Smartphones and the art of conversation: we only have a Bible because there wasn't sound recording technology...?

I just thought that this was a really intriguing thing. I hadn't come across it before and I'll be on the look out for it among the students I work with.

using the voice memo function on WhatsApp as a sort of dictaphone to “talk in turns” rather than hold “a live conversation” is now a thing

The title of the article that introduces this seems to be adding to the moral panic reaction. The actual article is actually better than that. But I did read this because I was wondering in what way I was going to disagree. And in relation to the sentence quoted above, I felt I could see how, in fact, this development might be viewed as a positive by users. Now, I'm not sure in what I'm about to write, whether I'm interpreting rightly in terms that users would recognise. What I'm offering is an interpretation of why I could imagine myself doing that.
Perhaps you might sympathise if I tell it this way: have you ever found that you wished that your conversation partner would stop interrupting and just let you say the whole thing in one go? Have you ever found that the data-bandwidth of your phone connection keeps meaning that you lose chunks of what the other person says because of your own interruption, cough, or background noise at your end forcing the connection to switch and choose between send and receive to the detriment of the conversation? (Because at that point you can't listen and speak at the same time). If you have then you have possibly come across the situation that this clever little trick may have been designed to overcome. Add to that the possibility that you are holding the conversation in conditions where interruptions are taking place (having to give change, get on the bus, etc) and it becomes a way to optimise communication. It also gives a way to listen again to parts to make sure you have got it right before you compose your own response. In fact it could helpfully slow down a conversation to proper thinking speed. It also gives the speaker the chance for a 'do-over' when something is not well expressed.
Far from an indicator of the end of civilisation, it may actually be the harbinger of better listening and speaking.
As Neil Postman and Andrew Crouch would remind us, though, we might do well also to consider the downsides: what is disabled or made harder by this. And I guess for some people it is easier to spot these. Probably it means that some of the joyous spontaneity of a lively conversation is deadened: that sense of mounting excitement as ideas and perspectives are shared and well received and a synchrony of thinking and feeling develops. What is also lost is the feedback of visual clues and verbal cues that as a speaker you have tried the patience of your listener(s) or that you have failed to convey your meaning and are puzzling your hearer(s) -or are angering them. Those feedback clues that enable us to adjust our speaking and self-presentation in order to communicate better and to rebalance rapport in the present moment.
If we think about what it is like to hear an answer-phone message, we get a clue also to how it might go. There is a slightly greater degree of 'objectivity' in the listening because we are less directly involved. For the speaker it is just a little bit harder to order our thoughts, but we do have to think a bit more about how what we are saying will be received because we don't have the visual and verbal cues to give us in-the-moment feedback. These factors will prove to have their plusses and minusses and we will have to evolve our practice to take account of them as they become apparent.
But the thing to remember is that it is the trying these things out that shows what is and isn't possible. If the things that it enables are useful -and more useful than the downsides are difficult, then the thing will develop and pick up its own etiquettes which will also affect the perceptions and notions of 'good practice', respect etc. So try it, wait and see if and how it is useful. It won't kill the art of conversation: there are too many pleasures in synchronous conversation for it to die. But it might be supplemented by this less synchronous form.
In Christian terms, I think I welcome the possibility of having a slow form of conversation where people can think about things less immediately. Being able to listen more fully and to meditate on what is being said and shared chimes well with a big stream of Christian thought over a long time. It can be a positive expression of loving neighbour by giving them space and consideration to express themselves and to give us a chance to respond better in loving attention and reply. It could be a school of re-ordering our responsiveness by giving us a chance to practice good replies and self-awareness at a speed we can think by initially -until our neural pathways have built a highway for charitable responding.
Perhaps too, it helps us to ponder what communication is and in doing so to think more about divine-human communication. While we are only too used to thinking about the word of God as something written, we have tended to forget that originally it was/is spoken, indeed performed. The Bible is a record of that (an inspired record and interpretation, but still somewhat second hand). So re-learning through a slightly strange medium what is involved in 'live' oral communication may benefit us in considering human-divine communication afresh. It may be worth considering that perhaps we only have a written Bible because there wasn't sound-recording technology ... ! ... ?

