A Healer’s Geste

All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Introduction

Cindy, as hostess of the discussion on this book, pointed out that this book was written and published in 1989 — well before Google and iPods. So she challenged us to extrapolate examples applicable to our own — or at least, my own — internet-saturated lives.

Myer’s introduction begins with a quiz to determine one’s own “Pop Culture Quotient.” He assigns point value to various conduits of pop culture and has you tally up your score. I scored, not surprisingly, as “semimonastic.” And although I am fairly out of touch with the current movies and tv shows, I think my score would have been higher if points were awarded based on applications rather than hardware. I don’t have radios in every room of the house, but I do have 2 computers and I do listen to the radio (or Pandora or my own MP3s on iTunes or podcasts from various places) from those computers. We don’t have a television. But for a while we did Netflix and watched a few tv programs on our computers. We also occasionally watch a program on Hulu. Not having a television is actually no preclusion to viewing television programming. We don’t get the newspaper or any magazine. But sometimes I check out Martha Stewart Living or any other magazine that catches my eye from the library, and really, the internet provides my magazine-reading equivalent. I do own an iPod — it was a gift, from my parents, who won it as a prize, which was given away because it was a discontinued model, so that’s my excuse — and I use it, even with the ear buds, though they don’t stay in my ears. I just recently joined Facebook and think it’s fun, and I’m not on twitter, but I am probably actually in Stage 1 of the Stages of Twitter Acceptance. I was in that denial step for Facebook, and now I’m on there; why not Twitter?

So, the quiz is in sore need of updating for the digital age, but I would still probably rate as a semimonastic. Here’s why:

• I can’t tell you how many children Brad Pitt and what’s-her-name have.
  
• I wouldn’t be able to pick out Britney Spears from any of the other blonde teen celebrities — and I also don’t know how many kids she has now.
  
• I don’t know the date of the Super Bowl.
  
• I never see television commercials.
  
• I haven’t been to the movie theater in at least three years, possibly five.
  
• I don’t know what movies are currently playing, except one a friend just saw and told me about.
  
• The most recently produced movie I’ve seen lately is the third Bourne movie (we own and love that trilogy).
  
• I don’t know the premise of House.
  
• I’ve never seen an episode of American Idol.
  
• I saw the first season of 24 a couple months ago.
  
• I listened to top 40 radio a lot 4 and 5 years ago, but got sick of it and can still hardly stand its monotony. It was a refreshing change from my CCM-immersed teen years, though. Then (after almost a year) I started actually realizing what most of the lyrics meant. And I couldn’t take it.
  
• I listened to talk radio a lot 3 and 4 and 5 years ago, but when my 3-year-old started shouting “I’m debt-FREEEEEE” I started hearing lots of things that I didn’t want him shouting, so I stopped listening.
• I think something is happening in Palestine right now.
  
• All the sudden one day Amy started posting all about Paulson as if I should know who he was and I wondered if one of my brothers or cousins had done something terrible.

I could probably go on and on….sometimes I get tired of being (along with Matt) the only one who often can’t participate in general conversations unless it’s about the antics of our children. But that feeling is much better than the too-easy-to-ignore reaction of self-righteousness: a feeling of superiority for being out of the loop. How ugly is that!

So, in reading this book, I must avoid the pitfall of wagging my finger at all “those others” out there.

Matt and I were never really connected to pop culture and we have more kept to our old ways than actively rejected it at some point. In our house it has been more default than principle. And I hope to keep it that way as much as possible without getting obnoxious about it.

What I am really interested in is the “medium is the message” argument, and how that might apply to the internet as well. Because, though I might not be too aware of pop culture content, I am completely saturated in the form of the computer and the internet and the microwave. And if I were to look merely to my experience (which isn’t good form), I would say the technology in my life is an overall net gain that I would be loth to lose; so I had better not knock it too much in my love of a good philosophical argument if I wouldn’t dream of putting legs on that argument.