Entangled States

A week of strategy

This is going to be one of those weeks where I spend a great deal of time thinking about and planning for the next year, and very little writing.

I'm going to be the "Theologian in Residence" for the Diocese of Arizona's Strategic Youth Ministry planning retreat. We're hosting some folks from around the country to help us make plans about our next steps in Arizona. Notably we have one of the bright lights of the youth ministry program in the Diocese of South Carolina spending the next three days in conversation with us. South Carolina is important because it is one of the few dioceses that have managed to grow over the past few years - and its growth is in large part attributable to the focus youth ministry was given by their former bishop Ed Salmon. Hopefully we'll find ways to apply the lessons they learned into our own different context here in the Southwest.

The staff at the Cathedral will be on retreat too in the middle of the Diocesan retreat. (I'll excuse myself that day and join with our staff - bilocation is still a grace not granted, though much longed for.) We're going to be talking about "branding" which sounds much more secular than it is. What we're really doing is trying to figure out the methods and symbols we will consistently use to communicate the Gospel and the special ministry of Trinity Cathedral to the neighborhood and city in which we live. We're going to be led in this work by a parishioner who is expert at doing this in the commercial world and who charges a very big amount because she's very good. So her gift to us is all the more appreciated.

On the downside, this is probably going to mean that the communications committee is going to have to do a redesign of the Cathedral website's templates. (The Joomla technology that we use to serve up the site is still working great as far as we're concerned.) But given the quality of the visual elements of our newest site that we've put for the Cathedral Center for the Arts, I don't think we'll have much to worry about.)

Fraser Speirs: "Future Shock"

Fraser, in the words of John Gruber, "gets it".

"The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get 'real work' done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the 'real work'.

It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done."

Read the full article here.

Something like 30 years ago I saw my first Lisa. My brother-in-law bought one because he got that with its release the computer paradigm radically shifted. I remember playing with it and trying to get my head wrapped around the new metaphor.

Back in the day when I was actually doing software development for fun, one of my students lent me one of the first Macintosh computers for a couple of months. What I thought I had glimpsed in the Lisa, I experienced fully in the Mac.

I got my start in computers programing Z80's in hex assembly code. I remember how exciting the Apple ][ was - color and a built in basic interpreter. My first real computer was a used Apple ][+ and my first really useful computer was a Mac Plus. That Mac got me through graduated school and seminary. What I loved about that Mac was it kept me from frittering away my time tinkering behind the scenes with the computer and more focused on actually getting stuff done - like writing papers, creating documents, etc.

I find the same thing today with my computers. I really like my MacbookPro - but because it has a for real Unix foundation, I'm constantly tempted to muck around with it. For me this is fun, but it's not really getting any work done.

For most of the people I work with, mucking around with their computers is not fun. But it's necessary. And it's not getting any real work done.

That's why this new class of devices is so interesting. It moves us toward the appliance computer. Which is what cellphones really are, and I think, what makes them so popular. Most people just use their phones. They don't tweak them or jailbreak them. You can if you want, but most don't. Because it works well enough to get the job done and doesn't require you to count on the good offices of a tech guru to get you out of a jam.

Apple's been moving in this direction for years. I think as Speirs writes above, the rest of the industry either gets what just happened - or they miss the point and are talking about the iPad as big iPod. It's the other way around. The iPod is a little iPad.

Are you getting an iPad?

I've been offline most of this week at our annual presbyter retreat here in Arizona. As I pointed out to the bishop, if he has any doubts about my commitment to ministry, he need only look at my willingness to attend lectures on collegiality at the time when the Steve Jobs is announcing the latest technology toy. I was reduced to sitting in the back of the room and refreshing twitter feeds on my phone during the all too infrequent breaks.

Now that I'm back home and have had a chance to watch the keynote address and read up on the specs of the new device I'm thinking about what it will mean for personal computing and more interestingly to me, for technology in ministry.

