Someone told me they found Tikkun Daily confusing last week. People usually tell me it’s a beautiful site, so I wanted to know more from her.

I took her on a quick tour of the page — the posts, how to follow one contributor by clicking on their byline so all their posts come up, the photos of contributors on the home page, the art gallery, and the links at top right to the magazine articles. I didn’t even get to the themes you can click on in the “tag cloud” in the right hand column (larger words mean more mentions of the word in the tags that we bloggers add to our posts) or other goodies.

She said she thought it looked fine and it had probably been her ADD that had made it hard to focus long enough to get it.

In an article about internet addiction in the paper yesterday I read that:

Dr. John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, uses the term “acquired attention deficit disorder” to describe the way technology is rewiring the modern brain.

In this and the companion piece we learn that 20% of people under age 35 in one poll had ended a relationship because their partner spent too much time on a mobile device. And:

“The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets,” Aboujaoude [director of Stanford University's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic] said, “the less patient we will be with more complex, more meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with any depth and nuance.”

Now refer to all those other scary stories you have heard about how the internet is connecting us digitally but not face to face in the way that count, and we come to this question: by sucking would be healers and transformers of the world into reading a blog that is tailormade for them, aren’t we just aiding and abetting this whole anti-community anti-thought anti-spiritual technology?

The cheap answer is to say that no doubt people said the same to Gutenberg. The fact is that printed books did lead to major losses as well as gains: loss of memorization, and a drive towards linear thinking and logic (a, b, c, and then a. causes b. causes c. and so on) which has facilitated fanaticisms as well as science. Children had to learn to still their kinetic selves to read and the whole emotionally repressed middle class culture took shape from that, building the “iron cage” of modern rational work discipline that extends into my job too and gives me the Monday morning blues right now. OK, it has been hugely productive, but our descendants may ask, productive of what: science out of control, global weirding, eco-destruction? Gains come with losses.

Some of these downsides of print may be lessened by digital arts, some exacerbated. The internet screen with its links and visual complexity, including 3D modeling, aids more ecological thinking (very little is linear — a, b, and c affect each other in complex feedback loops). Every living thing in the forest affects every other living thing in ways beyond calculating, except that we now are building the chaos theories and math, and acquiring the computing power to calculate some of it: which may teach us a little humility, perhaps. Then there’s this:

Fears that the Internet and other personal technologies are making Americans socially isolated are unfounded, according to a Pew Research Center report released Wednesday.

The study comes to the opposite conclusion: that people who use the Internet, instant messaging, mobile phones, photo sharing sites and social networks benefit from being more likely to have a larger, more diverse core of close confidants.

I actually don’t have a strong position on this myself. I am by nature contrary: if all my friends are saying “wo is us the internet is doom to spirituality and complex thinking” I am likely to research how it isn’t; and vice versa. I think the jury is out. I totally respect and support my friend Meredith Sabini at the Dream Institute of Northern California for giving up all computing devices and internet connections. Her cultural dreaming about the future has led her to that place and she is very happy about the life it has offered her, a life of deep personal and group connections.

What I do like about a blog like this, as compared to the print magazine we simultaneously produce, is the different kind of writing it makes possible. I wrote about this in The Naked Blogger, the very first post on Tikkun Daily. There are different ways of presenting a world view. One way is through carefully written and edited articles, offered occasionally (in Tikkun‘s case every two months). Another is through quicker, more spontaneous reactions to events and ideas. The latter is more like living with someone. When we talked about this last week, our newest blogger here, Hamza van Boom, suggested that Boswell’s famous Life of Samuel Johnson, in which he wrote down Johnson’s aphorisms and sayings over many years, was like a blog: and it is still read today.

Some writers do better with one medium, some with the other. I love this blogging myself: I find it less intimidating, more conversational, more like real life.

There is no one “spiritual progressive” worldview, and that may not be the best description for what we are doing here anyway. Some whom we feel strong affinity with don’t like those two words at all. By having various voices, all seeking to express what it means to them to be simultaneously spiritual and political, to act on the belief that we can create loving communities and a caring society in which everyone feels respected and cared for, we can build up some kind of reflection of that society here. We can let the dreamers and seekers and activists know that they have allies in unexpected places. We can build vision and connection with each other. It’s like the cafes that aided art movements and political connections of yore.

To be practical for a moment, we don’t know how long we can keep this up financially, and this whole blog is of course free to you, but not to us. So if you find it valuable and can support us, please do so by clicking on the subscribe, donate or join buttons at the right of our Tikkun home page, here.