The Digital Desires Inbox, Volume 1: Taken by the Tetris Blocks, Conquered by Clippy, Invaded by the iWatch

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It’s time for the church to renew that resistance today, but to do so with new attentiveness to what makes our age unique, and to first understand how digital media shapes and forms and deforms us. That’s the goal for our time together. And I think the best way to approach this entire conversation today, in our culture, is to frame it in terms of spectacles. Our Collective Gaze brunettes women digital desire magazine faces rilee marks natural lighting 1920x1200 People Girl HD Art Paris Haute Couture Week: Striking runway looks from Gaurav Gupta’s Vedic-inspired Fall/Winter 2023-... World AI will lead to an unavoidable market crash, cause 'massive' financial crisis warns Wall Street watchdog Is Harnaaz Sandhu dating Veer Pahariya? The duo raises eyebrows with their joint appearance at Jio W...

A spectacle is a moment of time, of varying length, in which a collective gaze is fixed on some specific image, or video, or event. A spectacle is something that captures human attention, an instant when our eyes and brains focus and fixate on something projected at us. In an outrage society like ours, spectacles are often controversies — the latest scandal in sports, entertainment, or politics. We need to give Christians the tools they need to evaluate the spiritual impact of digital media on the health of their own hearts. Here are eight diagnostic questions you can use and share: Biz: You’ve both been confronted with people being rude about the fact that you’re making music about things they don’t think a woman should make music about.Alia Bhatt, Ranbir Kapoor, Malaika Arora, Ranveer Singh and other celebs stun at Manish Malhotra's s... brunettes women models digital desire magazine closed eyes faces looking down hair in face sally cha People Models Female HD Art

Now, all of this seems like a bunch of harmless fun, until we realize that every spectacle — get this — every spectacle wants something from us. Every spectacle makes demands on us. So, what do our spectacles want from us? This, I think, is a huge reality that a lot of us fail to see. blondes women models short hair digital desire magazine faces hayden hawkens 1920x1200 People Short hair HD ArtSwades' actress Gayatri Joshi and her husband Vikas Oberoi make FIRST public appearance after Italy... Isabella: There aren’t a lot of women in reggaeton. Especially in Honduras, the only recognized reggaeton artist is one guy. There are amazing woman producers, but they’re hard to find, especially Latina producers. But it’s growing, and it’s inspiring to see [that growth] and to infiltrate this man’s world. Church leaders are called to reecho this plea from the heavens: Listen! Listen! Listen until it hurts! Give Christ your life-attention, not in tweet-by-tweet scattered glances. Focus on him in sustained discipline as if your life depends on it, as if you will drift away if you lose sight of this North Star. Controversy in any form makes for a captivating spectacle to grab millions of eyes. And as our media gets faster and faster, it becomes more fragmented. Now the most miniscule public slip of the tongue or passive-aggressive celebrity comment or hypocritical political image can become a spectacle. More collectively, spectacles take the form of public protests and riots framed for the camera. So, a spectacle is some moment captured and published to hold a collective gaze for a particular purpose.

We dare not let the greatness of Jesus Christ get lost on our affections. This is one of the greatest threats to Christians in the digital age. It’s as easy as giving our affections over to this age of the visible spectacle — to this attention economy — and our delight in Christ will deteriorate. We will drift. And that drift, away from Christ, for digital thrills, is the worst trade in the universe — to turn away from God’s great Spectacle in favor of the next little buzz of media offered by the world.

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Isabella: It’s [all] so destroyed by the algorithm and censorship. What is the ultimate social media? Where is it going? I think it’s all about [finding] ways of making things tangible and easier to absorb because now everything’s so fast. You can’t fully grasp art in the way that it should be. Isabella: It’s such propaganda. There are so many more ways to make a change in real life with these issues and to actually heal people. It’s so performative to always be talking about all these issues [only] online.

Like Grey, Lovestory understands the modality of desire—the many different shapes it takes, how gritty and dark it can get, and how funny it can all seem after the moment’s passed. “Love can be nasty and violent, it’s not always a sugary fairytale,” says Lovestory of the passionate stories behind her songs. “Sex is liberating and the most primal creative expression, but this same feeling can be found in other sides of life, not everything sexy is about sex.” Recently, Lovestory was shot by Richard Kern, the legendary downtown New York photographer known for his transgressive portraits of unvarnished female sexuality and an early collaborator of Grey’s. Isabella: People don’t know how to really be personable or social anymore. Social media can be so fake. First of all, [people] believe everything they read, then they cancel people. It’s like they get this fake rulebook of who’s a good person and who’s a bad person. That’s [what I like about] music. It’s so accessible—everybody can heal through it and everybody can connect through it. It’s not elitist. Coming from Honduras, I feel like music is the most healing thing for communities and for people to connect to each other. If then you have been raised with Christ [that’s the condition — an inner man that has been resurrected from the dead — if that has happened, if you are regenerated, then], seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Asian Games 2023 closing ceremony: PR Sreejesh leads India as flag-bearer after nation's record-meda...As an individual, I’ve also tried to find ways to reconnect and communicate desire and empowerment in new ways outside of social media, where the goal is to get you to stay embedded in these platforms. I’ve been thinking of ways to create a more tactile object. How do you give something tangible to people that will give them a lasting impression that isn’t just a photo they like and scroll on from? Despite heavy regulations by most Asian countries, social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Meta are very keen on expanding into the e-commerce segment. Meta, YouTube and TikTok are in fact looking for special licence to set up their systems From one angle, the age of digital spectacles is all about wealth, advertising, coercion, popularity, and grabbing more and more attention from us. But even more problematic, the digital spectacles do something worse, worse because of what we, sinners, do with those spectacles. At root, sinners feed on diversions to escape God. This is the root problem I mentioned at the start.