Have smartphones killed the art of conversation? | Technology | The Guardian:
And PS -see whether this article from four months later picks up the same thoughts.

Labelling, language and ethics

A recent twitter exchange reminded me that I have often been in discussions or even arguments where 'labelling' is thrown out at some point. It is often thrown out when one party feels that nuances are being lost or sometimes when someone is attempting to play a variety of victimhood trump card. The tweet that started me off re-musing about this was this:

Twitter / Notifications: Are all labels as attempts to describe another essentially acts of judgement? Label free speech?

To which I replied:

Of course: but 'judgment' understood as 'attempted discernment' vs 'prejudce'; some = self-take

And then also:

Meaning what by 'label'? Where does noun end & label begin? Speech acts by def are ltd gestures

What I was trying to gesture at with these necessarily brief responses (hey, they're tweets!) is that labels are, viewed from one angle, a way of referring to someone else. They are nouns. Sometimes they are nouns which those who are referred to are comfortable with or even choose for themselves. Sometimes, however, they are nouns that the refered-to dislike and would prefer not to be used. I sense that often 'labelling' is used to refer to this latter kind of noun-use. This is because nouns don't only have dispassionate meanings but also have emotional connotations which are part of their use-meaning and if the connotations are disparaging then they cannot be used equally by all parties to the dialogue equally: the use of a disparaging term will constantly be alienating and tension-building to at least one party.

The problem with the term 'labelling' is that it can get used as a catch-all term to try to disallow an(y) attempt to briefly characterise something that someone would rather not talk about at all even when there is no real negative connotation.

The solutions to the snarl ups, I think, are to find mutually acceptable terms where there is a genuine issue about a term and to remain aware that labels are 'limited gestures' and to be prepared to learn more fully and sympathetically about their referents.

Finding mutually acceptable terms is important. The solution here is not to disallow using any term at all: clearly if something is to be talked about, ways of refering need to be agreed. All language is about a communal agreement in order to carry meaning from mind to mind; it is mind reading by mediation and the mediation has to be a communally agreed instrument (vs Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's story). In fact languages are constantly in the process of being agreed, misagreed and disagreed, and it is in that dynamic linguistic-communal dialogue that accusations such as 'labelling' themselves make sense. They are a bid to steer the terms of the rhetoric.

Mutually acceptable terms is a way to recognise the bona fides of the parties in the discussion. To insist on using a disparaging term against objections is, in effect, to communicate contempt for the other. But note that the alternative is not to cease to give a label for that would mean ceasing to talk about the matter. No, the alternative to a disparaging label is to find a noun which is able to serve as a helpful token in conversation towards mutually-satisfactory ends.

The other dimension I mentioned above is to recognise the limitedness of labels. Actually, this is to recognise the limitedness of language and that 'labels' are actually a particular kind of noun (signifier, if you will). In short, what I mean by this is that I cannot convey to you the fulness of what is in my mind when I speak or write. Language is like using a two-dimensional artefact to try to convey a four-dimensional reality. It is 'lossy'.

To use language we have to choose a focus from the total of the (already limited) reality we are aware of and we have to find verbal gestures to help someone else find our focus. We then (in actual fact simultaneously) have to choose further dimensions of related bits of reality (usually our attitudes and reasons for interest are involved) to incorporate into the verbal gesturing. We do this drawing on the presumption of shared information in order to achieve the compression necessary to make a message. In effect we are hoping each time that from the limited information we can convey, the other mind will be able to reconstruct enough of our intentions for a part of our mind to be read through the medium of our speech act.

