We Are The Web: Kevin Kelly talks on Wired about 10 years of hypertext.
“No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences – and they knew a lot – confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. . . . Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There – another new blog!”
” . . . in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.”
Interesting thought – Kelly says the average internet user is 41 years old. Just like me (Am I AVERAGE?) As for his question, “What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download?”, I took a shot answering it in Generation Text.
Wired is the one magazine I will purchase every month. When we think of what the printing press did for the reformation in Europe… here is a great quote from “Best Practice 2003”:
“The internet exposes any indiscretions, any violations, and any polluting that is being done around the world. It also exposes the way you treat your workers, or conduct your human-rights policies. The bright light of exposure on corporate policies and the growing numbers of people – particularly younger people – who are socially minded and obtain information in real time off the Internet will make a difference to the way corporations act. It will place them under continuous pressure to adhere to high standards of social responsibility…I think transparency is here to stay.”
We are seeing this in the collapse of Unions; news that arrises outside the monolith propagandas of the NY Times and CNN and Fox and BBC and CBC. Grass roots blogging from soldiers on the front lines in Iraq to Iraqis on the other side of the barrel to Astronaughts in training to kids discussing their fourth grade teachers. The power of communications is more and more in the hands of global peoples who have access to these tacit communications technology. One battle for the Church in the future is getting these technologies into the hands of more and more of leaders in the two-thirds world.
Lord Byron once wrote, “Words are things and a small drop of ink falls like dew upon a thought and produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.”
My personal reason for blogging: A few years ago, while on a spiritual retreat, I asked God what I could do for him over the coming year that was different than anything else I had ever done for him. He gave me a reference, Jeremiah 30:1, so I looked it up right then and there:
“This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you.'”
So I started writing and writing and writing. Dr. Leighton Ford was the one who first challenged me to write everything down. I spoke with Yancey and McLaren and Sweet about writing…. But this was a command from the Almighty.
Well, I tried so hard to get the inside track in Christian publishing. I did what I could with my limited grammar and business skills. Nobody would help me publish my book (It may have something to do with the title I gave it: “Cadavers, Celebrities, or Children of God: a bloody biblical spirituality for this generation.”
I shelved the manuscript and the project for over a year, and then my brother invited me onto a family blog that he created at blogger. Once I got onto it, I created “from theocity to lovelocity” and have been posting pretty much every day since the beginning of Lent 2005.
Now that I have resigned from my job with Billy Graham (as of August 31) I can start cutting loose a bit. I kept the bite out of my words so that nothing would come back on BG. All I have are the words that have been burned into my heart by God. Words that should preach just as powerfully on a computer screen as they do from a platform or in a gutter.
In the Spirit of Barth and Bonhoeffer, we emerging bloggers need to preach more Christ and rant less about ecclesiology.
I don’t think Kevin Kelly can have travelled much, and I don’t think he is on the ball either regarding this preposterous and “western” worldview. SO many people are too damn poor to have a computer and millions and millions don’t even know how to read.