Pinterest: not just a time sink

When Bridget introduced me to Pinterest, I was pretty sure it would be a mindless time sink, a frivolous toy.

Here’s how the folks at Pinterest describe it:

Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

There’s a simple “Pin It” bookmarklet that you install in your bookmarks bar, and as you browse the web, you can “pin” the images that catch your eye. You can also browse within Pinterest, and “repin” things you find on other people’s boards.

It didn’t take long for me to see that this was more than a time sink.

Pinterest is a training tool for communicating with images. This is an important skill as we become a much more visual culture. Pinterest trains our eyes to scan for images that speak to us––ones we hope will communicate to others as we pin them to our boards.

Pinterest is also a useful discernment tool. I learned this when I created a “homestead” pinboard. Liesl and I dream of living on a piece of land, with a big garden, chickens and dairy goats, sustainable fuel sources, etc. We’re not ready to make that dream reality, but Pinterest is a place to “pin” images that make the big picture come into sharp focus.  (I’m also using this aspect of Pinterest to choose a new hair color, find my personal style, and other discernment issues of life-changing importance.)

Pinterest can be a spiritual practice.  I created a board that I called “center.” I started out with obvious searches: UU, Emerson, Thoreau, spirituality.  Then I started branching out: pictures of otters, an animal I feel connected to; otters led to a search for “flow”; labyrinths; things I long for, like strength, effort and power.  Each act of pinning was an affirmation of something important to me.  When I step back and look at an overview of the board, something inside me says, “Ahhh.  Yes.”

What about you? Are you using Pinterest? Is it a mindless time sink––or something more?

Why we need bridges

As an Alaskan, I’ve been reluctant to talk about bridges.  Conversation tends to turn toward a certain project linking Gravina Island with the town of Ketchikan, and that leads to, well, nowhere that I want to talk about.

But I’ve been thinking about digital immigrants, and how we’re an important bridge to the digital native future.

A few days ago I asked a digital native friend in the UU Social Media Lab, “Does learning new technology hurt your brain like it hurts mine?”  He replied, “No.”  And grinned.

I’m pretty comfortable online.  I blog.  I use Google Reader to read other blogs.  I live on Facebook (sometimes too much).  I have a Twitter account, but I’m not a convert yet.  I’ve just started to explore Tumblr.

But still, I’m not a native.  My mind does hurt when I start teaching myself something new.  The learning curve is steep.  I have to take a deep breath, and give myself frequent pep talks.

Here’s the thing, though.  People at AUUF think I know what I’m doing.  Question about Facebook?  Ask Heather.  How to start a blog?  Ask Heather.  What should we do with our website?  Ask Heather.

It’s kind of bizarre, actually.  My first encounter with computers was in the DOS era, where people who were good with computers were math geeks.  If you’d told me then that two decades later people would think I was good at computers, I wouldn’t have believed you.  I was a word person, not a math/computer person.

So we come back to bridges, and why we need them.  Between the digital natives, and the digital aliens and tourists, are the digital immigrants. People who know how to learn new technology, even though it’s hard.  We learn from the digital natives, and translate for the aliens and tourists.

There are a heck of a lot of digital aliens and tourists in religious communities these days.  If the congregations we care about are going to survive to welcome unaffiliated digital natives, digital immigrants will need to recognize their role, step up, and fill it.

The aliens and tourists who ask for our help will say, “This is hard.  It’s confusing.  I feel like my brain’s going to explode.”  And we’ll reply, “Yes, I know.  But if you work through that, there’s good stuff on the other side.”

The ministry of reading

One of the gifts of my TV-free childhood was that I spent a lot of time reading. This was less true of my siblings, but for me, I filled with books the spaces my peers filled with television.

Too many children grow up without enough to eat.  I grew up feeling like there wasn’t enough to read.  I read and re-read all the books we owned, and made good use of our public library.

The more I read, the faster I read.  My mother was sure I wasn’t reading every word (and she was right–I think that I somehow take a snapshot of whole paragraphs, whole pages), but every time she quizzed me about the content of a book I was reading, I was able to answer her questions correctly.

As I move into my fifth decade (wow, writing that made me stop in my tracks), there is finally enough to read.  Books, yes.  But also innumerable blogs and other online content.

There was a time when clergy were among a town’s few well-read residents.  A minister often had a personal library, and shared ideas gleaned from that library and other reading with members of his congregation.  The minister was a conduit of learning and information.

Times have changed.  Literacy levels have risen dramatically since then.  Many people have personal libraries, access to public libraries, and to a torrent of online content, much of it free.

These changed times call for a new ministry of reading.  Not one limited to the clergy, but a shared ministry performed by all those called to it.

One of my heroes in this ministry of reading is Doug Muder, who writes The Weekly Sift.  Doug’s blog gathers the news of the week, explores it from a liberal perspective, and provides a bounty of links to the sources that informed his writing.

My own ministry of reading is wider, and less deep.  I’ve subscribed to 269 blogs in Google Reader.  I’ve “liked” a wide variety of pages on Facebook, and they send more information my way.  I have an app called Pulse on my iPod Touch, and I read more there.  I read the New York Times online, though my patterns may shift with the new pay-to-read policy.  I share the most interesting of all this reading on Facebook and Twitter (more the first, less the latter).

