:: M squared T ::

:: Saturday, May 03, 2003 ::

Text Interaction "Paper"

Ok, so I just read Growing Up Digital by Don Tapscott for a class. It's kinda cute. It was copyrighted in 1998, which means it's really stinking dated. He makes a lot of the whole anti-internet media frenzy going on at the time. He kinda laughs it off. I guess that's what everyone (well almost everyone) else did, too. Maybe I'm living under a rock but I haven't heard nearly so much fearmongering and grousing about the negatives of the internet in a few years. And we've all happily been overrun by porn and been sucked into the corporate borg. Yeah.

Did anyone check out his website? Kinda text-driven boring. Like this site isn't text driven. So shoot me. It still looks better than his. Anyhow, very much late-90s boring design. Did I say boring twice there? Oh, well. It held my interest for all of about 2 minutes - and that was only because I was trying to give it an unbiased review.

Interact with the text: ok. The 'net has changed our entire way of thinking. E-mail puts us on a first name basis with just about everyone in the world, including distant relatives of Nigerian dictators with loads of cash. Hierarchies don't make any sense to us. "Have and have-not" makes sense to the extent that it is "can and can-not." Climbing the corporate ladder? Nah...

This has implications for how we look at church. Neither the "bottom up" hierarchy of our evangelical-protestant-congregational-democratic churches nor the top-down of some of our other independent-evangelical-pastor-driven churches and the Episcopal structures of the RCC and Orthodox make sense in the same way they once did. We're more ecumenical locally, less ecumenical structurally. We have gained a local focus and a global voice in an inter-networked conversation. Perhaps it is fitting that our structural models of church can't be mapped out on paper anymore. They have to be modeled on computer in some sort of dynamic, 3D, morphable molecular structure.

I think a lot of the naïvté we all originally had about the technological panacea has been shattered. That .com bubble burst hard. I don't know how much the "struggling, sluggish American economy" will continue to affect our technological revolution. I think it was good that the tech sector crashed. A lot of it was "stupidity darwinism." People are going to have to come up with more creative ideas built on more solid bases than before. And that's just fine.

On another front, it was interesting to read about what people were saying about me when I was graduating high school as a computer geek. I spent the next four years during college teaching a lot of my former high school teachers how to use various aspects of computers and information technology. The "generation lap" was bad in 1997. It's not so bad now. There's still a long way to go on that front, but it's not the crazy-divided thing it was.

How's that for interaction?

:: Matt 5/03/2003 03:31:00 PM :: permalink :: ::
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