Next-Wave Ezine > church & culture

On (digital) sparrows
By Jon Swanson

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My wife is dozing on the deck of our suburban home, listening to a quiet mix of robins, finches, cardinals and wrens. It's evening, so the raucous calls of midday have settled into the quiet twittering of evening. I'm involved in my own twittering, 'listening' to a small cluster of friends giving brief updates of their current thoughts, limited to 140 characters.

Twitter (twitter.com) is one of several microblog services. Rather than having a post followed by comments, you simple make update after update. You can subscribe to feeds of others as a friend or as a follower. On a web page or on your portable device, you receive a steady stream of updates from your friends. Because it is so easy to update from your phone or a browser, the comments are usually mindless, as profound as "I'm going home now" or "breakfast and coffee, big day today."

So who cares? Why should either kind of twitter matter?

Because both are the communication artifacts of beings for whom God cares. And twittering is just one element of the community 2.0 which is being built on the web 2.0 platform.

My current community isn't just in Indiana. Through social media, it extends from New Zealand to Nairobi to Amesbury to Portland to Oklahoma to Nicosia. In every one of these places, friends are writing and creating audio and creating video and creating community. We are talking to and with and about each other. We each have larger networks with which we connect. And I am spending far more time consuming this media than the media being created through popular mass culture.

I'm not alone in my new media world. Fill in your own numbers on the number of blogs posts and video uploads and podcasts. Sermons and social commentary. Absurdity and whimsy and a greeting to grandma. Real people are making real connections and having real conversations without having seen each other in real space.

The comment about breakfast and coffee? By itself it seems mundane. But it was a twitter from a network cameraman on a round-the-world trip. Yesterday breakfast was in Washington and today it is in Singapore. Twittering is a way of allowing a wide network of people to stay in touch with him. It creates the same sense of community that people in a small town feel when walking down the sidewalk and seeing a friend and saying, "breakfast and coffee, Ed. Big day today."

As we wrestle with the relationship between Christ followers and the larger culture, we have to be increasingly sensitive to the smaller culture, the people who are tired of big glitz and love to sit in front of a webcam and talk. At the same time we are talking about church getting more authentic, more missional and less attractional, we have tremendous opportunity to be involved in media communities with similar values. My friends are trying to take media production to the people, to create participatory media. I’m trying to live church the same way. Our twitters are creating an interesting scrolling tapestry. Because we are living out what we say we believe with everyone watching, it is increasing clear what works when I am living out the Gospel…and what doesn’t.
But now I need to back to the deck. And twittering birds. And my wife. And then I’ll blog about it later.

Jon Swanson is on staff at a 100 year old church (First Missionary)
in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he's almost half as old as the church.
However, connections say more than facts, so he's on Flickr (jnswanson),
Twitter (jnswanson), and at levite.wordpress.com.

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