Host youre watching booktv on cspan2 on location malibu california as part of the university serious where we visit colleges and talk to professors or also authors. Joining us now is Craig Detweiler with the book igods how technology shapes our spiritual and social lives before we get into that what you teach . A film maker first. I teach production coming film writing and help to navigate the entertainment industry. Host also director for the center of the entertainment. Is that part of your professorship . It is a think tank, media and culture impact each other onu both sides how it shapes the conversation and how students can figure out that i wanted to figure out how they built their software with their relationship to each other. And you quote from your theology my bet it is technology is the better mayor of guide it is a pitcher of cheeses with a laptop. He has the whole world in his hand is what were thinking. [laughter] so he is one of the early editors of wired magazine lookin
Sport new all of sort through all of the prompts, all of the interruptions, all of the things tugging at our attention, and how do we sort out whats urgent perhaps from what matters . Host you write jesus was more than a carpenter, he was a techie. [laughter] guest indeed. Well, its funny, you know, Everybody Knows in a sense that jesus was the son of a carpenter. They dont realize that that greek word for carpenter is actually the word tecton. So it could be, you know, as we enter this new century that we will come to think of jesus as more than maybe somebody, you know, good with his hands, a handyman type of person, but was he more of a builder . Was he more of a designer . Was he more of an engineer . Maybe if we want to understand what jesus looks like, we maybe need to look not to the front of the auditorium, but to the back of the auditorium. Maybe hes that person with a flashlighting and always figuring out how to tweak things and fix things. Host are are we idolizing technolog
Guest im actually teaching a course out here in the school of Public Policy on saudi arabia, a subject about which i wrote the book, and they invited me to teach, and i have never actually taught. But it was great fun. The semester is coming to a close here pretty soon, but it was a lot of fun. Host what did you learn as a teacher there your students . Be from your students . Guest they ask things, they clearly have a, you know, a perspective i dont have since im three times their age. [laughter] so, you know, thats probably the most interesting thing, just seeing what young people are interested in and the way they look at something. Host whens the first time you went to saudi arabia . Guest 1978. When i became Diplomatic Correspondent for the wall street journal. I had never been to the middle east, and sadat had just been to jerusalem, so that was, the middle east was kind of the hottest, even more than the soviet Union Foreign policy issue. So i bought myself an excursion ticket fo
Been doing this for a long time and i have been doing this since before there were laws in this space so there were some responsibility but in a regular talk i give to businesses right now is whether your data obligations because everybody has them now trade 47 states have passed certain data loss. Kentucky just past one this last month to come into the rest of the world. But its interesting, you have those in california has done things such as almost having a right to erase your past while on social media if you were a teenager. So god forbid any of us would have said things we were embarrassed about when we were a teenager and or posted them on line. That is where the California Legislature is coming from. Is a coming from the police . A little bit of both but theres a lot coming from the state legislature. Our good friends across the street here have been looking at this issue and have 20 or 30 acts in the statutes and the space up there looking at year after year after year but the
Leave our phones behind. We live here in california. And so its an station might be to take it to the beach. We live here in california and so the temptation might be to take that phone to the beach but isnt that supposed to be a time away, a time apart, time to think, time to not be interrupted, time to wander. Theres a need for space in our lives, too i guess make room to be surprised by whats in front of us rather than this thing that is sort of telling us whats next. Host is setup to do . Guest oh its hard to separate ourselves from technology. I have an assignment in class where i asked the students to put it away for 24 hours, to have no cell phone use, put away their computers in their laptops in a Television Set and it almost drives them crazy. They are like how can i possibly do this . My parents will wonder what am i doing, where am i . Get what they discover is they might begin that activity feeling very hairy but as they turn off they actually have more space and they sudde