Embedded Files
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
AR 21:25 - Snapchat's viral guru mixes "confession and sermon"
In this issue:
CULTURE - which self-help guru is more popular with millennials than The Big Bang Theory (the most-watched show on TV)?
NEW AGE MOVEMENT - while "Who speaks for Islam?" is disputed, "Who speaks for God?" is an even more strategic question
SCIENCE - indications of humility will be gratefully received. In their absence, humiliation often follows
Apologia Report 21:25 (1,298)
July 15, 2016
CULTURE
"The Self-Help Sage of Snapchat" by Sam Lansky, who profiles D.J. Khaled for Time magazine (May 16 '16, pp46-49). Lansky describes Khaled as a hip-hop artist who has successfully transitioned himself into a viral guru by providing "a mix of confession and sermon."
His audience? "According to tracking firm comScore, 45% of Snapchat users are 18 to 24 years old, compared with 19% for Twitter and 16% on Facebook. And Khaled's affirmations of self-reliance and perseverance seem tailor-made for millennials, who according to Pew surveys are more optimistic about their economic outlook and the country's prospects than Gen X-ers and baby boomers. ...
"Born Khaled Mohamed Khaled in New Orleans to Palestinian parents, Khaled grew up Muslim. ...
"Then came Snapchat. First released in 2011, the app distinguishes itself from other social-media platforms by the ephemerality of its messages. 'Snaps' - photos or short videos - disappear after just a few seconds, which made it popular among teenagers, including some who used it to send racy selfies and others for whom it served simply as a visual status update. ...
"Khaled first started gaining attention for his Snapchat feed in 2015. ...
"Forbes estimates that Khaled earned $7 million in 2014. ...
"Unlike on Instagram and Twitter, where posts often carry hashtags like #ad and #spon to denote that a celebrity was paid for an endorsement, on Snapchat it's harder to tell what's for-profit and what's not. ...
"How popular is [Khaled]? Snapchat doesn't make data publicly available on the viewership of users' stories, but recently he's averaged 6 million viewers per snap, mostly millennials. That's more than the millennial viewership of The Big Bang Theory - the most-watched show on television. ...
"[I]t is tempting to dismiss Khaled's relentless optimism as calculated performance. But like the most successful mass gurus, he seems to believe in his own teaching. He does not go off message. And his belief system is vague enough that it can be applied to anything. ...
"Whether the fickle nature of social-media platforms - Snapchat's longevity is by no means assured - could hurt, Khaled doesn't seem to factor. 'I want to let people know, like, "Yo, there's sunshine on the other side. Don't stop. Don't give up. Never surrender. Never fold. Keep pushing. Go hard."'"
Lansky concludes: "The soliloquy wears me down. Eventually, I give in and let myself feel a little bit uplifted. After all, I know it'll disappear in a few seconds." Cover story. [3]
NEW AGE MOVEMENT
God: An Autobiography, by Jerry L. Martin [1] -- With it easier than ever to self-publish in the digital age, when your book is less than a year old and Amazon won't sell it directly, you can usually take that as an indication that its profitability is doubtful.
Harriet Hall, writing for Skeptical Inquirer (40:3 - 2016, pp60-62), unsurprisingly reports that Martin is hallucinating when he describes how God speaks to him. "Jerry Martin was raised as a Christian but had been an agnostic ever since college." Then he fell in love and "was so ecstatically happy he suddenly felt the need to give thanks in prayer." Unfortunately, things went south from there.
"At one point, Martin decided to contact Jesus' mother, Mary, to ask her advice about what present to give his wife for Valentine's Day. ... He ended up getting his gift advice from a terrestrial friend.
"The voice consistently comes from him whenever he prays, and he converses with it without speaking out loud. The voice explains that God is not exactly omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent [sic], or unchanging." Martin says that God "is still trying to learn 'how to be effective in bringing man forward.' God is slowly evolving and he suffers and needs people for companionship. ...
"Reincarnation is true, Martin is told [by God], but it's not what we think it is. ... The voice tells him that there is to be a new project to develop a holistic world theology, fitting all the separate religious traditions together in a meaningful way. [Hmm, where have we heard THAT before?] And guess who has been chosen to start on that project as soon as he finishes writing God's biography? ... When [Martin] asks for clarification, the voice tells him not to get hung up on details, to stop thinking, and stop asking rational questions."
Hall makes interesting observations: "He stopped praying for a year when he was ill and again for six months when some of the voice's ideas began to stress him." Martin's expressions are reminiscent of New Age-speak: "Being facing Being, not necessarily speaking but simply facing, is what personhood is." "Gravity is a kind of love." "The universe is one great act of love." "Subjectivity desires to objectify itself. ...
"The voice tells [Martin] it's possible to talk to the dead, and he is impressed when his dead brother appears to him in a dream." It's not clear how "the dead stay around to talk to the living rather than being immediately recycled into reincarnations." [2]
According to his web site <www.godanautobiography.com>, Martin is "a philosophy professor and served as head of the philosophy department at the University of Colorado at Boulder and of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to scholarly articles on epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and public policy, he wrote reports on education that received national attention and was invited to testify before Congress."
SCIENCE
Comprehending "the final frontier" remains embarrassingly out of reach for astrophysicists and astronomers alike. After all, space exploration is hardly a mature field of study. New discoveries routinely eclipse current understanding.
That hardly seems to dampen enthusiasm. On May 11th, space.com announced: "NASA Finds 1,284 Alien Planets, Biggest Haul Yet, with Kepler Space Telescope" by Mike Wall <www.goo.gl/TgY5OY> (subtitled "The number of known alien planets has just gone up by more than 60 percent").
Facing this kind of exuberance, predictions of habitable options for Earth will not become realistic anytime soon. Take Kepler mission scientist Natalie Batalha of NASA's Ames Research Center <nasa.gov/centers/ames/home> in Moffett Field, California, who gushes: "You can see, doing the math, that you're talking about tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-sized planets out there in the galaxy." In the Information Age, all claims attract competitive views in direct relation to the magnitude of their significance. [See AR 21:22, <www.goo.gl/y9Y6ZL>]
A little humility is always refreshing when discussing scientific progress. And, in the absence of humility, realism - intended or not - can ameliorate the need. Please read the following instructions before proceeding: A) Begin with title, B) Read body copy of item which follows, C) Return to "A."
The June 13 BBC online "News" page tagline reads "We know how big the Universe is." The article itself is titled "It took centuries, but now we know the size of the Universe." Uh huh. Toward the end of this very interesting and lengthy discussion we read: "That is our best measurement for the radius of the observable Universe. Doubling it, of course, gives the diameter: 93 billion light years." Can you get your head around that?
Prepare for a jump to light-speed. The author, Chris Baraniuk, refers to a quest "to see if they [scientists] could work out anything about the shape of the whole Universe. The result, after using computer algorithms to look for meaningful patterns in the data, was a new estimate. The whole Universe is at least 250 times as large as the observable Universe." Any questions?
"But estimates and models aside, we just do not know."
Hold it! Didn't the title indicate the exact opposite? Apparently someone pointed this out to the BBC, because that last line has since been deleted. <www.goo.gl/NGerFf>
-------
SOURCES: Monographs
1 - God: An Autobiography, by Jerry L. Martin (Caladium, 2016, hardcover, 376 pages) <www.goo.gl/wRXOeD>
------
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse