Not because they are , as we often conceive of it, “technological”, but as “technologies” in the sense of how Daniel Bell* speaks of “technologies”; as “systems, structures, economies, politics, buildings, education, etc. ” which work together as a package to some ends. What “piece” of this “technology set” do blogs represent for the church? What can they be rightfully said to enable or accomplish, or “transmit”?

To review the question in the previous post, courtesy David Weinberger:

Jesus was God’s blog. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Hmm, then I suppose the Talmud would be God’s blog for the Jews.

Anyway, I know I’m off base and off track here. Nevertheless: A Merry Christmas to you and your families.

Not so much (as in: not so far “off base”), since considering Jesus, the Talmud, etc. as God’s blog for Christians, Jews, etc. is a good vehicle for conversation on who Jesus is, what the Talmud is, etc. As I have been reading Daniel Bell’s book today, and the theme continues with the need for “technologies of desire” that exist as a challenge and and alternative to the capitalist order, with its “technologies of desire”, it occurs to me that here is one such technology or “mechanism” that arises amongst almost any community which embodies itself as an alternative. Not that it’s because of its being a “technology” (since that is in the contemporary sense of “modern electronic/computer-based technollogy), but because of its role as an enabler of a system of shared narrative and conversation around that narrative.

I believe that blogs enable a dfistributed sense of community that in at least some sense, brings us into communion with that piece of ours and others’ humanity and faith that is able to be “transmitted” in this way. It seems that what happens is that the “communion” experienced is not itself transmitted, but the use of language transmitted as text , re-assembled on the receiver’s end, reminds us of a community which is beyond and NOT technology. IN oter words, as a servant to a larger system of desire, directed at helping us to find and experience face to face community more fully, to the extent that this can be said to happen at all. For me, enough of it happens to make me hopeful that we Christians on the Web can learn to employ the TOOLS we have here to further the church as the “City of God”; as the “Community of Character” ; as the “recovery group where we pool our collective resources to resist the deformation of desire.

* as in Bell’s Liberation Theology at the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering