“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662) Lettres provinciales
OK, I’ll admit it, I am addicted to Twitter. (http://twitter.com) That does not mean that I like it, only that I see its usefulness.
I started out thinking of it like this cartoon from last Sunday (http://bit.ly/4stuAs) and to some degree still do.
(Other humorous references to Twitter include God tweeting creation http://bit.ly/N2Hvp and the twitter/knitting ban http://bit.ly/21Vrqq)
I became addicted during the massive Station Fire and then was monitoring Twitter for the Sheep Fire. For up-to-date info it is great.
Another example is the coverage of the ordination examination for Lisa Larges at the San Francisco Presbytery #sfpby meeting last night.
Twitter provides a medium for distributed and mass reporting of developing news in real time as well as receiving it on mobile devices.
And that, for my purposes, is the real value of Twitter – that information and links about developing situations can be quickly distributed.
Professionally it is great for rapid notification about earthquakes. Now with three major earthquake sequences my feed has been very active.
What probably bugs me the most about Twitter is that the information then gets redistributed, or Re-Tweeted (RT) as they say in the medium.
RT’s serve a purpose because each RT spreads the important or interesting information to a new group of followers.
But when I am filtering a topic and a particularly popular post is RT’ed by a lot of people all the RT’s can quickly overwhelm the screen.
You end up with only a little signal in all the noise. (My view of it.)
I have found it both impressive and frustrating the amount of information you can place in a carefully crafted 140 character message.
It is long enough to convey significant information, particularly if you include a link, but short enough to inhibit nuanced discussion.
More than once I have been frustrated that my Twitter comments have been misinterpreted because of the limits on fully developing an idea.
Sometimes 140 characters is just not enough- The ability to Tweet the essence of the Athanasian Creed being an exception http://bit.ly/YHibv
However, I can appreciate the value of widely broadcasting your ideas and the potential for immediate feedback.
In general, for serious theological discussions, I have trouble finding usefulness in exchanging information in 140 character packets.
But in the case of Twitter the medium has become the message, as Marshall McLuhan would say. It is the democratization of info distribution.
Anyone with an Internet connection can send news to anyone else in the world-no corporate news filter, only the 140 character limit.
(BTW-In case you missed it in the midst of the other two big anniversaries, the Internet also just turned 40 http://bit.ly/4aZunE)
So, in a connectional church, does this mass interconnectedness of individuals change the hierarchical connections of our institution?
We are carrying to the logical conclusion the shift we have seen in the PC(USA) for the last several decades-we find identity around ideas.
In the “modern era” we have organized and advocated around affinity groups, but not strictly governed around them.
The 17th synod proposal would change that. http://bit.ly/ccHf1
(And of course the caveats: previous splits created such affinity governing bodies http://bit.ly/2zRIDI;
The PC(USA) already has language non-geographic presbyteries, a form of affinity group;
And some may argue that certain geographic presbyteries have a strong affinity nature to them already.)
It strikes me that the increase in affinity groups was helped by many technological advances in communications and travel, not just Twitter.
But in this shift we are not becoming congregational in nature, although demographers say the church in general is becoming individualistic.
Consider the PC(USA) list of Advocacy Groups http://bit.ly/2exeSq – Is that the direction governance in the PC(USA) is headed?
Churches in the mainline seem to have these groups – I’m not aware of other branches having this many groups.
(For differences in technology use by ethnic churches consider this article http://bit.ly/2O01Rl on web sites.)
Now I don’t attribute all this to Twitter, but it is the latest in the technologies that allow us to organize well on this granular scale.
I don’t know what this means for the future – friends tell me twitter is here to stay but they said that about usenet. http://bit.ly/3aixMt
But the trend of technology has been to empower the individual (blogs, self-publishing) and to facilitate social networking.
I can only believe that the trend to communicate, coordinate, and organize outside of our current connectional structure will continue.
So maybe the question is not “Are we connectional?” but “In what ways are we being connectional?” and how that impacts our governance.
Oh ya, in case you are interested I do tweet occasionally as ga_junkie. http://twitter.com/ga_junkie
And if you did not figure it out, each of the lines in this post is 140 characters or less and therefore can be tweeted.