comedy: Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First” bit put to typography. (HT:abduzeedo)

Someone has too much time on their hands. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture reconstructed from 1000 cellphones, 2000 text alerts. (HT: engadget)

Ever wonder what kids pray about? Here are real prayers from real kids. (HT: Tim Stevens)