Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Tag: anti-person

Integrity and Integration

For multiple world, our modern/postmodern world has forced many of us to split our lives and now even our identities into multiple slots such as work and home, public and private, inner and outer. Now many thinkers even suggest there is no real person behind the roles we play. I don’t have time to respond to that here, but I disagree.

The nature of personhood is more complex and interconnected than modernism may have realized and the Church Fathers offered a far more nuanced view of the person than the modern idea of the individual. This tendency to create separate identities between home, office, house of faith, hobbies, friends, and the multivarious online social computing personas is dis-integrating. It does tend to make us think there is really no me to me: just another face, another mask. This potentially could lead to many negative and even dangerous manifestations.

Since I believe the person is real, I believe that integration of these various worlds and identities are important. Thus my values at home are the same at work are the same among my friends are the same in the online world. I try to be the same person everywhere (inner and outer).

Thus this blog does not section off technology away from faith away from art or other interests, and that’s why I put the Pope Benedict XVI quote earlier. It captures some of the essence I think the word

Now enough from me. I’ll have to spend more time on this on my Floydville blog sometime. If anyone disagrees, feel free to let me know. 🙂

Boo for Bank of America

Mark Hurst tells a powerful story of anti-consumer experience on his Good Experience blog.

Matthew Shinnick sold a pair a mountain bikes on Craigslist, but the check he received in the mail looked a bit suspicious. He mentioned this to the teller at San Francisco branch Bank of America. Moments later he was dragged from the bank in handcuffs and spent the next 12 hours in jail. The charges were dropped but Shinnick ended up spending over $14,000 in legal fees.

Bank of America’s response? We’re sorry this happened, and we understand your anger, but we don’t really have any liability. Wow! Now that is some customer service: we don’t owe you anything! Sounds like they’re really setting some “higher standards”–for customers that is! Consumer Advocate Clark Howard mentioned Matthew’s plight on his show and ended up starting a “BOA Meter” tracking how much money customers had removed from Bank of America by closing their accounts in response to the Shinnick crisis. It looks like it has topped over $50 million thus far.

Not People-Centric!

Wow! This news from Captain’s Corner is a big disappointment in the “treating people like persons” department. Yesterday, ”  RadioShack Corp. notified about 400 workers by e-mail that they were being dismissed immediately as part of planned job cuts” (from Globe and Mail). This is certainly one way to use technology to dehumanize people.

Captain’s Quarter wonders, “If this is how they treat their employees, imagine what Radio Shack thinks of their customers.”

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