In-your-face Online Pastoring: Porn-Again Christian

Mark Driscoll is releasing a book chapter by chapter online for free
about porn and Christian young men. (click on pic above) Besides the need for this
kind of honest approach from Christian leadership, this is also a
good idea because it's free but not pushed in your face... you have
to choose to access it. Pastors in this age need to be creative in
getting God's culture-ideas into the hearts and minds of this
generation... and Mark D. is doing it!

Intuitive computing: speaking into the cloud

Could the future of laptops do away with keyboards? I think so, and I don't think it's very far away. [This picture was found anonymously on some server; it looks like a prototype fusion of a Macbook and an iPhone.]

A couple technologies are really being fine-tuned right now that are
preparing the way for small but completely functional mobile computer/
phones. One is the concept of "cloud computing," where most
information is not stored on the pc anymore but, instead, online.
This allows for devices to be more like windows to knowledge than
warehouses for it. Second, voice-recognition software is getting so
adept that in 10 years typing will be as ancient as typewriters (my
prediction). At least, they will be second place to voice-reg, only
used for privacy.

So here's the central idea behind this post... technology is mimicing
human intuitive practice... touch, speech, etc. Instead of us having
to adapt to technology, technology is adapting to us, so we don't
have to learn how to type or create code. We simply speak to our
device which takes our speech into the air where our ideas float
around and are mixed with millions of other ideas. Anyway, it's
worth keeping an eye on.

New Kinds of Knowledge: The Internet as a Source of Qualitative Study

A new field of qualitative research may be emerging from the marketing/computer science sector. Tags, metatags, and user descriptors on the Internet are creating huge fields of data for researches to study trends and mass user opinions. So, in normal every day terminology, there could be an actual academic approach to studying user behavior on the Internet besides just statistics. Studying trends in the market by qualitatively analyzing tags is bound to transform mass media studies. [Thanks to a new favorite blog, thetrendwatch.com]

Text in church?

Last year, at the Future of Television conference in New York City, audience members could ask questions... and not just in your normal pick and point method. There were several hundred people at this conference! Actually, any person in the audience, at any time, could simply pick up their phone and ask a question via SMS. The questions would be filtered by someone with incredible wisdom and tech savvy, and some questions would be posted to a screen where everyone at the conference could see... prompting the speaker to respond if the audience felt it was a good question.

While this is supposedly cutting-edge, I found out that churches are already doing this! Mars Hill has supposedly done this in their youth services, while a church outside of St. Louis is using SMS in their main service. (Check out the article!) So here's the "postmoderner" question: how is this going to change the dynamic of preaching in the next 10-20 years if this catches on? Think of it! People can ask questions, get involved... and unavoidably, talk to each other during the service! It signifies the battle between inner reflection and constant connection... and yet, transforming the Sunday morning sermon into a conversation might just be the openness outsiders are looking for.