Will I be getting one? Yes. The e-reader capability is the killer app as far as I'm concerned. I bought a Kindle the day it was released. I've been teased by a number of my friends who told me again and again why I was being silly. Then a few months later they bought their own. One friend (not a nay-sayer) has already worn out the buttons on her Kindle. If you're a reader, the idea of having a stack of books wherever you are is too awesome for words. I can read a novel in about a day. Two if I'm working. When I travel most of my luggage used to be taken up with books. Now I just toss in the Kindle and I'm good to go.

The iPad will function wonderfully as an e-reader. (I like the display on a Kindle, but I've never had any trouble reading on an LCD screen, so I'm not worried about the different screen on the iPad.) I should be able to read all my Kindle purchases on the iPad assuming the existing Amazon Kindle iPhone app makes it safely over to the iPad. Plus now I'll have Stanza, Reader and the iBook applications too.

But, in my mind, where the iPad really shines is that it will allow me to do a presentation directly from it - which means I won't have to lug a laptop with me when I'm speaking in a church or in a classroom. Just hook up the iPad to the projector, select the appropriate presentation and off we go. I've wanted something like this forever. I've gotten to the point where I could pretty much leave my laptop at home for most trips - now I'll be able to do that all the time. Thinking about this, my present laptop might well be the last laptop I buy. I'll move back to a desktop computer at home and the office and then use an iPad for travel.

What will this mean for ministry? Mac OS X uses PDF's as a native file format. Which means it becomes dead easy to share formatted files via electronic transmission and be assured that the copy looks the same as the original. This is critically important for sharing formatted material like liturgies or hymns.

Imagine what it might be like if this class of device becomes common. A parishioner with one might be able to come into the service, connect to the parish wireless, download the liturgy for the day plus the announcements by pressing one button on their tablet. Color in the bulletin? Done. Video in the sermon? Done. (No need for a giant screen or an overpowered projector.) Translation on the fly? Probably done - use Google's service. Annual Report? Done.

The biggest office expense at the Cathedral right now is the giant copy/printer press that we use to generate thousands of pages of liturgical handouts each week. Imagine being able to reduce that to a few hundred copies for people without tablets. All the rest of the congregation will be able to get what they need without having to use paper, or the power it takes to print a copy.

Just from a strict environmental view this is a win for churches. It's also a financial win (though it probably moves the cost of distribution from the congregation's budget to that of the parishioner). More interestingly it will allow us to do much more interesting things with the "bulletin" - like link directly to the congregation's calendar. Offer to auto add an event to a person's calendar. Refer them to websites for more information. Offer to provide them a copy of a special speaker's book for a very reduced cost... etc.

There's word that Apple received a patent early this week to create a solar powered tablet. Which would make this even more ubiquitous and environmentally friendly. Especially in the developing world. Look at how profoundly mobile phone technology is changing the way village life is lived in the developing world.

Now think about what would happen to have something like this (much cheaper of course) being made available and connected to the existing mobile network...

Oh yes. I'm getting one. I can't wait to see what we think of to do with it.

Pope to priests: Get thee to a blog!

Well. After having begged and cajoled people all over the Episcopal Church to take their proclamation of the Gospel to the new crossroads of our age, it appears the big reinforcements are taking the field.

Pope Benedict, addressing the faithful on the Roman Catholic Church's Day of Communications writes (according to Reuters):

"'Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources -- images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites -- which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis,' he said.

Priests, he said, had to respond to the challenge of 'today's cultural shifts' if they wanted to reach young people.

But Benedict warned priests not to strive to become stars of new media. 'Priests present in the world of digital communications should be less notable for their media savvy than for their priestly heart,' he said."

Read the full article here.

So, you evangelists and theologians out there, what are you waiting for? An invitation from the Pope? Done!

(And parenthetically I'll add that priest will not only reach the young by communicating online. The fastest growing segment of Facebook is the boomers and hero generation folks.)

Calling all Berkeley alums

Heh. Found this out online. I'm honored of course.