So it's no surprise that labels do not convey fully the reality of what is referred to. And since we are also inevitably conveying something of our attitudes, it is no surprise that in any community-crossing conversations, we may have to recognise that attitudes or beliefs encoded in our own usual use of the term may have to be challenged and re-negotiated for the purposes of civil and civilising conversation. Clearly this implies that the the problem is not the label itself, it is our unwillingness to be challenged and to accommodate others' views. In that we are at the edge of attitudinal matters to do with stereotyping, contempt, self-justification etc.

In the light of what I've just written, the "act of judgement" issue in the original tweet can be understood more clearly. Any use of language involves us in judging what to focus on, what is relevant, what attitudes to 'it' we convey, where lines of demarcation are to be drawn etc etc. We cannot speak without such judgements, or as I put it in response, "discernment". The question is what attitudes are being conveyed (and that includes both sent and received)? And it is the attitudes that are really in view. The problem is that the labels can themselves become the rhetorical point at issue rather than the attitudes. The easiest way around this is to try to remove the label by agreeing terms: either not to use a particular term or to mutually accept a term on the understanding that it is being used in a certain way.

Of course, part of the problem is that we hear linguistic usages in a sense through the ears of the communities we know. So the individual conversation also has to take account of the wider social context. So, while you and I might agree to use a term in a relatively neutral fashion for the sake of advancing our understanding, we also have to conduct the conversation knowing that others may hear it differently. And so, for the sake of taking the fruits of our better understanding (I would hope that might be the outcome) to our wider communities, we may be best to agree to use terms (labels) which would be best received by our respective communities and yet also have the best chance to convey to them the better understandings we arrive at and also to foster those communities in a wider inter-communal conversation.

So, in the conversation that began this reflection, I was eschewing the terms "conservative" and "liberal" in (popular) ecclesiological contexts. I was doing so as an attempt to agree different terms for conversation because I feel that these terms do not help me to think about the issues. They sound Political to me and that jars: I may be 'conservative' in terms of accepting a reasonably orthodox interpretation of Christian faith, but I tend to think that doing so implicates me in taking a far from conservative view of social matters. On the other hand "liberal" may better describe many of my attitudes to social issues, but not how I view doctrine, scripture, the relationship between God and world etc etc. So I tend to use the terms "orthodox" and "open" to try to signal that what I think is a linkage in the wider world between "conservative" faith and "Conservative" politics and between "liberal" politics and "liberal" faith is not in operation here.

I judge it is harder to change the terms in the wider world (for a variety of reasons) so it is easier to change my own self desgination and then to try to have the conversations about why I would want to do that. To me that is better than to have a sense or even the experience of being written off because of the label or of being unwittingly co-opted also because of the label. (It's embarrassing or anxiety-provoking to find oneself wanting to challenge someone who assumed that you shared some viewpoint of theirs).

I guess, with reference to the original tweet as presented above, that I do not think that "judgement" is necessarily negative or disparaging. It is possible to label positively and to judge in favour. It is not the act of judging that is the problem in reality. it is judging to the detriment of others, to do so unfairly on the basis of a characteristic that is not inherently negative and to refuse to revisit the issue of the fairness of the judgement. We need to focus on the attitudes not the act of judgement.

Social media killing off quiet reflection?

It's possible that I'm about to disagree with Justin Welby -though mostly it's a disagreement with the Torygraph's headline (Social media killing off quiet reflection, says Justin Welby ) and soundbite reporting a recent speech of his.

 “Instant reaction has replaced reflective comment.

“That is a reality that you deal with in politics and it demands a new reality of ways in which we accept one another, love each other, pray for each other.

“The best answer to a complex issue … is not always given in 140 characters.



Basically, it looks to me like the Torygraph headline writer is seeking to build and feed something of a moral panic about twitter by co-opting 'the church' into a 'modern life /social media is rubbish (things were better in the old days)' trope.  The effect of that kind of contextualising is to psychologically elide Justin's caveat phrase 'not always given in ...'



