Discipleship

digital

opportunities & challenges of

social media for the church

@krishk http://krishk.com
@krishk
DON’T
PANIC
 OPTIMISM
UTOPIANISM
GRAND SCHEMES
UNIVERSAL TRUTHS
OBJECTIVITY
SUPERIORITY
CONFIDENCE
POSITIVE TECHNOLOGY

MODERN VIEW OF THE FUTURE

POST/LATE/MODERNITY

OPTIMISM PESSIMISM
UTOPIANISM DYSTOPIANISM
GRAND SCHEMES NO GRAND SCHEMES
UNIVERSAL TRUTHS PERSONAL TRUTHS
OBJECTIVITY SUBJECTIVITY
SUPERIORITY INFERIORITY
CONFIDENCE FEAR
POSITIVE TECH NEGATIVE TECH
 REACTIONARY
digital

FIGHT/FLIGHT
RESIST/RETREAT
@krishk
 REACTIONARY
digital

But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and
give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.
Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not
always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of
them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of
your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot
have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls,
because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written
characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have
discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples
not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and
will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know
nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the
reality.

Phraedus, Plato @krishk

 REACTIONARY
digital

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from

Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing
important to communicate,"
“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think
what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a
man.... The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand,
and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I
assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run
over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others
have the misfortune to be ridden upon.”
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
 REACTIONARY
digital

"It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure."

Clay Shirky
 REACTIONARY
digital

FIGHT/FLIGHT
RESIST/RETREAT
@krishk
 EXCITEMENT
digital

Today postmodernity
1500 reformation
1000 schism
500 fall of roman empire
0 birth of church
500 BC return from exile
1000 BC judges to kings @krishk
digital

@krishk
DON’T
PANIC
 ENGAGEMENT
digital

TOOL
ECOLOGY
LANGUAGE
CULTURE @krishk
 TOOL
digital

We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."

Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media (1964)
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may
extend that truism: To a person with a pencil, everything looks
like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks
like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like
data.
Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 14

“Perhaps we just need a bigger tool

box” @krishk
if, knowing what we know today about the brainʼs
plasticity, you were to invent a medium that would
rewire our mental circuits as quickly and
thoroughly as possible, you would probably end
up desiginging something that looks and works a
lot like the internet. Itʼs not just that we tend to
use the Net regularly, even obsessively. Itʼs that
the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory
stimuli - repettitive, intensive, interactive,
addictive - that have been shown to result in
strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and
functions.

Carr, Nicholas, (2010) The Shallows - How the

internet is chaning the way we think, read and
remember, Atlantic Books, London, p.116
 ECOLOGY
digital

Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by

an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of
clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not.
We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean
by ecological change. to every home, to every school, to every church, to
every industry...

Neil Postman,
Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

When environments change, dinosaurs die the

church needs to be agile to connect @krishk
@krishk
 LANGUAGE
digital

Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations
of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.”

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, New York Routledge, 2002,p.82

“church must be digitally literate to

communicate with digital natives”
@krishk
“church can lead the way to
empower the digitally illiterate to find
their space in digital space” @krishk @krishk
Proverbs 24:17 "Do not gloat when your enemy
Proverbs 11:10 "When the righteous prosper, the
falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart
city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are
rejoice or the LORD will see and disapprove and
shouts of joy."
turn his wrath away from them."

Ezekiel 18:23 "Do I take any pleasure in the death

Romans 8:31 "What, then, shall we say in
of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD.
response to these things? If God is for us, who can
Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their
be against us?"
ways and live?"

