My posts to this blog have been a bit further apart this fall since I have been putting extra time into teaching.  And being a typical college professor, I’m not immune from waiting until the last minute on things.  Yesterday was the final exam for my class.  Exam was at 11:30 a.m.  I did a review of the test when I got into the office, started sending the one color figure to the color printer, and caught up on a bit of reading knowing that I had plenty of time to copy off the bulk of the exam.  What I did not count on was one of the department’s copiers being out of service.  When I started coping and discovered this at least I had just enough time to get it copied, assembled, and over to the exam room.  Barely.  Because of my taking technology for granted I was a bit rushed at the end, to say the least.

The effect of depending on technology and waiting until the last minute was even more pronounced today.  Next week is the biggest professional meeting of the year in my field.  I’m not going but part of my job is to help others get ready by helping them print out their poster presentations on a large format printer.  This used to be done as individual 8 1/2 x 11 pages with your text and figures tacked up on a bulletin board.  Now with large format printers you put it all on one 4′ x 6′  poster.  It makes setup and take down a lot easier at the meeting.

Well, because of the high percentage of the faculty and students in the department that go to the meeting we set up a schedule to use the printer.  When the schedule gets posted the latest times on Friday afternoon are the first ones to get claimed.  But there is now an alternative that allows you to put off the work even longer…  There is now a printing service at the meeting so if you have the cash you can wait even longer and get your poster printed just minutes before your session begins.  Not much more last minute than that.  I have had two other faculty members tell me today that they are not ready yet and someone else can have their printer times because they will print it at the meeting.

Coming in the middle of the Advent season I have thought of at least a dozen ways this could be a parable for our spiritual lives.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure some of these out for themselves.

But the other thing that this got me thinking about is technology in the church and how it has contributed to “instantaneous polity.”  For example, creating a Facebook group for your church — do you just do it, or run it by the session first.  Streaming or podcasting sermons — do you just do it, or is there some type of quality or content review to be sure it is appropriate for a world-wide audience.  Those of us that blog GA — I did the live blogging thing but afterwords I was pondering some questions of “what really did happen there?” because at the time my fingers were trying to keep up with the speaker’s comments and I was not always processing and analyzing as I went along.  And what about committee reports — with e-mail and word processors we are frequently putting the reports off to the last minute and reviewing and submitting them right before the meeting, because we can.

I have not been a big one for the “technology sabbath,” if for no other reason than Sunday afternoons are sometimes one of the few “empty” spots in my calendar, so I fill it up.  But my concern was raised recently when a medical study showed that children that grow up playing video games develop different neural pathways in their brains than those of us who did not grow up with video games.  Sorry, I have not found a link to that study yet, but I will point out that this week another study came out showing that video games help seniors keep their minds sharp.  Positives and negatives to any technology.

Anyway, some musings on the current trends in human response to technology.  I have made a commitment to continue the low level of blogging for the rest of December so that I can get some other reading done, spend time with family and not just in the same room as them, and think a bit about things.  See you next time.