New Year Resolutions?

2012 — the year the world ends? I sincerely hope not; there’s work to be done, and I wish anyone reading this all good faith, hope and love in the coming year.

Among many cards and messages recently, a fair few friends have asked after this blog. After four heavy years, December has been my month off blogging, aided by three realities — an extended educational development trip to India, the need to do a bit more work elsewhere, and curiosity about taking a break. That and the Day job.

Any result? This is how things are shaping up, at the start of a new year of Grace...

• Over the autumn I have put more time into Facebook, as a more interactive space in which it has been possible to explore some in depth conversations.

• I've certainly decided that having a very open policy on responding to friend requests on FB is an excellent wheeze, and much of the goof-about stuff I had been using this blog for as a kind of commonplace book, is probably better done through FaceBook. Friend me, and I will friend you, er, friend.

• I have finally disconnected from Fleet Street. When the Times paywall came in, I subscribed, mainly because someone’s got to pay for journalism and it could have been a fruitful way to go. I've let the sub go now, mainly because it was adding little value to my life. The upside was occasional pieces of themost superb journalism — Simon Barnes, I will miss you, sir. The downside was a tedious sense of being trapped at a fundamentally narrow andsuperficial party, surrounded by low grade right wing bores, stories spun up in a hurry, often lifted from the internet or agencies anyway, a dreadfully sparse and low standard of scientific, historical, educational and religious reporting. By December I noticed I could only be bothered to download the Times once a fortnight, out of a sense of duty. Why? I wondered. So I stopped. Mr Murdoch, I sucked it and saw. Now I’m out of here.

• Twitter has been my space of choice for immediate news, keeping up with events and opinions, and reportage. 

• The odd meeting or event, anything with potential news value, has proved to be well worth tweeting, and I have been using Twitter to trawl reactions and opinions all over the place. 

• If I worked at a desktop rather than being out and about so much, I might use Twitter even more, but certainly it remains my best immediate reaction and comment source, to listen as much as to talk. I use Echofon to thread conversations on iPad and iPhone.

• What is best done on this blog, however, are short comment pieces with the opportunity for follow-up conversations. As to frequency, I had been writing a piece then seeing through conversations arising from it until they dried up then sticking another on.

And in the meanwhile I'm also experimenting with a far cleaner simpler design. Some have been telling me they find the old one took ages to load, and had even produced the odd malware warning. I'd love to know reactions, especially if anyone misses any of the elements I've eliminated in the interest of de-cluttering.

That seems to me the way to go. Twice a week? Let’s see...

Media, Schmedia

This has been my year for pushing social media and learning — developing use of Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter.

Diary function and sharing snippets is probably best done by Facebook, news by Twitter, recce information about places for exploring by Foursquare.

Where does that leave the humble Blog?

As what people used to call a commonplace book, with occasional comment, it’s unbeatable. I need to invest more in it. Some of the comment threads it stimulates turn are fascinating, and it becomes a focus for a form of community. It’s brought great joy this summer to meet a few of the people whose comments I most respect and like. That and the occasional diary or policy reflection does make it worth some effort.

The key to them all is interactivity and human value. Up on my electronic watchtower three convictions have stood out this summer:

(1) There is no such thing as “Cyberspace.” Value comes from people interacting, not trips into space. The technology is hidden to most practitioners. The speed and availability of new media have implications, but the silly old idea there is a place somewhere beyond the blue called “Cyberspace” flies in the face of McLuhan’s observation that any form of human expression is a “medium.” The whole notion may just be the place memory of the obsolete commercialised information kitchen we used to call “the media.” Like the Urban Spaceman, it don’t exist.

(2) Interactivity and relationships have driven the crumbling of old media power. What contemporary media do give us, along with an invitation to waste time, is multiple small opportunities to add value to each others’ lives. Everyone is more naked now, for good or bad, but attentiveness encourages, heals and strengthens people. Facebook is more immediately effective for this than a blog.

(3) Quality stands out. Unexpectedly perhaps, old fashioned correspondent virtues of accuracy and painstaking research carry a premium. The role of professional journalists is to check facts and assure information quality, not to spin titillating or terrifying stories out of thin air. Good information sources prioritise researchers and journalists not marketing. That's why the FT and BBC have heads above water, and Murdoch doesn’t.