My response to this kind of trope is to recall that we human beings have always (I suspect ever since we have been able to have conversations) struggled with immediate reactions, over-simplification on the one hand and on the other hand trying to encourage more considered and generous responses. From one point of view, Twitter is just a further medium for this age-old bifurcation of response. Now, admittedly, the brevity does make it easy to offend -but then in many an animated conversation we are reacting quickly and offense is easily given and taken (and sometimes apologies and explanations are given -which can happen in tweeted exchanges too). Nor are printed media proof against cavalier dismissals and gross oversimplifications. What Twitter can do positively is to give the possibility of an extended dialogue of short interventions in which people could, over time, explore more thoroughly some issue. I've been part of many a conversation verbally and even on newsgroups (remember them?) where instant brief reactions have given way to longer discussions -sometimes thoughtful and sometimes intemperate: both of which can happen on Twitter.



it is true that 140 characters make nuance difficult (in one tweet at least), but we should observe what actually happens when twitter is used for discussions or arguments involving more depth and breadth of topic: people give hyperlinks to blog posts, articles etc and briefly state why they think it is important/helpful etc. Tweets then come to act as a kind of newspaper headline drawing attention to the content they head up.



So we should be wary of essentialising Twitter as if it is only 140 characters and that we have only come up with one usage for it. It is, in fact, part of an evolving media ecology. Part of the evolution is in the way it references, contains and is contained by other media. Another part of the ongoing development is of the social dance of developing mores and conventions: what counts as polite and rude and so forth.



At base we have human beings trying to communicate for a variety of reasons with a range of imagined and actual audiences. Human beings who are very adept in the aggregate at making communication work well enough within the constraints of bandwidth, signal noise and contextual meanings. One tweet does not a conversation end; we should not judge the medium by static standards but rather take it in as a dynamic of human communication and observe how people actually overcome the constraints -such as the brevity of 140 characters in the face of the desire to communicate a whole lot more.



in fact, what I think is most important about that bit of +Justin's speech is the call for generosity -charity- of interpretation given that widespread messaging is possible. In effect, is this not a call for us to see past the possible elisions and misunderstandings of short messages and to engage with open-heartedness with the possibility that there is a whole hinterland of understanding and perspective by human beings who are, in many ways, very like ourselves. Can we not exercise generosity by asking for further information and seeing through the exchange to an end in greater mutual understanding? That too is possible via Twitter.



Is this not the age-old challenge of communication?

The wonderful Journal of Oz; academic publishing rackets

When you put it like this:

Maybe the solution is for faculty to work with their universities to find ways to support a scholarly society without the condition being the restriction of research availability. There is enough money in the system to be creative about this, but not so long as our scholarly societies are extracting it from our libraries and giving it to for profit publishers

It seems obvious that somehow some publishers have managed to capture a goldmine and managed the hegemonic trick of persuading people that this is the natural state of affairs, as it was in the beginning, is now and evermore shall be.

Disintemediation is the logic once the hegemony has been revealed: the publishers really are the telephone sanitisers of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. They offer no real service that could not be done just as well by the collective that is the scholars themselves. Peer-reviewed blogs make as much sense. Crowd sourcing the crit might even do so; the reputation of reviewers would become the imprimatur. The title of the publication is an alibi.

In effect, peer review is the imprimatur, already, all on its own: the fact is just hidden behind the curtain of the wonderful Journal of Oz. What you've got is a bunch of people who already know something about the matter in hand and so can offer a credible opinion on the worthwhileness of the ideas and research. All you need to do is bring that together. A journal isn't necessary for that; it is merely a shorthand, a proxy for the expertise and reputations of the scholars concerned. It's a shorthand produced by the economics of paper publishing in the past and is now sponging off the reputation and historical legacy.

