Som hardbarka ateist og skeptiker med Kardemommebyliberale verdier er det ironisk at jeg ofte ender opp med å forsvare kristne mot fordommer, ikke minst de skumle småkonservative miljøene som mener at tro handler om noe litt mer forpliktende enn å bare være et “godt menneske”.  Årsaken er ikke at jeg liker det de står for, men at jeg faktisk kjenner en god del av disse folkene, og vokste opp som en av dem.

Når noen kommer med spydigheter om frådende fanatiske mørkemenn, er jeg nødt til å rette på dem.  Samme hvor mye jeg ellers deler verdiene deres, så er faktaene deres feil.

Jeg har faktisk aldri møtt noen som ikke har vært i dette miljøet selv som forstår hva det betyr å være personlig kristen i Norge i dag.  Nesten alt du leser om norske kristne i mediene er ganske slurvete.

Et eksempel er denne artikkelen av Heidi Helene Sveen, om friskoler, som ber leseren forestille seg hvor utrolig fryktelig det må være å gå rundt som barn og tro at Jesus kan se inn i hjertet ditt.  Ja, skrekk og gru.

Jeg har postet et svar her.  Se også en lignende debatt hos Øyvind Strømmen.

I begge tilfellene er det snakk om smarte, kunnskapsrike mennesker – som ikke aner hvordan verden ser ut for de de kritiserer.  Det finnes det egentlig ingen unskyldning for.  Et godt sted å starte er å spørre, og lytte.  (Og så gjerne kritisere etterpå.  For de tar jo feil, de kristne.)

It may just be me, but here are some media and technology ideas that right now feel a bit dated.  Not much, just enough that I pause a little when I encounter them, and think “yes, but ..”:

- That everything must be connected with social media.  That there must always be a “tweet this” or “like this” button, everywhere.  (But whenever I see a Facebook box that says “hey, we notice you’re visiting this site – here are some of your friends who like it too!” it freaks me out.)

- That everything must have an URL.

- That everything must be free, or noone will care.

- That everything must be personalizable.  (I don’t want my search results and App Store bestseller lists adapted to where I live.  I do want to pick and choose from media sources, but I want each of them to speak with their own voice, not ask me what I want to hear about.)

- That the best sources of information are automated or crowd-sourced.

It’s not new that I am skeptical of these ideas.  What’s new is that they now feel over-extended as well, and their promoters just haven’t discovered it yet.  Again, it may be just me.  But here is one thing that does not feel dated:

- Anything, no matter the format, that is well-written, well-made, well-selected, well-presented, by individuals with a vision of what they want to create.

There’s not necessarily a conflict here.  It’s about what feels relevant.  The last one does, more than ever.  None of the others do.

One thing I think about these days is which, if any, media reality I belong to.  It used to be simple.  When I started blogging in 2001 I lived at the border between two media realities: The Norwegian news media, and the emerging web media.  As I saw it the two realities were in conflict, but I had a clear picture of where they stood in relation to each other, and I in relation to them.

Now .. In the last 24 hours alone, I’ve: 1) Read two Danish and Norwegian newspapers on the iPad, 2) watched old episodes of the British news comedy show Have I Got News For You, 3) browsed YouTube clips from the protests in Egypt, (some of them from Al Jazeera English, the world’s best news channel), 4) paid half attention to Twitter, (the excitable hive mind that sometimes tells you something amazingly interesting), 5) browsed through some opinionated blog entries, 6) and checked for new videos on Fora.tv.

Other days are different, but similarly fragmented.  What strikes me is that I don’t know where all these media stand in relation to each other.  There is no one bigger conversation.  Partly the same topics, but not the same conversation, just many small ones that each insist on being the one that matters.

I think I’m describing something that always was, but noticing it, that’s new.  The vertigo from realizing that you don’t quite know where you are in relation to everything else. I can’t decide if this is a temporary confusion, or a higher form of media consumption.

The first law of technological change is that nobody knows what is possible or profitable, so you can either get right in there and experiment, or wait a few years and emulate the winners.  Now that the first generation of newspapers and magazines for the iPad have been released, the backseat drivers are emerging, saying that it won’t work, it won’t pay, and why is everyone so obsessed with this overhyped iPad thing anyway?

Are they right?  I have no idea.  Nobody does, and it’s a bit pointless to speculate.  Media companies must choose: Experiment, or wait.  High risk, high reward, or low risk, low reward.  Whatever their choice is, it’s too soon to tell.  What matters right now is your subjective feelings as a user.

Now that I’ve tried it, I see why media companies are excited about the iPad.  I wouldn’t mind paying for news content in this form.  But I also realize that this isn’t about the iPad as a revolutionary media device.  It’s about the iPad as a wedge, that can introduce the habit of paying for digital news.  First on tablets, then on smart phones, and finally on the web itself.