What we each need to work out is how much time we’re willing to invest in what particular media when...

New Model Titan: Geek and Supergeek

Facebook has led the social media revolution of our age. It began with four undergraduate friends six years ago and today boasts over 500 million members, who spend more than 700 Billion minutes using it every month. A new movie, The Social Network, tells the not-so-heroic story of its inception. It’s largely about Harvard Undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg who, understandably, was not script consultant to this biopic or the book, The Accidental Billionaires, upon which it was based.

This filmic Mr Zuckerberg, however, drives a surprisingly compelling tale. A geek, twenty hours a day in front of the computer, with low social skills but a bright idea whose time has come, accidentally inherits the earth. This is no simple story of genius come good. Any heroism is deeply flawed and almost entirely veiled by social gaucheness.

The race goeth not to the swift, like Ty and Cameron Winklevoss, Ivy League twins so privileged, self-assured and naturally entitled that there must be times they wonder which was which. No, the only race that counts goes to Zuckerberg, spotty nocturnalist whose coding skill, determination and almost autistic inability to focus on human beings triumphs over every darn thing.

Given its subject, David Fincher’s film is masterful, absorbing, sharp and skilful. It lacks a strong emotional core but this seems inevitable because so do all its principal characters, and their lack of emotional groundedness doesn’t stop them getting cross or upset, just achieving undestanding or maturity. It’s a fearfully authentic portrayal, we fear. What the real Mark Zuckerberg makes of it all we do not know, and probably does not matter. The instinct that powered the Rockefellers is alive and well, and residing in a Harvard dorm. Perhaps it always was. Nowadays, however, what took JD thirty years to build by the sweat of his brow can just happen in six months. That’s the difference.

At the centre of this great film is a paradox — we use social media because we basically like other people and instinctively want to connect, but the means we use to achieve this are entirely impersonal. You don’t have to a computer geek, or indeed have any interest in the contemporary media revolution, to follow the story.

And, damn it all all, these things happened only six years ago. If that fact in itself isn’t enough to convince you of the pace of change and the dramatic way it augments some aspects of human personality whilst squishing others, you might just have a glimmer of the crazy killer-geek instinct necessary to hatch the next big idea that will enable you to take over your own particular universe some day.

Reading for (Digital) Revolutionaries

Colleagues have been asking me about books to help them understand the communications revolution engulfing us.
Everyone is having to ascend a steep learning curve, steepest and most treacherous, perhaps, for those most accustomed to pre-digital communications. Many colleagues don’t have time to explore extensively online, but they are thoughftul people who realise that things are changing fundamentally, and would like to get their laughing gear round contemporary communication technology and its implications for their own work as pastors or Christian leaders.

How far should one get into this stuff, and how?
It rather depends on your learning style. Some assemble flat-pack furniture by getting it out and having a go: This learning style has a lot to commend it, for contemporary media. Other IKEA customers prefer to read the instructions first, to construct a framework within which they can understand what they are trying to achieve. Christian leaders will, rightly, be anxious about the risks of getting something very wrong whilst experimenting. There is value for all in including conventional reading in a journey of discovery.

There is an incredible variety and number of titles out there — this in itself adds confusion. Colleagues may have a particular interests, and I’d gather my top 17 titles around five frequent lines of inquiry. If you’re reading this, by definition, you’ve made it online, and are probably far more expert in these matters than I. Therefore I’d love to know what you think of my immediate suggestions...

(1) What is going on? How is our cultural context changing?

Begin, I would say with Clay Shirkey: Here comes everybody — How change happens when people come together. Alongside a general line of approach, people over 50 wonder how people under 30 habitually communicate and what kind of culture are they developing. For this, I’d turn to Don Tapscott: Grown Up Digital (following up an earlier survey of the net ge eration called Growing up Digital). To assist contemplation about the implications for institutions, I’d still recommend Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom: The Starfish and the Spider — the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations.

(2) What is modern communications technology doing to the ways we get things done, our business practices and attitudes?

The classic strategic overview is Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics — How mass collaboration changes everthing. At a strategic level, leaders in any institution will need to take serious account of the map provided by Gary Hamel: The Future of Management. For a closer and more recent picture of the operational possibilties, I recommend Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr & Mary Ellen Jassotakis: Social Media at Work: How networking tools propel organisational performance. I have been asked about books dealing specifically with Facebook, like Clara Shih: The Facebook Eras. If interested in the operational feld within which Facebook operates, you could do a lot worse than Lon Safko & David K. Brake: The Social Media Bible.

