Wow!

I haven’t had a chance to look at this report yet, but I have to say it looks like the Vatican has its act together.

The Church’s interest in the Internet is a particular expression of her longstanding interest in the media of social communication. Seeing the media as an outcome of the historical scientific process by which humankind “advances further and further in the discovery of the resources and values contained in the whole of creation”, the Church often has declared her conviction that they are, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, “marvellous technical inventions” that already do much to meet human needs and may yet do even more.

Thus the Church has taken a fundamentally positive approach to the media. Even when condemning serious abuses, documents of this Pontifical Council for Social Communications have been at pains to make it clear that “a merely censorious attitude on the part of the Church…is neither sufficient nor appropriate”.

I want to read this and see if it provides some help for us, but at the moment I was simply overcome with curiosity about the Council itself. I messed with the URL and then followed a link to this page. The group dates its start from 1948 and the Pontifical Commission for the Study and Ecclesiastical Evaluation of Films on Religious or Moral Subjects.

One would have needed to be a clairvoyant to foresee the remarkable future of this minute Office, composed of a President and four Members and housed in a single room in the Palazzo San Carlo in Vatican City, in a wing still overflowing with the Information Office’s vast archives on the Second World War. In spite of its modest beginnings, this small Commission was to write a new page in the history of the Church’s pastoral and cultural activity.

I’m sure it did!

On a much less important note, since I listed some Web 2.0 apps I like, I feel compelled to mention one I have bookmarked that really intrigues me. Stikkit looks like it might come my bookmark site, address book, task list, calendar, and more.

Maybe.

If it works.

Here is Merlin Mann’s hint sheet.  See what you think.

Since I’ve been linking distinctively Christian social networking sites perhaps it would be good to show you a few discussions. The first I’ll mention is a blog entry from the interestingly-named site, “Church Marketing Sucks.” I really liked this entry because I thought I was the victim of confusion. I couldn’t figure out is web 2.0 applied to social networking or to application services that are remote (i.e. not a program on your hard drive, but one you can use through the interent). Well, I was confused because the term is confused. It seems to mean both:

For my purposes, web 2.0 refers to the kinds of sites that build on community or offer a service. Rather than simply offering static information, web 2.0 sites offer interaction.

See? The interaction can be between people or users and programs.

Let me just break in at this point (I want to talk about social networking, of course) and list a few of my own current favorites. First, some background for those who don’t know: I have two computers a laptop, and a desktop, which I use about equally. Both are normally connected to the internet by broadband. What this means is that I used to have a continual headache trying to synchronize them with email and calendar etc. My first and primary reason for searching for web applications was to eliminate the need to worry about this. So…

• Gmail — this is an outstanding service. It even allows free POP3 integration if you want to use your own email client. I guess I should experiment with that feature in order to download email when I know I won’t have a web connection. But the interface through a browser is quite good. (If you won a Mac, then I would recommend Firefox rather than Safari, unless there have been some updates since I switched browsers.)
• Google Reader — This is still officially “in the lab” but it works quite well. This is a case where a function wasn’t working for me on my browsers and using it on the web was a great help. I tried to use the “live bookmark” feature on firefox (version 1) and had so many feeds it seemed to be making the browser useless for the first five minutes after starting it. (Anyone else have this problem?) Switching to the reader made life much less frustrating. There are other readers out there. I couldn’t tell you which one is best because I didn’t feel any great need to move from google’s. I’m just a pawn of the evil empire…, unless that is WalMart… Or is it Microsoft? I get so confused!
• 30 boxes — a calendar program designed by a fan of Getting Things Done. I suppose there are other good calendars out there, like google’s, but I get superstitious about Google knowing every thing it is possible to know about me (yeah, like they have time to worry about such trivialities) so I diversified. 30 boxes also gives you a todo list as well as a place for shortcuts on an imitation Mac OSX destktop screen in your browser.
• Tasktoy — another GTD-inspired site is my current start page. It allows you to send reminders to yourself of your tasks, and it allows you to put in your most important links.
• Zexer address book — I can’t check my gmail address book while composing, so I’ve begun using this site so I can have important addresses available in a window.
• Google Notebook — I find this easy to use and much more easy to track than, say, using textfiles on my computer. And it is instantly available to any computer I use!
• Calculator.com — I, frankly, hate using my mac dashboard. It paralyzes my computer for at least a couple of minutes. So reaching my calculator presents a challenge. It is usually a lot easier and faster to go to this website.
• Time-tracker — This is an indispensable tool for me now that I’ve found it. You can track days or projects as you wish (and you can do both simultaneously if you want). You don’t have to stay on the site for the timer to work.