Ezekiel 33:11 "Say to them, 'As surely as I live,
declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in
the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn
from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil
ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?"
Romans 13:4 "For the one in authority is God's
servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be
afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no
reason. They are God's servants, agents of wrath
to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." (Driscoll)

Romans 12:19 "Do not take revenge, my dear

friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is Proverbs 21:15 "When justice is done, it brings joy
written: 'It is mine to avenge; I will repay,' says the to the righteous but terror to evildoers." (Warren)
Lord."
 CULTURE
digital

1. Condemn culture 4. Consume culture

2. Critique culture 5. Create culture
3. Copy culture
“ Our culture is doing
a better job of
making disciples
than we are
Bishop Graham Cray
34
35
36
World View
story

praxis questions

symbol
NT Wright, NT and the People of God, SPCK, p.124 37
 OPPORTUNITIES
digital

CONVERSATION
COLLABORATION
CULTURAL CHANGE
#twitmovie
Summarise the plot
of Inception in 140
characters
dreams are real and yours aren’t safe
@mikey_oldfield

inception
if the top is still spinning you are still

in a tweet
dreaming
@mikepcshaw
can u plant an idea in a person's mind +
persuade them it's their own? corporate
heist in a dream world leads to questioning
reality
@thomasarthurmaj
he went to sleep for a week and it felt like a
lifetime. But did he ever wake up?
@dean_seddon_uk
 COLLABORATION
digital

Dr Michael Jenson
 CONVERSATION
digital

Dr Michael Jenson
digital
CULTURECHANGE
"This linking together in turn lets us tap our
cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of
free time the educated population of the planet
has to spend doing things they care about. In
the 20th century, the bulk of that time was
spent watching television, but our cognitive
surplus is so enormous that diverting even a
tiny fraction of time from consumption to
participation can create enormous positive
effects."
digital
COLLABORATION
Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide victory (by
a margin of nearly 200 electoral votes and 8.5 million popular
votes) by converting everyday people into engaged and
empowered volunteers, donors and advocates through
social networks, e-mail advocacy, text messaging and online
video. The campaign’s proclivity to online advocacy is a
major reason for his victory.Since the election, the social
media programs adopted by Obama’s transition team have
foreshadowed significant changes in how Obama, as
president, will communicate with – and more importantly –
through the mass of supporters who were collected,
cultivated and channeled during the campaign. Obama
wants to be the first president to govern with BlackBerry in
hand; he will certainly be the first with a legion of 13 million
advocates at his fingertips.

TheSocial Pulpit Barack Obamaʼs Social Media Toolkit, Edelman

“Without Twitter the people of Iran
would not have felt empowered and
confident to stand up for freedom and
democracy,”
Mark Pfeifle, a former US national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter
to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“There was no Twitter Revolution inside
Iran....Western journalists who couldn’t
reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people
on the ground in Iran simply scrolled
through the English-language tweets post
with tag #iranelection....Through it all, no
one seemed to wonder why people trying
to coordinate protests in Iran would be
writing in any language other than Farsi.”
Golnaz Esfandiari
Social media gives us the illusion of
action...but also drains energy from
real action. #Apple8 Wed Oct 13 20:41:05 2010 via Twitter for
iPad @KesterBrewin

“Displacement means you accept a

fantasy of political participation rather
than the real thing.”
Luke Bretherton 2010
What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights
movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people
they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than
dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism... is a
“strong-tie” phenomenon.
Malcolm Gladwell, Why the next revolution will not be tweeted
The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social
media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you
may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for
keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why
you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

Malcolm Gladwell
When networks of elites in overlapping fields of
culture and overlapping spheres of social life
come together with their varied resources and
act in common purpose, cultures do change
and change profoundly. Persistence over time is
essential; little of significance happens in three
to five years. But when cultural and symbolic
capital overlap with social capital and economic
capital and, in time, political capital, and these
various resources are directed toward shared
ends, the world, indeed changes.

James Davidson Hunter,

To Change the World,
Oxford University Press, (2010), p.43
Social media is a tool to seek the
welfare of our cities by informing &
strengthening a movement of grass
roots committed communities.
 Social change, social media and the Bible

We
Exist in Exile to
Bless Babylon not
Pressgang our Politics
“
If a man does not keep pace
with his companions, perhaps it
is because he hears a different
drummer. Let him step to the
music which he hears, however
measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau