25 January 2009

I don't want to cause a Twitter

I've been thinking some more about Twitter and how it will effect the church. (You might want to read my last post) I did some reading of the reviews that are out there for Anthony Coppedge's book The Reason Your Church Must Twitter and I saw this quote by Jim Watson
"The beauty is that you can reach your people on their computer and/or on their cell phones, via SMS text messaging, which is a huge thing. Phone calls are tedious, email is often not read and fairly labor intensive for a church and in the end, ultimately, communication is key."
Communication is key, but I think that Twitter will eventually become like the things mentioned above, just another form of invasive annoying communication.  Ultimately people respond to communication because they have an connection to it.  (I already ignore text & Facebook messages from some people)   The quote is actually quite telling of how quickly we forget how cutting edge the mentioned technologies once were.

I'm know at one point email was the saviour of communication....because the telephone was quite tedious
I bet the telephone was once going to save the church.... because visiting people took a lot of time.
Throw in how websites, signs outside our churches,  radio broadcasts, pod-casting  etc. were all going to save the world around us.

A new medium will not change the way most basic reason that people ignore your message....they don't like you or you're not important to them. 

Being the McLuhan geek that I am I thought I would look at Twitter through MM's four laws of media:
ENHANCES:  - the ability to communicate information, to convey quick information.
OBSOLESCE:  - email, phone, talking to people, deeper connections
RETRIEVES: yelling across the street, passing notes in class....
REVERSE: reverses into constant barrage of short messages, devoid of personal connection

I'm going to contiune thinking about some of these.... feel free to let me know where I am wrong in comments.

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