The Social and Spiritual Realities We Ignore

The Internet hosts a variety of communications of varying complexities.  There is email and the many "email groups" or "mailing lists".  There are static websites that display brochures in Web form.  There are "catalog" sites that organize products and provide a way to buy them online.  There are "Portals" into nearly every subject area,  which seek to aggregate a variety of related materials that would interest an audience seeking products and perhaps also "comradery" around a certain area of interest.  And lately,  over the past 2 or 3 years,  "Weblogs" have sprung up which allow a wider audience to construct their own personal portals wherein they can comment,  aggregate links to related sites,  react to the postings of others,  and solicit comments on their own entries.  And they can "subscribe" to the Weblogs that interest them the most so that they can be updated regularly when new content is posted to those Weblogs.  Commerce sites and Weblogs both make use of data-enhanced data-driven Web pages that help in the task of organizing and presenting content. 

Data-driven content has made it possible to "customize" the presentation to certain characteristics of the audience.  Many of the most successful Websites have found that the more they know about their visitors, and the more they can get those visitors to identify various interests of theirs,  the more they can present items that would be of most interest to them.  Nowhere have I seen less of this than in the "religious" world.  While there is an obvious diversity of emphases and concerns among the faithful,  most Church-related sites are blindly marketing their wares and their message to a monolithic, one-dimensional audience. 

I have been turning over in my mind the idea of "Theology-driven, data-driven websites".  The idea that data can provide information to a web page that determines any one of a multiple of choices for display is not new.  Commerce sites are perfecting the art.  Sites track purchases and searches by customer,  and use that history to construct probable interest intersections to similar offerings or offerings in the history of others who buy the same products.... a kind of commerce-based matchmaking.   Amazon asks customers for Wish Lists (kind of like a wedding registry) so that users who have similar "wishes" can be paired with them to form a kind of link-by-common-interests,  and thus further the sophistication of their product-to-audience data relationships.

It seems that there are similar ways to "match" people with similar Theological interests and concerns,  through a variety of rankings and choices,  similar to psychological profiles which are devised in order to help people determine promising career paths based on their measures derived from their responses.  People who rank certain things higher on a scale of "theological importance" can be directed to groups of persons who share their priorities in that area of concern.  People who gave responses similar to yours in topic A also ranked topic B highly (similar to Amazon's people who bought this book also bought this----which I think would be particularly valuable in the theological world --- I would love to know what people who bought this book also consider important --- I can look at my favorite theological books on Amazon and get some of this....but there are many more relationships that could be constructed by theologically  minded folks than is provided for us on Amazon,  and things other than books against we can measure.

This seems to be inquiring at the boundaries of what I think can be a grand discovery about how to match up people in the theological community -- by helping people connect with others of similar interests and "level of personal and spiritual investment" in those interests,  we can enhance the journey of becoming more effective Church.  It is "more effective" because it is increasing the ways to "be resources to one another" and "develop" our gifts to the point of being able to collaborate and possibly see the building of structures that enable forces to mobilize to address a need --- to build a "Mission Group" in very much the same sense as those in The Church of the Saviour.   Many times,  I would imagine,  we can discover things about people who are already "in our midst" in a physical community to which we have attached but not yet discovered our common call.  This would seem to be more likely as Churches begin to discover the value of "Intranets" (the local expression with online information,  interaction,  and storytelling and sharing) joined to ExtraNets (connected to larger bodies related to them such as denominations) joined to the THE INTERNET (a part of the human family in a deep ecumenical sense,  where missions of the Church and human welfare projects of all kinds can join people who can join forces. 

© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:37:33 PM.