Passing Digital Heirlooms
Recently, my 1st generation iPad was gifted to my 2 year old niece as a birthday gift. Likewise, in faith communities, its not just fatih that’s passed on, but heirlooms and sacramentals too. Is there space in digital faith expressions for the same kind of bequeathing we see in the offline world?
It was only a few years ago when I held my niece in my hands for the first time and had my sister take the photo from across the hospital room. As I held her, I knew that not only was I holding the future of our world, but also someone who’d take from me many tools, behaviors, and characteristics that would help her define her life. She’s just turned two. And that little lady is learning about life at a pace that’s amazing.
In an effort to cultivate that, I gifted her my 1st generation iPad. She’s using it to play various learning games — one of which has her using a stylus and game to teach her how to write. She’s taken an icon of my time and is using it to create and express her own understanding of reality.
This year will be the 10th year of attention paid to a space called mobile ministry (#mobmin). As I’ve matured in this space, matured in this field, I’ve noticed a tendency for a specific kind of action to come after a sense that things need to change: I give stuff away. Usually, its a mobile device, sometimes its a piece of media (app, book, music, database). But, in those moments where I recognize that I need to grow, there’s this purge which happens where the thing I’ve been attached to is gifted to another and they get a chance to create life with it. Many times, that gifting also comes with some kind of leading or training. The device is given, and some part of my life is given with it.
In the Christian space, we’ve got these heirlooms. Sometimes its a family bible, or a necklace, or even a suite of sacramentals — objects which represent some favored area of the faith that’s been blessed or ascribed to be holy or santified. I wonder about the digital faith space and whether we can continue such practices, especially when devices and services are so temporary, siloed, and attached to us personally.
I struggled with this giving away of my iPad. It was with this device that I launched into doing MMM full-time. It was the device that reignited drawing. It was the device that helped me to disconnect from mobile long enough to look at life around me. In a real sense, I grew and I wanted those lessons I’ve learned to go along to my niece when she received that tablet.
I’d want her to gain some benefit towards using the tablet — but there was little that I could do towards giving her aspects of the faith I’ve been growing in since having it. She’s not old enough to venture into Evernote, Dropbox or Flickr so that she could see my sketchnotes or read my notes from sermons and bible studies. She could enjoy the device, but until I could spend time with her (and she grew to that mental point), those aspects of mobile-enabled faith would be lost.
When we talk about faith in digital spaces, we often talk about broadcasting content, being a place where questions can be answered, and sometimes finding connections to others who believe like we do. But, we rarely talk about where this digital stuff goes later. There were several faith communities before Facebook — where did those people, their lessons, and their expressions go? To those who had been doing mobile ministry before there was even the Palm Treo, what happened to their notes in those Bible apps? What about this digitally-lived faith goes forward to the next generation?
My niece is learning how to write letters. The digital device gifted to her will one day show her the things her uncle also created on that device — if it doesn’t break first (she is 2). And when she sees her drawings next to mine, a connection to us will be further cemented. And when she reads her writings alongside mine she’ll question why I was so opinionated or why I’d not written that great novel. When she’s able to receive my digital output, she’ll ask questions of my activities and my faith — and hopefully, I’ll be around to answer.
Should we expect from all of our digital faith activities similar? That someone in a future generation can look at our digital trails and compare how we lived and thought to what they live and think about? I think so. I think generations to come would expect nothing less for that connection. However, I don’t know that we see devices, services, and experiences with that kind of weight now. At least, not all of us. Scratches on a case are more than a sign of being clumsy, its a sign that the device was lived with. Are there scratches in our digital faith expressions which are a similar sign?