(3) What are the implications of all this for the Church as a communications outfit?

Shane Hipps: The Hidden Power of Electronic media: How media shapes Faith, the Gospel and Church starts with concepts first formulated by Marshall MacLuhan, drawing acutely from them challenges and benefits for the Church. The same pastor and theologian’s Flickering Pixels aks the $64K question “How far is this technology our servant, and how far our master?” Good for sermons...

(4) How do you put yourself or your product over in this environment: What’s it doing to Marketing?

Here I remain very impressed by the wisdom contained in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff: Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. This is particularly helpful on how feedback can be set up and maintained in a complex and crowded environment. Many hundreds of books on the groaning shelves address marketing issues, but I like the people-focused treatment in Juliette Powell: 33 million people in the room. Eric Qualman is an interesting marketing writer, whose recently published Socialnomics assesses, on the basis of research, the impact of new media on marketing. If you get a taste for this stuff and want to strategise in the light of the above, I’d recommend Larry Weber: Marketing to the Social Web — although it’s a couple of years old, it proposes a clear iterative strategic approach which is easily transferable to many contexts.

(5) Should I start a blog, and if I do how do I write material for electronic media?

This is probably an area where it really is best just to click around the various blogs out there, but a very good overview of some excellent and innovative pratitioners of the medium can be found in Michael A. Banks: Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s top Bloggers. Getting down to brass tacks, how am I supposed to write material suitable for web communications? In a space full of words really good writing remains precious. Janice Redish: Letting go of the Words, deals with some stylistic particularities of new media, but I don’t think it’s worth worrying too much about these. What makes good writing interesting remains surprisingly constant. I wish I had read a good book like Angela Phillips: Good Writing for Journalists years ago, but if people don’t have time for that, I recommend George Orwell’s Essay “Politics and the English Language.” If really pushed for time, T. S. Eliot’s poem “Whispers of Immortality” says pretty much everything that needs to be said about writing style. I suspect the areas of communications in which clergy need most training is effective use of presentation software. Some the dreariest uses of PowerPoint to deliver design abortions that are merely the script reduced to headings make me want to stick my head in a gas oven... But that’s another tale.

Well that’s a preliminary list> What have I missed? What is now obsolete?

News: the March of Time

I’m delighted to catch Ruth Gledhill’s characteristically clear, honest and illuminating talk from Religion and the News at Cumberland Lodge online — sadly I wasn’t able to join the consultation until the session after hers, and it’s good to catch up. Ruth observes, hitting a very important nail on the head, that the plane that crashes is inevitably a bigger news story than the thousands that land safely. Back in the sixties the BBC, beseiged by letters complaining that only bad news made the headlines, tried to run a programme called “The Positive World” that majored on good news stories. It lasted all of six weeks, if that, before bombing out, via the world service in the wee small hours. Sad, you may say, but this truth reflects human nature.

This ugly something about ourselves sometimes gets blamed on journalists, unfairly. You might as well blame criminal lawyers for crime. Without it they’d be out of a job, but that hardly makes them criminals. There is, however, a severe temptation for people selling stories — “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” was Randolph Hearst’s legendary response to a correspondent’s report that Cubans were not, in fact, murdering and raping Americans left right and centre in 1898. The power Hurst weilded to shape the news was the direct result of the fact that in 1898 only press barons like him had the resources to get someone out to Cuba with a camera, and inflamatory pix back onto the streets of New York in hours. He had the steam press — the only technology to deliver news to ordinary people affordably.

Now turn the clock forward. Pretty much everybody now has the technology to read or tell their own story; and there is no longer any need, or increasingly desire, to pay money for newsprint. I wonder what the new found ability of news targets to answer back does to the exclusivity of any story in conventional media, and what kind of accountability it will require of them.

Looking at online newspaper sites, I wonder how they can raise the quality of outside comment on religious stories, rather than the rubbishy weary procession of same-ish comments from, e.g., about a dozen snarky atheists going on about sky fairies, with equally silly rejoinders. Many newspaper comments seem to come from small coteries of fans and people with axes to grind. Are the crown jewels of journalism changing — no longer the Hearst style news stories of the past century, but what conventionally would have been labeled op-ed?

