Clickable Content

A mouse click here and a mouse click there and presto, you've got information...

While the video is disturbing and not something to joke about, I find the events of this week groundbreaking. The actor who portrayed Kramer on Seinfeld, Michael Richards, went verbally postal at a comedy club in the past week. Thanks to YouTube, if you want, you can see the whole clip (I'm not linking to it, but you can find it if you want it). And that's the groundbreaking part. Where it not for YouTube or the Internet, I probably wouldn't have heard of the incident and the media may not have picked it up. Not anymore. Someone had a video recording device, figured it was worth posting to the net and now there's a visual record of what went down. Very ugly.

We have to adapt to this latest facet of our culture, what H. Rex Miller termed at the WFX Conference as the digital age. He contrasted the current digital age with the earlier broadcast age and applied it to the role of the church in this one statement. In the previous ages (broadcast, written and oral), the role of the church was to provide CONTENT, in the digital age, it's to provide CONTEXT. Though I haven't read his book yet, he backed this premise up with his observation that just about any content is readily accessible in the digital age. I can't tell you the number of questions I've been able to answer utilizing the Internet. The content is out there somewhere, I just need to find it. And it's not just that the church is no longer a key provider of content, it's that everyone is providing content.

Think about the ramifications...

• There was a time when TV stations solicited home videos of "news happening", but I don't need to bother with that laborious step now, I can just upload my videos to YouTube in a matter of minutes and broadcast my own stuff.
  

• If the content is readily available, what does education need to look like? With so much information available now, it may be more important for students to learn fundamental search principles more than memorizing everything.

• If the content is readily available, I can find messages by just about any Pastor on any portion of scripture, whenever I want, the church will need to educate people on how to discern truth to be able to filter out what's contrary to scripture.

There's a part of this that intrigues me and there's a part of me that's very afraid. That makes me wonder if my age group has a tremendous responsibility over the next 20 years. I sense that I can relate to the generations growing up in the digital age because my generation was on the crest of the digital wave. At the same time, we were trained through the methods that had been tested over time. I sense we're a generation that has the opportunity to fill the gap. What scares me is the amount of garbage that's included in the volumes of information available now. If we fail to provide context, the garbage could go unfiltered.

I hope to read H. Rex Miller's book, but I continue to ponder what changes we need to make to our ministry in order to adapt. I'm finding more on YouTube that I'll share next week.