I have a few more, but this digression is already too long. In any case, after offering his own examples (which involve more social networking than I just offered) “chief blogger” Kevin Hendricks writes:

The church is essentially a community, so the ideals of web 2.0 thinking fit nicely in the context of the church.

He’s absolutely right. Connect Our People has more of a congregation focus than the others that are springing up (as far as I can tell at the moment), which I think is good when the goal is building congregational or denominational community. But the point remains true.

Also this:

Do you see where this is going? Suddenly you don’t have an overworked communications team doing all the updates. You have youth group members maintaining an online events calendar. You have a Sunday School teacher posting lesson notes on a blog and the learning suddenly happens outside of the classroom. You have older members of the congregation sharing their wisdom with younger members. You have people sharing and people connecting. Suddenly it’s not the pastor trying to do everything.

There are some links to follow that are well worth reading, with discrimination. I’m not all that happy with the strong anti-hierarchical message that seems to come out in some 2.0 discussion. It makes me glad that ConnectOurPeople is aimed at churches rather than individuals (though it certianly provides networking for those individuals).

However, it is still pretty interesting to see what sorts of tools are becoming available in response to real needs.

Web 2.0 is growing rapidly in cyberspace. I knew that, but I hadn’t realized how much it had done so for Christians until I found Joe’s blog through the church technology review blog. Joe has kept an eye on things (I’d like to know how) and has updated his list since it was reprinted by the church technology review.

It is an interesting list. (I am tempted to reproduce it in case it disappears some day, but thanks to Google Notebook, I don’t have to worry about the information becoming unavailable.) The only one missing is MyChurch, because that’s the location of Joe’s own blog.

In the midst of the list, Joe lists Connect Our People as one of the social networking services. I haven’t gone through the whole list, but thus far I’m not sure that COP really belongs there. As far as I can see at this point, the only service with a congregational interest is MyChurch–but I’m not seeing any provisions for denominational networking. I would make other comments about what’s missing, but I can’t be sure that I may be missing something.

All of these sites seem geared more for individuals on the web. Most don’t even give much place to the church in how they are structured.

Connect Our People is different from the rest in that it starts with a congregation and networks into a denomination if desired. While it has some features for identifying oneself, it isn’t primarily interested in self-expression in the way that myspace or facebook is. It doesn’t provide a blog, for example, and it isn’t really properly a “website” at all. One can’t make one’s membership page available to the general public. Rather, it is a tool for encouraging community in churches, regional church organizations, and denominations.

I’m not saying other things aren’t valid (hey, don’t expect me to knock blogging on this blog!). I’m just saying that COP has a different purpose and functions than most social networking sites.

This entry by GTD wizard Merlin Mann sort of surprised me. I had never thought about Merlin as someone who thought much about church services.

But Merlin doesn’t see it as that much of a stretch and I think he is right:

As I’m sure Brian realized at some point, a lot of the advice in the book (creating an online image, deciding who the blog’s for, and improving your blog over time) will also be of interest to small business and garden-variety bloggers. I enjoy Brian’s writing and think he has a sound grasp on what makes blogs work (or not). Good stuff, and red meat for anyone thinking of taking their church (or their business or their kittens) to the web (emphasis added).

This sort of relationship should work the other way around as well, it seems to me.  While Mann is discussing blogging, it could apply to other applications.  If a product is good for producing collaboration at work, something similar should be useful for encouraging community in churches.  Businesses already show they are willing to purchase this sort of service.  Why shouldn’t church leaders?

Wow!

I don’t know how I managed to do it, but I managed to miss the tenth birthday of the First International Church of the Web by just over a week. What a shame.

I think this “church” represents probably most pastors’ worst fears about how the web is used in a religious way. Perhaps it would help to state the obvious:

• A church is people. There is an immense difference between naming an application, a website, a Church, and using an application to help a Church. I realize this is a “duh” kind of statement, but when people act like something online can only be a detraction from a church I think they are assuming that these sorts of abuses are the only kind of uses the web has.
• It is easier to foster and nurture a community with technology than it is to create one. I can’t help but notice that a bunch of hokey stuff is being offered in the hope that someone will click on one of them. But when you have people who are already part of a group, then you don’t need to desperately try to attract people; you just help them connect and communicate.
• Your site is due for new design in a lot less than a decade! Even though seven doesn’t count as early in a decade, I can’t stop myself from thinking, “Oooh, that is so early-nineties.” Running your own website can be great. But if you don’t stick with it the results can look pretty bad pretty soon. One of the nice things about using an online service is that they are always making improvements to attract more customers, in graphic design as well as in other features.

