Message from the President

I have a confession to make. I have never seen a Future Shop, Radio Shack, or electronic gadget store that I did not want to enter. I am a tech junkie. I never follow the instructions, and I distinguish little between what I need and what I want.

I come by it honestly. It is in my DNA, inherited from my parents—particularly my dad. I remember as a young boy seeing my father enter the house with a box under his arm. It contained one of the first cassette tape recorders; he had discovered it at a trade show in New York. He let me play with it, and finally had to buy a second one because I was using it all the time.

A few years later, when I was having trouble in school, this tape recorder saved my academic career. With a short attention span, it became increasingly difficult for me to concentrate. In fact, during lectures I often lapsed quickly into conversations with my neighbouring students. Needless to say, I was a teacher’s nightmare.

My mother came up with a great idea. Using the tape recorder, she taught me how to tape lectures so that they could be played back later when I was home. It proved so successful that I used it right into university—developing a library of audiotaped notes rather than written ones.

My point is simple. Technology is not all bad, but it does change things. The social media tsunami and technological advances of the last years are changing the way we do things and even the way we relate to others. The challenge is to understand how we navigate and negotiate both the changes and their impact on our lives. I heard Dr. Peggy Kendall, a professor of communication studies, speak to this. She said, “We risk turning into pancake people, spread wide and thin as we connect with the vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Let us be clear. We live in a connected world and frankly there is no going back. The number of people using Facebook has doubled since 2008. Close to 50% of all North Americans use it, and while the average user is 38-years-old even my 90-year-old father has mused about whether or not he should join. The number of Twitter accounts increases by 300,000 per day, and 640 Tweets are generated per second.

In the early days of any new technology, we all think the rules have changed; but the fact is, only the technology has changed—the rules may still be the same. In any navigating and negotiating of new things, it is critical to understand what the compass points are that make navigating possible—compass points of values, virtues, and commitments. One person described it this way, “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” From my point of view, the challenge is to know how to go deeper, for that is the framework to which our faith calls us.