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Social Psychology of Online Communications

My sociology/psychology education has brought me into this "Virtual Community" hunt with some very interesting thought about the nature of this communication, and how that impacts church, education, person-to-person interaction, and many-to-many communications

The Illusion of anonymity

The response from a larger more intimate audience

A Compuserve For the Church (March 1993)

I opened this meeting on Ecunet just over a year ago, and started by asking "what would a national service for the church offer in the way of resources, products, communications, information, and education? In the two year period since I first began to think on these things, the Internet growth has brought to the public's attention a vision of the future (best represented by the AT&T commercials that ask "Have you ever wanted to ....watch ANY movie, WHENEVER you want to? You will! The company that'll bring it to you? AT&T").

I have had similar future visionings about the church and the possibilities ahead in the virtual landscape. I began with thoughts about who would be there, what would be shared as online information, and what kinds of communication would be possible.

I continue to be amazed at the way our programs which allow us to use an information system such as Compuserve have matured in the way they allow a more intuitive response from the user to perform certain functions which were until only recently, done only by the computer professionals and database experts. The office I presently serve as a student intern is overflowing with numerous database access methods from the most cumbersome mainframe environment to the simple point and click search for the appropriate data. Our EMail system uses a simple phone book selection along with a function which fills in the name for you as you begin enetering the first letters of the person to whom you are addressing the message, and many Windows programs are beginning to include this function for a variety of typing tasks where the user is choosing from some kind of list.

It is now theoretically possible for anyone on an email system to connect to any other EMail system. I can send notes using the company EMail system to any internet address, because the company has installed an SMTP server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) which routes internet addressed messages to the proper "connection" which feeds the Internet. The names and addresses of all your worldwide communication partners are in the minidatabase within your own EMail directory, so that all that you need do is select the name or type the first few letters of the last name, and the message is off (and around the world if need be).

In the context of our community of God's people, the word "Virtual" may come to mean something different than the "not really real" idea it suggests to us now. Perhaps another way we can experience the word today is "realistic"; something which very effectively simulates reality. I want to suggest that "Virtual" in this sense is also a good "theological word" to use when describing the journey of God's people, for we can only hope but for a reasonably close facsimile of actually following the paths that represent Kingdom choices.
But try we must. And I fully believe that it is by applying the concept of the giftedness of those in the church that we can move toward a more efficient use of all of our talents and contributions by sharing this wealth of resources with the world. We are in an age when that is much more than a pipe dream, where we can reach out to all parts of the globe in a personal way.