I recently found this entry on Lauren Winner’s blog complaining about the number of people using mobile phones on a college campus. The article, which she refers to as a “screed,” makes some great points, but I still think her starting illustration, the campus and the proliferation of mobile phones, actually goes in the opposite direction she intends (I also can’t help but note the irony that under the picture of the couple on their cells with their backs turned to one another was the following image that linked to an email subscription:

)

The problem is, while I’m sure Winner has seen a great deal of ill use of the mobile phone, I simply don’t see campus commons walk-bys as being worth keeping. What if these people were on the phone with their parents, sibling, or children.

As I’ve written before, my wife and I rely on mobile phones. Right now we have four children ranging in ages from 3 to 10 we simply do not get out that often and when we do we are mostly focused on them. (Occasionally, there are moments on trips where Jennifer and I probably get our best conversation time, when the children are in back either asleep or quiet for some other anomalous reason.)

My point is, mobile phone technology is what allows one of us to have the other one “with” us when we are out by ourselves at the store or doing necessary errands. So yeah, you’ll see me at the grocery store with a phone to my ear. But my wife is more important than anyone else and I’m glad to have her voice inside my head and to be able to cast my voice to her over the distance.

So, yes, new communication technologies are disruptive to some “communities” but they can also maintain others. The question isn’t the phone. The question is who is on the other end.

Computer communication is the same way. The challenge is to use the technology to reinforce the right communities.

This story is interesting, at least to me. IBM recently paid a hefty amount of money ($187 million) for a relatively unknown company, Corio. Apparently, IBM sees a lot of potential profit in the services Corio offers and wants to make sure that they get in on it.

Corio is an application service provider, the reporter comments

That may seem like a lot of money to pay for a company most people have never heard of and for an idea–application service providing, or renting out applications over the Internet–that was blown out of proportion by hype four years ago and has been subject to some ridicule since then. IBM is a pretty stingy company, and it rarely falls for its own spin, so perhaps server, software, security, and networking technology have matured to the point that the ASP idea, which both Corio and IBM independently refer to as applications on demand to try to duck the whole ASP comparison, might start to go a little more mainstream.

ASPs are used often in the business world to promote collaboration. They are nifty tools that the Church should consider using. The market would indicate that they offer true value.

I wrote a few days ago that I thought Christian outreach on the web was already making good progress. In my opinion, as I said, there is still a lot to be done in using the internet to build up congregations and associations.

I want to list another reason why I think so.

As I said, Christians tend to have other hobbies and interest. I wrote:

Christians blog. Christians use myspace. Christians, in other words, are already netizens. In my experience, moreover, this has not resulted simply in Christians forming exclusive Christian forums, but in lots of other things. Christians like surfing (I mean on the ocean in real space) and cooking and movies and TV shows. I have no idea if this is done more or less often in cyberspace than in realspace, but it happens plenty. And this is not, and doesn’t necessarily need to be, a concerted strategy on the part of Christian leaders guiding the rest.

I didn’t point out that negative part of that picture in any detail, but let me do so now. While it makes sense for pagan and Christian moviegoers to find forums to talk shop, and Christians should embrace (with wisdom and prayer) the challenges that involves, it doesn’t make nearly as much sense for Christians to find forums to talk to one another.

I’m not saying it is always wrong, one should look realistically at the damage that can be suffered. As I wrote earlier

I suspect many might resist the idea that technology can radically reshape lives, but I think they’re being naive. Communities require communication. The fact that Cingular offers unlimited minutes between my wife and I on our mobile phones is an immense change in our lives from before. We rarely ever are together outside the home, and when we are we have all four children with us, which doesn’t make for much private conversation. Effectively, I have moved to a situation via technology in which I am never alone. Whenever I need it, or simply on impulse to hear her, I can have her voice “in my head.” And she has the same option.

I realize that face to face involves a deeper level of communication. Voice alone will never be as powerful as voice and eye-contact or voice and shared food. Nevertheless, the fact that our voices can be heard without regard for distance is still an amazing extension of community. Without wanting to neglect the role of the other senses, to the extent that communities are built on hearing and reading, geographical space has been collapsed. We have been moved out of exile into a common city.

This was meant to be a positive description, and it is. But the dark side would be when people become more enamored with finding the individuals out there who agree with them, rather than getting along with the Christians in their local congregation. In my experience, the internet quest for the like-minded email list can be a real detriment to the local body. Instead of learning to live at peace with a broad spectrum of Christians, one gets daily reinforced in some cases with those things that make one hard to get along with.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the internet is evil, nor that it is wrong for people to connect with Christians who have common interests and convictions on secondary matters. But it does give us reason to think that churches would be wise to use the internet as a tool to build up community within the congregation.

I think we commonly assume that we only need cyberspace for those separated by great distances. But the fact is, if we don’t see each other except on Sunday, we might as well be hundreds of miles away from one another. Furthermore, interaction through the net is probably going to remind us to get together rather than make us less likely to appreciate meeting in real space.