"On June 8-9, Berkeley Divinity School will host a special two-day symposium for BDS alumni, Getting the WORD out: Communication as Leadership.  The Very Reverend W. Nicholas Knisely, dean of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix, AZ, will serve as keynote speaker for the event."

From here.

A New Year's Resolution for your church

I don't know how I missed the extraordinary resource that the United Methodist Church Communication people have put online for anyone to access. It's a full, self-directed, effective methodology for creating a church marketing plan for your congregation. It looks like it will work for any mainline denomination congregation.

According to the site, the reasons you would do such a thing are:

• To fulfill your church's God-designed calling and purpose.
• To prosper and grow in the areas where God has uniquely gifted your church.
• To improve how you communicate with and impact the people you want to reach for the Kingdom.
• To be good stewards of church resources (time, energy, money, people, facilities), ensuring they are working together for your church to be most effective."

We have a communications committee at Trinity Cathedral - and we've been taking the first steps towards creating our own marketing plan. We're especially gifted with some technology people, a couple of people who own their own communications firms, and some world class music and art to draw people downtown.

But we've not had a step by step plan on how to put all this together.

Now we do.

What an awesome resource for the new year!

Find all the resources here.

Are email newsletters dead?

Some of you know that I've been very active in church communications for the last decade or so. I've been involved in parish, diocesan and national work as part of that. The one thing I've learned over the past ten years is that communications is rapidly changing, and that we're ALL struggling to keep up with the crest of the wave.

Ten years or more ago the idea of using email to regularly communicate with members of a parish or a diocese was a radically innovative idea. I did a lot of fast talking getting various parts of the church to get involved in using that technology.

But things are changing. Good email is being inundated and drowned in unwanted spam. Users haven't all learned how to deal with too many emails. ISP's and mail servers are starting to just reject mail if they're too busy to be able to receive it. And the sender has no idea if the message is read or not.

The nice folks over at Media Salt ask the question about whether or not it's time to move beyond emailed communications:

"Do you regularly read the email newsletters that end up in your inbox? I know I don’t. Even if I sign myself up intentionally, I’ll skim the first message I receive (maybe) and will then ignore all of the rest. They even begin to annoy me over time, requiring me to unsubscribe or just block the message as spam. Just like ads online, my eyes are  in the habit of ignoring the newsletters in my inbox.

Am I saying that email communication all together is a bad idea? Not at all. I understand the importance of occasional email blasts for special events and promotions. I just feel that the weekly newsletter format is an outdated way to push out your information online."

Read the full article here.

Email is a push medium - the message is pushed out the recepient. As such there's "friction" in its transmission. You have to format the note correctly. The servers all have to be working. The receivers computer must be working. The receiver must be ready to read your message.

There are other techniques. Facebook, RSS (real-simple-syndication), twitter for example are all pull media. The user tells the computer to go get interesting things when they're ready or interested in reading them. As such there's less friction to getting your message out there.

Is it time to pull the plug on email newsletters? Probably not. The one thing I have learned is that absolute answers don't work during a time of rapid transition. (There's a theological side to that too, I should blog about that.) So we're going to be best served with a both/and solution for a while. Email newsletters and RSS feeds.

Sort of what I'm doing here. (See the upper right hand corner under the mast head.) Not that I have lots of readers (about 400-500 a day) but the ones I have use direct page loading, facebook, email and RSS feeds about equally.

And I'm glad you do. Thanks. Now go and see if you can convince the folks in your church or diocese to do something similar. Grin.

Episcopalians! Ninjas! The Creed! Awesome.

Every now and then someone comes up with a brilliant theme for a video. This one about the Super-Ninja Jesus followers delivers and then some.

Is this the long awaited viral video about the Episcopal Church?

Direct link here.

Bible Study Software

My favorite part of preaching is the preparation. Each week, starting on Tuesday morning, I look up the lectionary texts for the coming Sunday, read them through and then start ruminating upon them trying to find a common theme - or something that needs to be said in the congregation’s local context. By Thursday or Friday I generally have some idea of where I think I want to go with the text. That’s when the fun part happens.