The sleight of hand is the psycho-historical fact that probably most of these scholars at some point have measured their self-worth as scholars by being invited to be part of the journal's vetting and barring procedures. They feel a debt of gratitude to what they think has 'made' them. And then they have 'forgotten' that they themselves -over time- are actually what props up the rep of the journal.
The journal really is otiose.
It has merely managed to inveigle it's way into the charmed cycle by virtue of controlling a disposable part of the publishing process (which too few have noticed is disposable, or are scared to notice).
The emperor has no clothes. However the lad has been paid to keep schtumm.

All it needs is a bunch of scholars with a good bunch of rep to set up a collective and to publish electronically with whatever copyright license they see fit (I would assume some kind of Creative Commons would be appropriate) and Robert is ones niece's father.

Disintermediation would be complete.
Apologies to those put out of work in publishing paper copies, but most of them could presumably find other jobs in academic or publishing or curating posts enabled by the funding freed up from university libraries not having to pay huge fees to unnecessary journals.
I shed no tears for the fat cat owners who've been riding this gravy train: I assume their offshore accounts should tide them over.

Not that kind of “living in the past”… | Savage Minds:

Memory and representation

Broadly speaking this is a good corrective to the moral panic sort of stuff we've been seeing lately that this title refers to Google Is Not Making You Stupid : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR. I found myself, musing over a side-bar this time though.

We have evolved not to be representers-of-the-world, but to lock-in and keep track of where we find ourselves. We use landmarks and street signs to find our way around;

I'm not sure the two things are so far apart or even fundamentally different. Representation surely involves picking out particular features out of a large potential field of percepts and using those features in communication based on, among other things, a sense of what other people may pick out (and this is heavily influenced by culturally-driven convergences). These features are probably landmarks in the relevant communicative transactions and, by analogy, landmark-like things in other kinds of discourse. I'm hypothesising, I guess, that the psychological mechanism for using landmarks, therefore, is recycled into perception-for-communication: ie representation ....

Begin Your Email with a Deadline to Get a Quicker Response?

I normally like Lifehacker's suggestions on productivity, but I'm a bit concerned about this.
Begin Your Email with a Deadline to Get a Quicker Response: "Skip the small talk and throw a deadline in the first sentence—for example, 'Attached, please see the draft of the Tuesday meeting notes, please reply with changes by 9 a.m. Monday.' Be clear about the deadline and the expected turn-around and don't waste their time with anything else. Check out the full post at Stepcase LIfehack for a few other helpful tips for inspiring prompt email replies."
A'm all for making a clear request. However, having been at the receiving end of terse emails in the workplace, I think that I would counsel the would-be writer of such emails to consider the emotional impact, paying particular attention to the possibility that if you already have prior record of dealing with people in a way that fails to acknowledge their difficulties, humanity or need for reasonable esteem, then an email of this type runs a high risk of coming over as officious or even with some kind of hinted criticism. Small talk can have the function of cementing, massaging, re-opening relationships. Failure to pay attention to the relational dimensions can be counter-productive. In this case, for instance non-co-operation from the colleague could be a way of reasserting their own power or sense of esteem.

Setting up Good Diagrams for slides

This has a lot of sensible advice to improve your visual communication. Definitely worth viewing if you do projector slides reasonably often.

How to make Awesome Diagrams for your slides

View more presentations from otikik

There's a good sense of typographic nous shown in these which are not produced by a professional designer, just someone who has reflected on what they have seen and done.
How to make Awesome Diagrams for your slides

Slide presentation software: wrestling it to purpose

This is a pdf and worth looking at if you ever use presentation software particularly in a classroom-type situation. I was pleased to discover that I'd already pretty much worked out good practice that corresponded to much of the advice here.

Something I'd not come across explicitly was this: "there are a number of rules
of thumb one can follow when creating PowerPoint presentations (e.g., the 10/20/30
rule—states that you should use only 10 slides, talk for no more than 20 minutes, and
never use a font smaller than 30 points" The article explores some of the limitations of that rule of thumb.