Some say that they would never pay for digital news.  I think they’re lying.  Or if not, they’re morally wrong.  It offends me, this idea that good writing isn’t worth paying for.  I don’t know what will work, (and neither do you), but I root for anyone who tries. And the iPad is an interesting place to try it.

Jeg skriver at det er vanskelig å oppsummere 2010, og umulig å si noe smart om 2011, i en kommentar hos Liberaleren.

Jeg har en artikkel på Minervas nettsider om å skille mellom fakta og prinsipper i politiske debatter:

Politiske debatter går gjennom tre faser. De starter med utskjelling og latterliggjøring. Her slutter de som regel også, men hvis debattantene er ivrige nok beveger debatten seg til fase 2, hvor man diskuterer fakta: Jeg mener at verden ser slik ut, du mener derimot den ser slik ut.

Debatten stopper fort opp her også, eller den beveger seg tilbake til utskjellingsfasen, men hvis debattantene er ekstra ivrige og saklige borer man seg dypere ned i emnet, og ender opp i den tredje og mest verdifulle fasen, hvor man diskuterer prinsipper.

Les resten hos Minerva.

I hate iTunes.  Not because I have paranoid fantasies about Steve Jobs and the way he unfairly gets all this really good press, (“all Apple does is consistenly releasing excellent devices that everyone likes, what’s so great about that?  Ptui!”)

I hate it because it has so many good qualities, combined with so many bad.  The good ones are the good qualities of all Apple products.  It’s simple and obvious to use iTunes in a lot of powerful ways.  The bad ones are the bad qualities of all old, bloated software products.  Like the way you click, and five seconds later something happens.  Maybe.  Or the way once a track has been added, it can’t ever be deleted, even if you delete the file.

But finding a replacement isn’t easy either.  I’ve tested a few.  They have none of iTunes’ bad qualities, but also very few of its good ones.  For instance, there’s MediaMonkey, which was obviously designed by a bunch of programmers who wanted to cram every single feature anyone could ever want into the UI.  And you can extend it in any way you want.  Translated, this means that if there is a feature you miss from iTunes, you’ll have to scour the MediaMonkey forums for an addon, then write your own SQL code to customize it.

I’ll stick with iTunes.  For now.  But I advise Apple to outsource iTunes to someone who has experience with cleaning up old bloated software.  Like, say .. the Office team at Microsoft?

There are two reasons you need to watch Milton Friedman’s 1980 documentary series Free to Choose.  The first reason is that it lays out clearly a principled, coherent approach to free market capitalism, and whatever you may think about those views there is no excuse to be ignorant about what the views you disagree with actually are.

The second reason is historical.  Free to Choose is basically a half-implemented blueprint for the last 30 years.  It captures a moment in time when political momentum was shifting to the right.  The next decades would give us deregulation, globalization, the end of Communism – basically, the world we live in today.  And Free to Choose is the mission statement of that process.

You see this moment most clearly in the debates that follow each program, where Friedman defends his ideas against intellectuals, union leaders, business people, politicians, etc., even one or two genuine socialists.  The debates are surprisingly interesting, they feel fresh, not like the festering wound such debates are today.  But more than that they show the high water mark of a particular approach to leftism, which over-extended itself, and had to retreat and regroup, giving us the savvier third way leftists of today.

You can watch Free to Choose here.  Watch out for a young(er) Donald Rumsfeld and Thomas Sowell.  For extra fun, look up all the names you see in the debates on Wikipedia, to find out how the next decades would treat them.

It’s said that people grow more moderate and conservative in their beliefs as they grow older.  I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s say it is.

The implication is that this comes from gaining experience.  You start out with all sorts of new ideas, and then you learn that you can’t change everything, that there are hidden forces that resist purposeful change, forces that follow their own rules.  And you learn that beautiful ideas can look horrible in real life, and that things could easily be worse than they are.  Moderation and conservatism is the sane response to that.

That’s the belief, anyway.  I disagree.  I think there’s another factor: Cowardice.  Anyone who becomes more moderate in all things is not becoming wiser, they’re just learning that any time you believe in a principle, or see things differently from everyone else, you risk making a fool of yourself.  So it’s safer not to do that.

What experience actually tells us, if we listen, is that this idea is impractical, and this principle needs to be moderated, but that idea is correct whatever anyone says, and when it comes to that principle there can be no talk of moderation.  Young people are random fanatics, they seize on whatever powerful idea comes their way.  Wisdom is to be a selective fanatic: Moderate in some things, unbending in others.

Experience can help us to calibrate that balance.  Or it can turn us into abuse victims, hiding behind a safe shell of middle-of-the-road beliefs.