I’ll find that there’s generally one phrase or image in one of the three lessons that ends up being the fulcrum point of the sermon. Once I’ve identified that I start opening up the bible research tools in earnest. That’s the part I look forward to each week. The study session usually lasts two to four hours and as I’ve said, those hours are the highlight of my week.

When I went to seminary I expected that because of my background in science and mathematics I would find my greatest joy in systematic or applied theology. Oddly enough it turns out that I fell in love with biblical studies. I took every New Testament course I could cram in my schedule. I spent way more money than we had to build up a personal library full of the classic biblical research texts. Don’t even get me started on my bible translation collection...

I spent all that money on books because, given my desire to be a traditional anglo-catholic slum priest, I figured I’d never have the sort of easy access to research material as I had while a student at Yale. Turns out that my call, with one exception, really hasn’t been either that of a traditional anglo-catholic nor in economically depressed areas. But I have a pretty large library of reference books, and with a big enough table, they sufficed to do the sermon prep I wanted to do. It was a bit time consuming to chase down all the possible leads I’d find doing my reading but it was manageable.

My younger brother, who’s a CMA pastor, asked me once why I wasn’t using any computer bible study tools. (I think that was in the mid-nineties.) Frankly I didn’t know such things existed. I was in the process of learning how to build computers from spare parts again as a way providing equipment for the parish I was serving and software was a luxury that we couldn’t really afford. But my brother has spent some money on something called Logos Bible Software and he showed me one Christmas what he could do with it. My grandmother had given us a nice gift that year, and with my wife’s permission, I spent some of that on one of the early Logos Scholar packages.

I messed around with that software for a long while but I never really invested the time to learn what it was capable of doing. And then came the great hardware crash of 2004 and my subsequent move to Apple hardware. Logos was a windows only program and while I gained much moving to an Apple, I regretted the loss of access to my electronic books in the Logos (Libronix) format. But, serving in Bethlehem at the time and teaching at Lehigh I had access to a good library (and the Moravian Seminary within walking distance of my office) and I was able to manage. I lost that access however when I moved to Phoenix. Wanting to still be able to access the standard references, and having learned what a great timesaver it was to do that electronically, I spent some money to buy one of the Accordance Bible Study packages for the Macintosh. It worked differently, but I was able to manage and I’ve used that since as my primary bible, concordance, reference library. A year ago Logos came out with a Mac based program that let me regain access to my older library again and since then I’ve used both in tandem. (I have an overlapping collection but have unique favorites in one or the other collection.)

So this week, while I’ve been home with the flu, and trying to find something useful to do, I decided to spend some time learning how to use the various packages. And now I’m rather cross with myself that I didn’t do this before.

If you have a copy of Accordance, you really need to start watching the excellent podcasts that they are making as tools to show people how to use their software. I’ve spent the mornings watching the whole lot. While I don’t use some of the specific techniques for bible study that are being demonstrated, just seeing the capability of the software has opened up whole new workflow ideas to me. I’ve had the best time this week working on my sermon on Job and using the tools demonstrated to get into the actual text itself. I’ve even bought one of the cheaper bundle packages from Rejoice to round out my collection of Hebrew tools to make this easier in the future.

I’ll eventually do the same with Libronix as well I suppose. But at the moment the Mac version of the program lags in functionality behind the Windows version - and while I’m grateful to have access to my older purchased reference works again, I’m leery of spending too much time or money in this particular system until the promised new version for the Mac arrives. The conversion from my Windows reference library to the new Mac one was a bit spotty, I lost access to some of my texts (through my own lack of careful record keeping) and as such Libronix in it’s present form just can’t compete with what I’m able to do in Accordance. I have watched a couple of the videos on the website, and I suppose spending some money to fix the holes in my library would help, but as I said, I’m going to wait and see for while. If on the other hand, you’re a windows user, do take a close look at the Libronix training materials. They run regular training seminars around the country. I’m told that unless you’ve attended one of the seminars, you’re simply not going to be able use the software to its fullness. The one real advantage that Libronix has going for it in my mind though at the moment is that it’s possible to purchase the entire Yale Anchor Bible Commentary series in the Libronix format. (It’s not available in Accordance.) I have a number of print copies of that series, but owning the entire set is something that I’ve always dreamed of.