We are also treated to helpful comment on "the term CARP, which stands for
contrast, alignment, repetition, and proximity. Adhering to the principles of CARP can
help create legible and professionally looking instructional visuals." Interestingly, I found this resonated with my own approach which transfers principles from the design and presentation of liturgy. in fact, as I told one colleague recently, I tend to design learning events as a kind of liturgy. So it is interesting to note the point about repetition: "Using consistent and repetitive headings, titles, font, as well as backgrounds, helps improve the readability of your slides." That is true (and good liturgy has this repetition thing built in). In presentations it is worth considering using, eg, images to badge different phases or activities of the time together, repeating headings or instructions etc. I actually don't put huge amounts of info on slides; most of the learning is listening and discussion and exercise-based in my classrooms; the slides are to help navigate, offer instructions in a further medium, giving info that might be easy to miss otherwise; they are more framework /scaffolding oriented than content. The danger of ppt is that it it can be used to reinforce a content/instructional (ie filling empty vessels) centred model where the aim seems to be simply to throw information at the learners. If we consider slide shows to be a scaffolding for learners to interact with teacher, materials and ideas in live classroom environment then we will tend to design slides better -but it depends on having a mathetogogical approach at the constructivist end of the scale rather than a 'vessel-filling' modeal.

The point about contrast is important though we should also bear in mind that for some readers, high contrast makes reading for some difficult (think of the effect, for most of us, of trying to read fluorescent type on fluorescent paper). So my default design has pale yellow text on a black background (not blue, note: directly contrasting colours). Now I may be wrong about that and I'd be interested if anyone has further info on that. (There seems to be conflicting advice out there and so evidence-based ruminations are especially welcome). I'd also underline the importance of

When I read this, I realise that having done a theory of typography course, once upon a time, probably really did help ...

BUT there comes a point when, surely, we've got to ask whether, actually, we need something different. I've just started experimenting with Prezi which is attractive because it 'grows' out of a mind-mapping style approach which is the way that most of my work begins anyhow. I have sometimes found slide-shows have forced a linear approach which doesn't always well serve moving into non-sequential mode when the class interest and energy actually gets into something that isn't 'next' in sequence. With something like Prezi, it looks like it should be possible to zoom out, identify a more relevant area of the map and zoom back in on that.

Chapter_12.pdf (application/pdf Object)

PowerPoint shapes strategy-making, says new paper

Readers of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding media: the extensions of man and The Medium is the Message will not be at all surprised. It is interesting, though, to see it applied to the presentation technology-complex represented by data-projectors, portable computing and GUI-driven software and the quasi-ubiquity of certain software in corporate environments. What I like about this is the attention to actual usage (cf Bourdieu et al). Article here: Love it or hate it, PowerPoint shapes strategy-making, says new paper. Here's a summary statement: "By studying the daily use of PowerPoint in strategy making, it was possible to see how meanings were negotiated through PowerPoint use, as a means for both collaborative efforts to generate ideas and cartographic efforts to divide up territories and pursue individual or group interests." It was good too, to see a recognition of the importance of its relative accessability: " "has radically changed who can participate. It has the potential to democratize strategy-making." The important thing, of course, is to understand just how to understand its effects in order to strategise for its use.