The journalist whose work people may increasingly be bothered to pay to read will be anyone who manages to draw interesting comment out of ordinary life, rather than the person who zeroes in on potential conflict and drums up a war to go with it. Plane crashes will continue to make the news, but sexing up flights that land safely and pretending they were plane crashes just looks silly. Don’t sex up the material — go for depth, colour and connections. Don’t be anonymous, be yourself and own up to your biases. Above all slow down and reflect.

I was at a London mainline station at 2220 recently, surrounded by piles of newsprint waiting for the pulper. Someone offered me an Evening Standard, now a freesheet. Was I bovvered? The Daily Telegraph (£1) was giving away a bottle of mineral water free with each copy. This was a not inconsiderable offer, as the bottle itself cost £1·55 without a Telegraph. Reading the morning’s news fourteen hours on, noticing the only story I know anything about, the RC ordinariates one, the line between news and comment was so confused, the content so thin, slanted and childishly inflamatory, I thought “If this is supposed to be quality, why would I pay for these people’s take on stuff I don’t know anything about? I’d rather read people who do understand what they’re talking about...”

Human beings are insatiably interested in information. It’s perfectly possible to sell something people actually want or need on its own merits. You can, for example, buy a packet of Nurofen without having to give away a free DVD with it. But the fact people can only shift conventional newsprint with prodigous freebies says everything. If media barons had invested as much in quality journalism, as marketing ploys and production economies, they might now have rather more to offer. But good correspondent journalism takes time and immersion. It costs.

As it was, I had a very good book to read, and bought a hot drink instead, before getting onto a crowded night train home. 4 out of 65 people in the carriage were reading papers, all freesheets.

The delivery of information and news is pretty much down to search engines and the like, spiced by social media and with hundreds of channels of conventional radio and TV, led in the UK by the BBC.

So what business should newspapers actually consider themselves to be in today? Comment and Review, à la Huffington Post? If so they’d need to invest substantially more in journalists and quality. If it’s publishing, iTunes and Amazon are becoming lead repositories of all kinds of media, with increasingly blurry lines between them. Could newspaper groups invent new website activities to add as yet undreamt of value to our lives, within their clouds? Trouble is, Facebook and MySpace are leading the way on that one... Time for newspaper editors to get thinking caps on and start justifying their up to 1·6 million pound salaries, I would think...

Religion in the News

I’ve been away for a conference among media people at Cumberland Lodge. Everyone had brickbats and bouquets to throw, all of them sincerely, but I don’t actually think religion gets as raw a deal from the media as people sometimes fear. Yes, there’s a lot of ignorance and prejudice in the papers, but distortion applies to all complex activities in the Fleet Street hall of mirrors, and it’s ceasing to matter in the way it did. There is probably generally less nastiness than applies to sport and politics, and fractionally more understanding than they have of science and medicine. I remember diocesan conferences in the eighties where people actually ordered morning newspapers to read. Even on a media conference, the pristine, generally unread, condition of the Fleet Street titles laid out on the hall table was notable, even as late as lunchtime.

Make no mistake, there is big evolution going on. Look at it however you will, the game is now up for the 1938 Evelyn Waugh Daily Beast and all its works. The old media diplodoci are flailing around in a new kind of swamp they simply don’t understand, trying to get a foothold, and wondering if they might be able to float if they could only work out how to swim.
Unfortunately their bulk, limited vision, and small unadapted bigoted brains make them better adapted for floating, perhaps drowning, than swimming.

Intereactivity has made hand-me-down obsolete and the mushroms are beginning to realise they have the technology to bite back. Advertising value is leaching out of the newspaper trade in spring torrents. The best evolving media are probably those with genuine local traction — hard for Fleet Street, but easier for media like local radio, which live on their connectedness and travel light. They have for years had some degree of real interactivity built into their model.

Amidst very fine presentations, the money shot for me was Charlie Beckett’s excellent map of the outlook (read it all, but here’s a summary)

1. First assertion: this is a wonderful time for people who think media can promote understanding.

• There has never been more media - including quality media. Around the world people are richer and better educated and need more journalism to help cope with the information they need to live their lives...
• there are threats to traditional business model which may reduce the capacity for journalism - both good and bad.
• The media sphere is a contestable space - and that means it should be allowed to be imperfect and relatively uncontrolled.
  