Of course both have the new Hermenia series. That series is causing me to start thinking about how many lunches I’d have to skip to be able to save up the money to purchase...

What sorts of software do you use? Do you find it helpful? Any tips about how you learned to use it better?

Can "smart" people believe this stuff?

If you're bored this evening and living within range of KKNT's radio signal (Phoenix 960 AM), perhaps you'd like to tune into Faith on the Line at 9 PM tonight.

I'm going to be one of a panel of clergy with backgrounds in science and scientific research speaking about how we balance our belief in God with our secular backgrounds. The title of the show is "Can Smart People Believe in this Stuff?". At least that's the working title.

I have a few things to say to that question. But then you probably guessed that.

If you can't listen directly, there appears to be a link here that will let you listen to the streaming program over the Internet. (If that link isn't working for you, use the link at the upper righthand corner of the show's website.)

eBook version of "The Lost Symbol" is outselling paper

I've seen this news reported in a number of places online this afternoon. Dan Brown's latest book "The Lost Symbol" is selling more copies electronically on the Kindle than it is in paper. At least at Amazon.

Most of the online reports seem to track back to this post at Kindle Nation Daily:

"As of 10:30 a.m. EDT today, September 15, the Kindle edition is ahead of the hardcover edition in Amazon's own hourly-updated sales rankings. "

Read the full note here.

Interesting.

I bought the Kindle version. It was half the price of the hardback. I'll finish in a half day's worth of reading and I'm not likely to reread it many times. I won't have to store a copy in my already overloaded bookshelf. And it was cheaper. (Did I mention that already?)

Perhaps we're starting to see a long expected shift?

----

On a quick note about the actual book - I'm a little worried about how Brown tries to base Noetic science (the science of human consciousness according to his novel) in part on the ideas of Quantum Entanglement.

I've always been uncomfortable when people try to push physics models further than they are valid, or into regimes where they are not meant to be used. I've read a lot of hackneyed religion and new age ideas that try to build off some of the surprising and counter-intuitive predictions of Quantum Physics. I've done my best to avoid that here. But I'm thinking that we are all in for a lot of nonsense if this new book has anything like the following of Brown's last book.

What to do after General Convention adjourns today?

Warning: This post is not on the topic of what the Episcopal Church should do, or what the Anglican Communion should do, it's what *I* personally intend to do on Monday and Tuesday...

When I returned home from Convention in Columbus, I was emotionally drained. The intensity and the anguish felt by so many over the last few days of that Convention took a massive toll. When I got home, besides sleeping for a day or two, I just sort of sat and stared out the window. I ended up digging out my director versions of the Lord of Rings movies and spent a few days watching the whole series sequentially. Sort of like going to Bayreuth for a full Ring cycle.

I'm not as drained this Convention. The bishops have made the big decisions already (and there's little or no question about where the House of Deputies is standing on this during this particular Convention) and the budget discussions yesterday were mostly a waste of time in terms of accomplishing anything. So given that I'm not exhausted, I'm thinking I need to find a nice mental challenge for a couple of days of vacation.

I think I've found it:

"Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates believes that if he had been able to watch physicist Richard Feynman lecture on physics in 1964 his life might have played out differently.

Mr. Gates, of course, is legendary as a Harvard University dropout who went on to create the world’s most successful software firm. He has told associates that if had watched the lectures earlier in his life he might have become a physicist instead of a software entrepreneur.

However, Mr. Gates, who is also well known for his sharp and varied intellectual interests and his philanthropic commitment to education, said this week that he had purchased the rights to videos of seven lectures that Dr. Feynman gave at Cornell University called “The Character of Physical Law,” in an effort to make them broadly available via the Internet."

Read the full article here.

My advisor back when I was working in the area of General Relativity was Ed Kerner. Kerner was famous around the school as having been Feynman's first grad student. Dr. Kerner (I never ever called him by his first name, not even behind his back) was said to have had much of the same lecture style as his advisor had. Kerner, while certainly one of the finest mathematical minds I've ever known, never ever lost sight of the physics behind the equations. He told me that he'd learned that skill from *his* advisor.

I've read the Feynman lectures a couple of times now, but I always wished I could have seen Dr. Feynman actually deliver them. Now I can apparently.

I think I'm going to do just that for my aperitif in the coming week.

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Shutting down open communication is the first sign of real trouble

Interesting article on the New Scientist about an analysis of the communication patterns of the Enron Corporation leading up to it's collapse into scandal a few years ago.

Two researchers, Collingsworth and Menezes were given access to the final 18 months worth of email logs of Enron.

"Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely. They presented their findings at the International Workshop on Complex Networks, held last month in Catania, Italy."

Read the full article here.

Interesting finding, but not terribly surprising. We all know that we're in trouble when we walk into a room at work and people stop talking. We know that when we're feeling threatened, we reach out to an ally for a private talk.

This is just that human instinct writ large and empowered by technology.

The import of this though is that it should in principle to be able to work up some sort of "closed communication index" or something, that would measure the degree of open communication lines in an institution. The more closed the communications, the more dire the prospects of the organization.

I suppose investors would love to get their hands on that sort of information. And I would imagine that a wise CEO and board would want to monitor the index regularly. Done right, it ought to be relatively easy to measure without betraying any private or confidential information.

The article goes on to suggest some other sorts of things that can be found by looking through the email logs in an aggregate ways. Worth the 5 minutes it takes to read.

And makes me glad there's no single email supplier for the Episcopal Church. Ignorance can be bliss I guess. Grin.

Map the Fallen

If you have some time to surf the web today or tomorrow, let me encourage you to take a look at new "Google Map layer" which will allow you to put faces and names to the statistics of those who have given their lives for this country in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The layer is linked from a new site called "Map the Fallen"

The author describes his creation thusly:

"This Memorial Day I would like to share with you a personal project of mine that uses Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each of their stories—you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit memorial websites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died."

Read the full article here.

I've already visited the friend I buried who lost his life in the war in Iraq. You may know others. Seeing their faces and remembering their story is one of the fitting ways I can imagine to mark Memorial Day this year.

Excellent new resource for social web types ...and churches

I've been hearing about the Inbound Marketer's Handbook for sometime now and been looking forward to reading it. It's basically a quick start guide to using social networking tools to build a successful online presence.

"Inbound Marketing combines blogging, social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) to build communities and enhance personal and business brands. Learn strategies and best practices for this new form of Internet Marketing. Tons of up-to-date tips and tricks for using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for business, and much more..."

Download a free copy for yourself here.

I've had a chance to skim through the chapters. It's pretty exhaustive. Now mind you, it's written for a secular and business audience so there's going to need to be some necessary translation done for it to make sense to a church audience, but that's not unusual. In the main body of the book you do it by swapping "brand presence" with "congregational marketing" as you read along.

The tools John describes work the same in both settings, and they represent a significant addition to the tool-belts of those of us trying to do local and regional evangelism.

Full disclosure: the author is my brother-in-law, but I've had nothing to do with the creation of this book. I've just been following his creation of it as he's posted his progress on Twitter and Facebook.

The end of the line for newspapers

Fantastic article by Clay Shirky that explains the unsolvable problem that faces newspapers in the 21st century.

In short the old Pulitzer business model of advertising supported newspapers has run its course and no longer works.

The problem isn't that we watching a buggy whip in the automobile age scenario unfold, it's that it's been known to be coming and has been intentionally ignored by the titans of the print business.

Shirky calls this business model collapse the "Unthinkable Scenario" and writes of it:

"The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away."

Read the full article here.

And if think this is bad, you should see how Churches are managing to ignore the changing models in their part of the print world...