The language of future ministry

I'm not always a big fan of Thomas Hofstadt; but I do think he has a point in his latest reflection: Post Modern Christianity: The Future of the Church and Post Modern Ministry in the 21st Century. This really resonated with me: "But we can’t understand the language of the future until we realize that the power in Virtual Reality is a metaphoric power. Whether eternal images frozen in time or living narratives moving in time, the future belongs to those who can create and communicate prophetic metaphor. ..."
In a sense that has always been true, Hofstadt's strength here is in linking it up with the metaphoric possibilities of new media and ICT. Also important is that he links up the emerging potentialities with the inherited:
"And, we commonly call Virtual Reality only 'virtual'—not really real. Of course, every art form, ritual, symbol, or metaphor is 'virtual.' And, in all of them, their hidden feelings represent something 'not there'—something beyond themselves, something not seen. Yet, like faith, they give 'substance' to their vision.5 More important, they have the power, through God’s grace, to transform us—to recreate us—even to heal us.
Why? Because they speak an incarnational language—a language that points out of the power to which it points."
I think that where I'd want to push this further is to link this insight up with the chief insights from 'Philosophy in the Flesh' (see my recommeded books in the marginal column) etc noting the embodied nature of metaphor and of the fundamentality of metaphor to language (it's more than an epiphenomenon, folks). The point being, imo, that metaphor in artistic and ritual forms is very much more powerful than worded metaphor, being more closely allied to embodied experience.

ICT's enhancing conversation rather than destroying relationships

I keep having conversations verging on moral panics that social networking, web2.0, mobile phones etc etc are eroding our ability to converse and build relationships. I keep saying that in all probability they are merely reconfiguring how we use our communicative bandwidth. Of course, the main caveat in that is that technologies always have effects on our sensorium and so our thinking (cf McLuhan, Understanding Media). So this article, How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle: helps us to note that indicators of face-to-face time and work are not falling off, if anything they are rising in usage. What's going on? "Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh."
Quite so. There's more to being embodied, clearly, than the neo-gnostic ideas of many pundits.

Communication is about love

At the moment I'm really enjoying John Morehead's output. Here's one of the important issues he raises. It grabs my interest because of the confluence of communication and cultur.

As the reader clicks on the photos connected with this outreach we see several individuals from this ministry holding up signs that read "Muhammed Lied.com" as they stand outside a mosque in southern California with beaming smiles on their faces. ... Does anyone seriously think that Muslims will be favorably disposed to considering the message conveyed by these Christian communicators? What message might the Muslims infer from these signs? Can it in any way be viewed positively by Muslims? Is this an appropriate form of cross-cultural communication? And, do these evangelists intend on trying this approach in those parts of the world where Islam is dominant, such as Asia or the Middle East?

It seems to me that it illustrates a failure of a communicative strategy to embody love. Communication is about helping ones conversation partner to understand something. Love is about looking at things from the other's point of view, to some extent, and responding generously, compassionately and with the welfare of the other in mind. Loving communication, then, is about matching up what needs to be 'said' with the other's ability to understand and to take in what is at issue between us. In that perspective, John's questions are spot on.

I fear that the justification for behaving in this way is that Jesus was prepared to speak sharply and perhaps offensively to some Pharisees and Sadducees. I think that this is a hard case for what I have just outlined. Nevertheless, I am reluctant to think that I or anyone else has enough self-understanding and other-understanding in cases like the one above to say that we may simply and easily emulate Jesus in that matter. I believe that Jesus will have uttered those rebukes in love and because they were finely calculated to be the best hope of reaching those people who were, in any case, there physically before him in circumstances where dialogue had presumably been taking place (if I read aright he situation). It was not a contextless, semi-anonymous action action such as propogated by the group John mentions.

I may be reading this, actually I clearly am reading this, through the lenses of previous experience on both sides and an onlooker to similar kinds of actions by Christians. I note, from the comments, that the organisation concerned may not be acting in quite the way that this first appears. However the principles remain, and I am concerned that quite unloving, depersonalised /decontextualised communications are becoming too easily accepted by Christians. My imagining the biblical justification is drawn from personal dialogue with one such Christian who was a friend. So while it's possible that, in the end, these considerations don't apply fully to the situation John outlines, the principles, I think, still apply as a way of assessing whether it is an action that stands up to scrutiny from a Christian point of view.

I would be interested in think collegially some more about the way in which we appropriate this particular example of Christ... over to you, dear reader.
Morehead's Musings: Cross-Cultural Communication: What Can We Learn From an Extreme?

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