2. Second assertion: this is a dreadful time for people who think the media is only there to promote what they think

3. Third assertion: in a complex world the media envioronment is getting more complex

• Issues such as migration, climate change, economics, science etc mean that the world is not getting any simpler. Individuals’ media consumption is now multi-layered, interactive, creative, passive, active
• Likewise, the production process is more complex - it is participatory & multiplatform
• there is much greater diversity. The challenge is to ensure that the variety and plurality is manifested in the content. There’s no point having hundreds of channels if they all show the same show.
• Mainstream media still dominates and will continue to do but it is getting more complex too. Think about how the BBC has become more diverse and how it will be encouraged to be more open and form partnerships

4. Fourth Assertion: the news media has to learn to be more networked to society as a whole

5. Fifth Assertion: institutions like organised faiths also have to learn to be better as networked organisations

1. Institutions will now have a different relationship with MSM -
2. they can have a direct relationship with the public too
3. they can be media organsiations creating their own channels and content
4. but just like MSM they have to go where the public is (social networks)
5. they have to be conversational - they have to listen as well as talk
6. they have to be more open, engaged, literate, interactive

6. Sixth Assertion: don’t get mad, get media

1. stop complaining and do something about your coverage - start connecting.
2. Most faiths are natural networks
3. Sometimes these can be dangerous - the most successful online faith-orientated organisation I know is Al Qeada
4. But if all you do is connect with your followers than obviously you are simply rebuilding ghettos in cyberspace
5. newspapers made the mistake of thinking that going online meant replicating their newsrooms and their pages online -
6. the analogy for the media is to shift from a fortress mentality and fortress insitutions to networks. For people of faith, the analogy is to stop building digital churches or mosques - it is about building networks and connectivity

To pick up on one of these fine points as it applies to the C of E, there is no such thing as the Church of England. You can talk about London Taxis, or even a notional “London Taxi Service,” but remember you are actually talking about 19,000 cabdrivers. That is not quite as large as the number of independent chartered public bodies that comprise the Church of England, but it is in the same ballpark for numbers.

Consider, for example 2 Oxford trusts. The governing bodies of Wycliffe Hall and St Stephen’s House are both independent trusts dating from within a year of each other, 1876 and 1877. They are in the same town, and the same business, training ordinands. They have common interests, but their policies sometimes diverge, sharply. Historically they have represented entirely different concepts of what an Anglican priest is and should be. The same Coral Reef level of variety, conceptual richness and passion is reflected across 16,000 odd parishes, many of them complex multilevel bundles of trusts. This will be very annoying to stupid poeople, who have no idea why it is that way, and would certainly have designed it differently themselves.

Since the 1960’s Diversity has always been seen as a Bad Thing for the C of E. The Holy Grail has been a kind of British Leyland Corporatism, with the Church of England compared unfavourably with the Roman Catholic Church which was supposed to be more of a single rational entity. That’s why every priest in a Dan Brown film has a hotline to the Vatican. In fact the Roman Church is every bit as multilayered and subtle, and on a radically international scale, too. So are Baptist Churches. Etcetera, etcetera. No surprise, then, that the whole coral reef is seldom analysed and understood, with a stress on the brightest coloured fish, not the whole structure of the reef.

But in the kind of media multiverse Charlie is describing, being the way churches are is actually an advantage. All that’s necessary is for authentic and interesting people to get out there, be themselves, stand up and engage interactively. Thus one message to angry vicars who feel misrepresented becomes “Forget Fleet Street. It simply doesn’t matter any more.”

Socalnomics: Scanning the horizon

Interesting meetings are in the diary this autumn about the possibilities and challenge of social media in the Church. Investigating the effects of social media on marketng practice, I’m reading Erik Qualman’s Socialnomics this week — a rather chipper and US based assessment of the marketing angle. He begins with facts and figures that make yer think...

However breathless and enthusiastic this stuff may seem, it’s a more informed perspective than idiocy in the Dinosaur media about how Facebook eats teenagers’ brains and makes them suicidal, neither of which assertions seems to be particularly true. Something significant is happening, with a capacity for benefit as well as evil.