We live in a time of information overload.  Some of us have that time and inclination to sift through that information, gathering up the parts that interest us, the pieces that seem valuable, important.  And that is a ministry, a ministry of reading.

 

A community of lifelong learners

Yesterday at the Anchorage UU Fellowship I had a casual lunchtime conversation about technology with a small group of fellowship leaders.  I was the second youngest person at the table (and I just turned 40).

We talked about Skype, Go-to-Meeting, and Persony.  We talked about costs and benefits of using something like Persony, which would have a monthly fee.

One of the people at the table expressed deep reservations about all the digital devices that seem so disruptive.  Those concerns are quite valid.

I said that I believe the generations need to stay in touch with each other, learn from each other, help each other look out for pitfalls.  Older adults need to help digital natives remember to value face-to-face interpersonal skills; digital natives need to serve as tour guides to the brave new world that is coming, like it or not.

Maybe I should say that it has already come.

Last night on PBS I watched Digital Media:  New Learners of the 21st Century.

To say that I was blown away would be an understatement.  And I’m pretty tech-savvy.

Here are a few things I realized that relate to Unitarian Universalism.

The cost-benefit analysis at yesterday’s lunch table had it backwards.  We were asking, “What are the benefits of this technology to the people who have already found Unitarian Universalism in Anchorage? Are those benefits worth the cost?”

What we should have been looking at is the cost of doing nothing.

If those of us who are not digital natives refuse to throw ourselves into intensive, deliberate learning of this new language, this new culture, this new way of life, then we will be unable to pass on our faith to a new generation.

And not only that.  We’re going to have to let the kids drive.

We’re going to have to really believe that inherent worth and dignity begins before age 35.

Our vision of shared ministry will have to expand dramatically to include the ministry of younger minds.

We have not been particularly good at this as a movement.  Our usual pattern is to reject the gifts of a new generation, only to have them come in the back door anyway, completely transforming our way of life.

Maybe it’s time to do something new.  Maybe it’s time for more graceful and intentional generational transitions.

Change happens.  We waste an inordinate amount of energy fighting it.  What would happen if we chose to cooperate with change, to shape it gently, like a pot on the wheel?

 

You Are Not Who You Were

I almost failed typing in high school.  It was a shock to my goody-two-shoes honor-roll self.  But now, freed from the failure-creating restraints of a typewriter without a correction tape, I type fast enough to be paid to do so.

Our family had a computer before we had a TV (and that’s another story), and I never thought of myself as being particularly good at it.  In fact, I thought I was terrible at it.  But now that we’ve moved beyond computers-for-programmers, I’ve learned enough about computers that people actually ask me for help.  On Sunday, our minister at the Anchorage UU Fellowship described the workshop on social networking that she’d attended at General Assembly, and she said, “Basically, they said we need to be on Facebook and I don’t know how to do that but I’ll ask Heather.”  I’m the Heather she was talking about.  Weird.

As a child, I was terrified of dogs.  I had very little experience with them, since we only kept the one dog we ever had for about 2.5 days.  Now I love (most) dogs, and I can actually get Brady to do most of the things I ask him to do.  A few weeks ago he learned “roll over.”

Like everyone else in my school district, my seventh grade electives were divided into four quarters, one quarter each for metal shop, wood shop, cooking and sewing.  Three guesses which one I liked, and was good at.  Did you guess cooking?  Ding, ding, ding!  We have a winner.

I grew up cooking with my mom.  Some of my earliest memories are of sitting the kitchen counter while she cooked and baked.  It was, for me, the best kind of learning–the kind you absorb, rather than consciously acquire.  Seventh grade cooking class just felt natural.

Sewing class, on the other hand, was more alien.  My mother also sewed–but I think she sewed out of obligation, rather than joy.  As I think about how she was when she sewed, it was with a determined concentration that just looked less fun than the creative chaos of the kitchen.

When my seventh grade self applied that determined concentration to sewing, it didn’t work out all that well.  I made a dress (light blue calico) that didn’t fit, and I never really liked.  And I made a stuffed pillow that was supposed to look like a surf board.

I didn’t like the precision that sewing required, and I had trouble keeping steady pressure on the foot pedal.  I decided that I just wasn’t any good at sewing, and I haven’t touched a sewing machine in the years since then.

Until today, when I unpacked this from its box:

It’s a Brother CS6000i, and it was an amazing bargain via Amazon.  I wanted a new creative outlet (crazy quilts), and I wanted to be able to mend and alter our clothes.  This model has an amazing option that tipped me over the edge:  I don’t have to use the foot pedal.  If you follow the link to its Amazon page, and watch the video there, you’ll see that there are buttons just above the foot for forward, backwards and speed control.  (Not only is that good for me, it means that my partner will be able to use the machine as well, without having to find a way around a foot pedal.  An accessible sewing machine, in more ways than one!)

I’m kind of afraid of my new sewing machine.  Well, not of the machine per se.  I’m afraid that I will still be terrible at sewing, and that my bargain will be an expensive doorstop.

But I’m choosing to believe the lessons I’ve learned from typing, computers and dogs:  I am not who I was.  And that, as Gandalf says in The Lord of the Rings, is an encouraging thought.