"Choosing to go unheard"

I'm in Kanuga (an Episcopal Church Conference Center) right now, and have been giving presentations to some of our bishops on why and how to "blog".

Actually I've been trying to convince them that the way to drive our the effects of bad information is to overwhelm it with good information. My brother the doctor says this aphorisitically as "The solution to pollution is dilution".

Some people in the Episcopal Church have been resistant to this idea in the past. They have lots of reasons. None of which I've found convincing. Their "reasons" are, true be told, cautions that we need to heed while communicating, but not reasons to not do it. I mentioned all this in passing to a friend and colleague, Canon Andrew Gerns.

He went off on a very useful rant as a result.

His full post on the use of communications and technology in the church is worth reading. Really. Seriously.

But his point toward the end makes the same point I've been trying to make for years:

"This means that parishes and dioceses have to be intentional and committed to layering their communications strategy as much as they able, and this may mean that parishes have to band together to work together on getting the word out. This means we need more Christians, lay and ordained, using as many layers as possible.

It means that dioceses and congregations and our lay and ordained leaders must begins seeing ourselves as a network rather than as members of related stand-alone institutions. The Apostle Paul likened this network to a human body.

For us Episcopalians, it means that priests and bishops have to set the example in being proactive in their use of communications tools: the more a priest or bishop blogs, tweets, and uses FB, as well as writing in the diocesan paper and speaks from the pulpit, the more that pastoral leader shows us that Good News is for telling and that we are willing to meet people where they are."

Spot on! We need to communicate our story of the change Jesus has made in our lives again and again and again. It might not be easy, people might reject what we say, and they might even make fun of us.

But we still need to do it.

You can find the full article here.

I am an Episcopalian (.org)

A new website campaign for Episcopalians has gone live today at www.iamepiscopalian.org.

The site has videos and stories of Episcopalians, some famous and some not, who talk of how they came to the Episcopal Church and what belonging to the denomination has meant to them.

Here's a sample:

Google on what the future will bring...

There's a President's Day reflection on Google's blog that talks about what effects we might expect to see as the broadband stimulus funds contained in the recently signed national Stimulus package are spent.

If things work out, Google sees both an increase in the connectivity of individual nodes on the 'net, and an increase in the way that people are going to access that information.

Specifically they foresee:

"All the world's information will be accessible from the palm of every person

Today, over 1.4 billion people, nearly a quarter of the world's population, use the Internet, with more than 200 million new people coming online every year. This is the fastest growing communications medium in history. How fast? When the Internet was first made available to the public, in 1983, there were 400 servers. Twenty five years later: well over 600 million.

In many parts of the world people access the Internet via their mobile phones, and the numbers there are even more impressive. More than three billion people have mobile phones, with 1.2 billion new phones expected to be sold this year. More Internet-enabled phones will be sold and activated in 2009 than personal computers. China is a prime example of where these trends are coming together. It has more Internet users than any other country, at nearly 300 million, and more than 600 million mobile users — 600 million! Twenty-five years ago, Apple launched the Mac as 'the computer for the rest of us.' Today, the computer for the rest of us is a phone.

This means that every fellow citizen of the world will have in his or her pocket the ability to access the world's information. As this happens, search will remain the killer application. For most people, it is the reason they access the Internet: to find answers and solve real problems."

Read the full article here.

As an iPhone user - and actually one of three people who use iPhones in a family of three - we're already starting to live into this new paradigm. Having access to the web anywhere and at anytime has changed the way we communicate information in our family in ways that I didn't expect.

And I'm wondering now what the effect is going to be on the Church. It's certainly going to be more than just having a bunch of bible translations at your fingertips all the time - or being able to read the Book of Common Prayer whenever you want.

Just as blogs created a method of conversation that no one in the Church really anticipated, these convenient, always on Internet devices are going to create change for us that we don't expect.

For instance, in classrooms these days, students use laptops to have conversations with each other about the lecture they're attending. (Or at least some do...) Could something like that be in our future for worship services?