One suggestion here is that the whole idea of “broadcast” in the sense of a few big powerful media beasts shoving its stuff at you wholesale, with no opportunity to bite back, is fatally undermined now. He also makes great play of the idea that in a fast developing world such as ours, organisations that hang around wondering what to do about stuff put themselves at an immense disadvantage, compared to people who get on with doing something interactive with real human beings, even if it’s not perfect.

A bit of a challenge, then. But I’m not downhearted because the story about Church communities on the ground is often very positive. We’re such an inherently bottom-up dispersed organization, we’ve a lot less unlearning to do than slick eighties corporations with big marketing budgets and associated politics. The trixical strategic bits are around how dioceses and national institutions can genuinely support and enable local talent, relationships and excellence — but then, that’s always what we try to do anyway...

Life, Jim, but not as we know it...

The Telegraph carries an interview with Archbishop Vincent Nicholls in which he is represented as suggesting Social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace can lead children to commit suicide. I am not sure whether this was the main point, or indeed any point he was trying to make, but we can only go on what we’ve got. My first reaction is that this piece belongs in the noble company of newspaper pieces since John Robinson’s “Our Image of God must go” (1963), where the subeditor’s racy headline stood out clearer than the author’s deeper intention.

What is there to say? Well, for a start, if the Archbishop had his own blog of course, we could see what he had to say, without having to try and figure it out through the refracting lens of the Telegraph, with its own agenda. We could dialogue with him directly and come to a clearer understanding of his perception and discuss it until we had teased out its most constructive use. As it is, all we’ve got is the Telegraph.

As to the moral, human and social values underlying Archbishop Nicholls’ reported words, I am completely in agreement. A clear sense comes over that the Archbishop, like any instructed Christian, believes people should be decent, respectful, nurturing and constructive in their dealings with one another. Christianity teaches love, strong as death, as self-giving — our highest human purpose is to love God and love our neighbour as ourself. This applies to all ages, but as every pastor knows, each of the seven ages of humanity has its own particular challenges and stumbling blocks, from the innocence of childhood to the gnarled cynicism of old age.

Where do social media fit into this landscape? One might be tempted to cross out “Facebook and MySpace” and substitute “letters and telephone” or even “communication and miscommunication.” I don’t know how many young people have been driven to despair by either a love letter, or lack of it, or as a result of a telephone conversation, but I’d guess there have been a few down the years. I agree strongly with the Archbishop, too, when he implies that the family provides a holding framework within which people can most easily live together and grow up safely and fruitfully. Playing fast and loose with that personal and social capital, however fashionable among the chattering classes, does nobody any favours.

The problem, like the joy, isn’t the media, but the human beings. Bullying is bullying, whatever the medium. There are people whose would say their quality of life has been spoiled, with zero accountability, by, say, the activities of Daily Mail reporters. Do teenagers pile up superficial relationships only to become devastated when they let them down? I’m not so sure this problem is getting worse. My children are considerably better socialised than I was, as a middle class boy the same age. They generally care far more about relationships and humanity, and the time they spend MSN-ing or whatever is time I would have spent with my nose in a book — not exactly the best way to build nourishing relationships, either.

I don’t believe our young peoples’ interest in people is waning. It seems unstoppable. What I fear for is their understanding of the concept of privacy, and, like any parent, their ability to protect themselves. I wonder if people of my generation sometimes remember what our parents said to us when they rationed our TV, and somehow transfer the warning to any screen based media? This ignores the fact that today’s screens offer interactive, rather than entirely predigested experience. TV is wallpaper not the Boob tube and Oracle it used to be.

Young people I meet around have often developed a very sharp critical nose about the information they see around them. That’s why they don’t usually go anywhere near newspapers — partly because the print comes off, but mainly because they reject the tyranny of relying on one, once-a-day, source. They are often fascinated by the concept of Truth, but for them it is emergent, rather than inductive. That raises serious difficulties for anyone with a message to sell, whether Church or Media Mogul.

What do Churches have to offer?

1. interactive localised community, rooted in a place and tradition which is not, at its best, synthetic, but organic, growing naturally from experience of God and people.
   
