AKMA’s Random Thoughts

World [Class] Series

I have only one disappointment with this winter-spring series of technology lectures at Seabury: that more people couldn’t find time to come to more of the lectures. From beginning to end, the series offered nutritious food for thought. If the series’ insights were to seep into Seabury’s bloodstream, and hence to the Episcopal Church more broadly, we might begin getting a message across to a culture-generation conspicuously absent from many congregations (and under-represented where it’s not absent). Moreover, I suspect that that cultural group stands metonymically for a great deal more than seats in pews. If we were culturally in-touch enough to make appropriate use of technology (not just, “Hey, let’s have a ‘chat room’ for those teens!”) — and theologically clued enough to remember that our gospel’s heart beats with joy, integrity, sharing, and love — we’d be reaching not just technophilic Gen-Next-ers, but a wide swath of souls who see no particular to squander an exquisite Sunday morning being badgered and bored. I say this not to suggest that there’s no admonition or formality in church life; far from it! But I observe a great disproportion between scolding (on one hand) and articulating a coherent account of why one might live one way rather than another (on the other hand), between restrictive formality and joyous order.

I worry that Jordon Cooper came to us so long ago that people no longer remember the tremendous demonstration he gave. Jordon showed, on the basis of cases in which he’s been involved, the ways that a hyperlinked congregation grows in community, in effective congregational communication, and in outreach to an increasingly digitally-active world. Jordon’ talk connects beautifully back around to David Weinberger’ on the last night of the series; it’d be great if we could re-run him again, now.

Mena and Ben Trott demonstrated the tremendous capacities of their Moveable Type personal publishing system. Though most people associate MT just with weblogs — for obvious reasons — the Trotts showed that the back-end of the architecture makes possible a great deal more than blogs alone, and they sketched some of the ramifications of the whole idea of a content management/personal publishing system.

Jim McGee walked us through a discussion of how “thinking in public” in general, and weblogging in general, can enrich the shared work of organizations. Jim’s talk bore important implications for work in congregations, much of whose work gets done by people who spend little time in immediate proximity to one another, and who often rotate through particular responsibilities on a yearly basis. A congregation that took care to preserve its institutional memories from year to year would lose less time to revisiting preparations, planning, and organization, and would be free to devote more energy toward other ends.

And David Weinberger talked to us about the Web as a locus of meaning and connection, of communication and hope, and why that’s important.

I’ve been on the receiving end of thanks for this series from a number of directions, but they’re the ones who offered all this wonderful, deep, thinking for us to learn from. To David, Jim, Ben, Mena, and Jordon — heartfelt thanks for your participation in this series, and we’ll see if we can’t cultivate some fruit from the seeds you all planted.

Posted by AKMA at May 18, 2003 05:48 PM | TrackBack