It's not a nurdy thing

I often picture myseld preaching a sermon about the online relational revolution.   How online communication, and all its artifacts, like online relationship factors,  benefits and furthers the aims and mission of the Church.  I was not a computer programmer student.  I never owned a PC until I was 35 years old (in 1991).   I was a child of the 60's and 70's ,  in high school when our Youth Minister thouroughly immersed our Youth Program in relational movements such as Lyman Coleman's "Serendipity" and Coffeehouses and such.  I read and was deeply influenced by Keith Miller, Robert Raines and the like in the late 70's.  And I was yet to own any kind of computer. 

When I finally did get one in 1984,  it was a game console add on called the Coleco Adam, and I got it to help me write and type and envision myself doing all kinds of neat stuff (which amounted to playing "Buck Rogers" , a game which came with the computer addon portion of the system).   Later,  in 1991,  when I got my first PC,  it was after working with a Commodore Amiga in the Seminary AV studio,  and using it to learn how to connect to some BBS's and download stuff.  The PC and the BBS systems I eventually discovered,  including "Compuserve",  the earliest elaborate online, linked, navigatable "world" I ever experienced,  were the germination of what would evolve into a call (still evolving at a rapid pace as the Internet and the Web and all the related technologies lend themselves to new ,  previously unrealized uses) to join the online world as a pastor (in self-proclaimed status) with a mission to discover what can be done to get to the task of connecting any part of our common stories and experiences that can be connected,  and combine that with putting us in touch with the opportunities to share knowledge across this planet regarding living on this planet as People of God.  It's like "The City of God", in virtual;  but there's something about it that's very real,  and that's the Human Voice and the representations that wander the Net in search of conversations taht would enable the telling of our own stories.

All of this is like the whole body/soul dichotomy,  which has been argued for centuries.  The Jewish and the Greek notions;  the body and soul; the gnostic heresies and the wholistic movements.  Online,  are we "less human",  "less present"?  This is coming to the fore again as more applications are built on top of the Net with "networked" features which create a whole new social reality,  and the one which confronts us squarely with questions about what it is to be human.

More later 

© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:34:55 PM.