I just discovered there is some such thing as “The Pew Internet and American Life” project. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I will probably find out about it soon and report back if it is interesting. Stay tuned.

The project got mentioned in this article, “The Church-Internet (dis)connection.” It was written all the way back in 2002, but I wonder how much the author, Andrew Careaga, believes things have changed. He wrote:

When I went to Search Party 2002, a conference on postmodern ministry held just down the road from me in St. Louis, in May, I was expecting to connect with a different breed of ministers. I was expecting to meet pastors and priests who appreciated the Internet’s ability to facilitate community… I figured everybody at the conference would be willing to dive right in to discussions of the Internet as community.

I was wrong.

Our panel fielded many of the same questions that church leaders were asking four years ago. “How can I make my church website cool?” “Should we have a message board on our site?” “How can we make our website ‘sticky’?” “How can I keep people from leaving my church to join a ‘cyberchurch’?” We also were put in the position of defenders of the Net as a resource for developing community. One participant claimed it was impossible to create authentic community over the Internet.

I came away from that experience shaken and disillusioned. I thought that perhaps we had moved beyond the Big Question of the Internet — the question of whether online community can exist. Howard Rheingold wrote the book on online community nearly a decade ago, and millions of Netizens are online proving that virtual communities can and do exist. While we in the church are still asking, “How can I make my website cool?” and debating whether or not people can develop relationships and community on the Net, some 3 million people a day are using the Net for spiritual purposes. Before Search Party 2002, I assumed most church leaders in the postmodern movement had gotten to the point where we could talk about how the Internet is radically reshaping lives, perceptions of reality, communication, community, relationships and culture. I left Search Party realizing that we are a long way from that point.

I suspect many might resist the idea that technology can radically reshape lives, but I think they’re being naive. Communities require communication. The fact that Cingular offers unlimited minutes between my wife and I on our mobile phones is an immense change in our lives from before. We rarely ever are together outside the home, and when we are we have all four children with us, which doesn’t make for much private conversation. Effectively, I have moved to a situation via technology in which I am never alone. Whenever I need it, or simply on impulse to hear her, I can have her voice “in my head.” And she has the same option.

I realize that face to face involves a deeper level of communication. Voice alone will never be as powerful as voice and eye-contact or voice and shared food. Nevertheless, the fact that our voices can be heard without regard for distance is still an amazing extension of community. Without wanting to neglect the role of the other senses, to the extent that communities are built on hearing and reading, geographical space has been collapsed. We have been moved out of exile into a common city.

So, in other words, I think Careaga is on target when he writes, “Why is the discussion about e-tools in the first place? Is the Internet just a tool, something we can use to manipulate and alter our surroundings, to carve out another niche in the world? No, it’s space. It’s more organic than mechanical. It’s a place in which relationships can occur. It’s at least that, if not more.”

However, I may differ with Careaga on where his emphasis lies. It seems to me that when we speak of “the church” and web 2.0, we are simply talking about how Christians use the internet. Christians blog. Christians use myspace. Christians, in other words, are already netizens. In my experience, moreover, this has not resulted simply in Christians forming exclusive Christian forums, but in lots of other things. Christians like surfing (I mean on the ocean in real space) and cooking and movies and TV shows. I have no idea if this is done more or less often in cyberspace than in realspace, but it happens plenty. And this is not, and doesn’t necessarily need to be, a concerted strategy on the part of Christian leaders guiding the rest.

(This difference may parallel my tendency to think in terms of “post-modernity” rather than a “post-modern movement.” To me, the post-modern is not something you adopt, but that has already adopted the world. We are all post-moderns simply by virtue of living in the Western world in the twenty-first century.)

So it isn’t clear to me how much pastors of congregations have to do with this. It seems to me that they mainly need to remind their congregations to behave in a Christlike way in all their endeavors and situations, including their cyberspace ones. And it is probably helpful if a pastor has a blog or some other netizenship on desplay for his congregation to see. But this sort of outreach is simply happening. I’m not sure how it could be, or if it should be, a specifically congregation-based outreach.

But building community in the Church might be a different manner. The Net now under girds communities based on affinities. Bikers, joggers, watchers of the new Battlestar Galactica and others find in the web a way of generating and maintaining a community based on what goes on in the real world. And I don’t think Church congregations, parachurch organizations, or larger denominational structures, should be any different. In my opinion, “How can I establish community with our church website?” is a really good question, though I don’t know that it actually requires a website, per se.

This is one of the reasons I’ve started working with Connect Our People–having gotten involved through my friendship with the Boneman. I think it helps in a needed area, using the web to collapse space between Church members or between the members of other Church groups both within and without a congregation. Take a look at the video if you haven’t already. Sooner or later I’ll be working on a second blog about these issues (and will export this entry) there.