   
2. a pooled range of ages, cultures and expectations which has always been genuinely globalised and transcultural. I am frequently moved, even in small congregations, by the wide variety of people present, one of everyone, from babes in arms to nonagenarians.
   
   
3. a shared framework of stories and narratives within which to set personal perceptions, connected to ancient wisdom and transcendent morality.
   
   
4. an open offer to participate in sacred liturgy, ritual, music, poetry and dance, whereby people enter into spiritual experience for themselves with increasing confidence, connecting with possibilities way beyond ego, individualism or mere ideas.
   
   
5. a connected spirituality, contemplation, silence and rest; call it “sanctuary.” The sabbath principle privileges offline downtime. It also sets a perspective around immediate experience, from which it can be critiqued.
   
   
6. the challenge to trascend ego and consumerism, and live for others, wrapped up in the teaching of Jesus.

Unfortunately, if local church communities themselves does not particularly enjoy, ceebrate and share these things, there’s a problem — the salt has lost its savour. The problem, however is not Facebook, but with the Church failing to be what it is called t be.

Social Media, Church and Bishopping

Social Media Day in Oxford, organised by Sarah Meyrick and Phil Hind, from our communications team. The aim was to gather people working for the Church with an interest in communications, to scope the scene and its possiblities. I chaired it and did a short bit on blogs and bishopping. We have presentations from Dave Adams on the broader context and Tim Davies about the ways young people are using social media.

We began with the Blessed Mitch Benn on the Now Show, explaining all you need to know about social media in under a minute:

One or two soundbites stood out for me from a varied and engaging day sharing experience and possibilities — Tim pointed out the way in which social media amplify conversations going on anyway, engaging young people who are often fluent, but not literate, about the use of these media. He challenged us to try and think through the transition of all communications people from providers of the message to enablers of the message within an enriched network we could not control.

And mainly because someone asked for it, I’m also happy to stick up here the list I gave of ten ways in which blogging has enriched my own work:

1. This job involves being in a network with many people out there and one of you. May of them want to know you. They may not read what you wrote but the fact that you bothered to try is undeniable
   
   
2. Be yourself! Most of your colleagues only see you on formal occasions, or when they’re in trouble. This makes them think you’re a workaholic or policeman. You’re not, but how would they know? What you reveal in your blog adds dimensions to the way you are seen, for good or ill, usually for good unless you are a complete idiot.
   
   
3. Take the initiative! People cometimes seek your views for their own reasons, time and context, often to make up stories — like the old round robin about how many bishops believe in God. The reality is they all do. The fantasy is they all don’t. You get caught in silly crossfire. Gazump this process by publishing your own views for your own reasons, in your own time and context, to tell your story. If anyone really wants to know what you believe all the information is in the public domain. If they’re just trolling or manipulating you, you don’t have to play.
   
   
4. Local is beautiful! an intelligent acknowledgment of the genuine good you noticed in a school or parish, in your own words, is worth a hundred general thank-you emails.
   
   
5. Can have a copy of your sermon? It seems mean to say no; but it’s not the same in print. Recorded on the internet is even worse. Very very few of our sermons translate into podcasts for length, style, content or production. They just sound naff. Blog content instead. Positively, work you do in one context be more available — input from one context can be picked up off Google search by other people who weren’t there for original...
   
   
6. Learn how to write in quick English! It’s a useful skill, even for Bishops...
   
   
7. Learn the joy of obliqueness! There are delicate matters out there like bullying, which you will only say anything about in a crisis if ever, left to your own devices. If you care about them, say so before there’s a crisis going on. Gentle positive reflection that tackles the subject is likely to work better. nything hot can be left on one side for six months, then picked up for comment in a less pointed more constructive way
   
8. We are all expected to hold ourselves positively accountable to the people we serve. This is a way to help do that.
   
   
9. Connect with the world! Discuss things that matter, explain what you mean, interact with overseas colleagues, convey your attitude to things as well as your policy about it, show that you aren’t a sock puppet... Tie up ideas and challenges in real time, and develop discussions. Think, rethink, interact — there are some extraordinary people out there you’d never meet otherwise. Sitting on the Peacock Throne (if you have one) handing down stone tablets to people, none of whom are listening anyway, is not a winner.
   
   
10. If you don’t nab your space someone else will! Google yourself and weep... or not, as the case may be.