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Church of the Saviour

Saturday, October 18, 2003

Another Cluetrain-like Rant
A fairly substantial and important rant , if I can say so myself. I did it over on my MT blog , entitled Cluetrain and Theoblogical
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1:41:55 PM

Lessig in Wired 11.11: The New Road to the White House

Great piece in WIRED by Lessig on blogs and poliics

A managed community works about as well as a managed economy. So the challenge is to find a way to build community without the community feeling built.

The article's message is that Open Source is what works. It seems the Church can learn here from the power of the movement in the software world.

...you will absolutely suffocate anything that you're trying to do on the Internet by trying to command and control it...

Part of how the Church, mostly in it's traditonal and established , denominational forms, does "command and control" is in systematically ignoring the open source nature of community. They have Web sites and web developers, but the conversations are lacking becuase they want to control them. The publishers avoid allowing the customers to "talk" about their products because they're afraid someone will trash them. Well, if the shoe fits.......On the otherhand, if the product is worthwhile, wouldn't we WANT to know how people are using it? Wouldn't this be the BEST endorsement, replacing the theological/marketing hype of resources with the stories of how these are actually being used successfully? There has yet to emerge an expectation among the resource producers that this content can become immersed in community, and even, as a result, partly if not largely produced by that community. But this would challenge, seemingly, the leadership.

community can't be broadcast. It gets built not from slick commercials squeezed onto a Web page, but from tools that enable, and thus inspire, hundreds of thousands of people to something that American politics has not seen in many years: hundreds of thousands of people actually doing something.

This again says something to the Church and her institutions. People actually DOING SOMETHING. Linking to efforts being created to address the common causes --- the "breadth" of which was not previously known until previously geographically and socially dispersed "pockets" of individuals discover each other's activities and conversations via Google and such, and then end up working together FTF.

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1:17:17 PM

Weblogsky - Reflections on Our Present Discontents

Weblogsky points to:

The Internet: Reflections on Our Present Discontents

In NetFuture, Stephen L. Talbott explores the impact of our thinking about the Internet, or perhaps our lack of the kind of thinking that puts it into the right perspective relative to our communal, social context. He argues that the supposed efficiency of the Internet should not be seen as a goal in itself, apart from our values, concluding that the Internet can be the expression of a healthy society – or society can become an unhealthy expression of the Internet. [Link] Discuss

"...we will have so easily and casually invited young people around the world into this new activity -- and no actual community will have done anything at all of the sort that was once required to create a place, the conditions, the cultural surroundings, the human context within which the activity occurs. The young people will have been lifted out of their communities and into this new recreation, not because some sort of rooted and coherent evolution of the communities is taking place, but simply because a worldless world is now at our fingertips and someone sitting alone in front of a screen came up with a workable combination of digital bits. The levity of it all -- the ease and thoughtlessness and disconnection and vapidity and grave cultural consequence -- these are what worry me. We have gotten ourselves into a situation where a teenager, with no real sense for what he is doing, can to one degree or another reprogram every community in our society."

posted by jon lebkowsky on 10/18/2003 07:39:13 AM | ~permalink~ | ~wiki~

Another inportant consideration for the Church. Net Community doesn't usually just happen. I've seen it treated that way. Stick up a bulletin board. I never got much traffic when I did that. It was only when I posted a good bit of ME (via Weblogs) that the comments and comradery came. People "found" me via Google and other Webloggers (as I mentioned earlier today). There is a definite value in having a real live group of people who are hospitable in the Net-sense; they have a welcoming, encouraging, exploration-encouraging sense of "dialogical tendency" to them; much in the same way that Churches practice in-person hospitality to make people feel welcome when they visit their services. And much in the same manner that visitors return when they experience a sense and air of excitement and care, the online sojourner will return to the places where there is BUZZ; and "place" seems alive and rip with expectation.

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11:38:29 AM