Googling the Future

I'm a scenarios junkie and love alternate timelines science fiction so this was bound to get my attention, interest and get me thinking. It has a degree ofplausibility about it; basically that the way we consume media, particulalry news media is about to change and reconfigure the global media scene. Heck, I'm doing some of this stuff already: I rarely buy a newspaper -I feed of RSS and blog the stuff that catches my interest.

When I read stuff like this, though, a part of me wants to ask, how it will affect spiritual formation and corporate spiritual life [usually churches] -not to mention parachurch activity. It's worth following up the links from this page. They are pretty informative.

Spiritual formation becomes interesting in a context where individuals and groups have access to loads of info -more than we can process really- and so we employ trusted aggregators, commentators etc. Power moves from the traditional gatekeepers of church worlds to those who produce trusted comment and guidance. Actually, this isn't so new: this is the way things aldready work but they do so around print and conferences. We actually do it with reality as a whole: we not only sense only a small amount of the possible data/inputs available to us [eg we don't seee infra-red radiation or ultra-violet, we cannot unaidedly sense radio waves, and so on] and wha't more we are only really wired to attend to some of what we can sense [eg movement in our visial field is priviledged]. Then we are wired also to interpret it in particular ways as a first response. So our repsonse to the huge data-flow that becomes available is to make it manageable. The difference is, though, that we can make choices about what we will and won't attend to and how we will attend or exclude it. Being social animals we will tend to negotiate it through social means: gatekeepers of data. There is a potential for understanding to grow and for previously excluded perspectives to find exposure, but -like now- it will be subjec to the vicssitudes of our filtration systems. Data may be available but it may not be appreciated, or wanted under current filter paradigms. The filter of the local congregation or leader may be passing [I call as witness the growth of dispersed Communities of Christians through email groups, blogs, spirituality commonalities such as the Northumbria Community, and so on where the energy of corporate discipleship is found trans-locally]

The real need is to find ways to sytematically expose ourselves to 'alteridata'; the stuff that we would not normally notice because we didn't think we wanted to or because it hasn't got the kind of prioritisation that others might give it that would result in us picking it up from them. This is a bit like with the techniques for sparkihng creative and lateral thinking that Edward de Bono proposes. If we learn anything from the 'Wisdom of Crowds', it is that we need to allow people to bring together their information and ideas in ways that do not seek consensus but free up responses and then aggregate them. I suspect that in seek ing God's will we need to think similarly: find ways to empower people to listen for themselves and only then begin to aggregate and discuss and then let people freely respond. All the time we have to be wary of building 'group minds' based on partial information.

The churches are bad at this. We have tended to confuse consensus with the voice of God without realising that consensus can just as easily be [in a fallen world] the voice of unexamined assumptions or the leadership influence of strong personalities. The gospel surely encourages us to listen to the marginal and the powerless. We are at a point when we can perhaps see how that will be more easily done than before. The question is whether we will take our responsibility to be global disciples of Christ seriously, or whether we will simply let gatekeepers [software or persons] evolve who will tell us what we want to hear or find doctrinally conducive. Will we allow our spirituality to be exposed to the uncomfortable voices of the marginalised or will we continue to marginalise them?

In my first hint of tackiling a controversial subject, I will relate this to the debate on gay people and Christian faith. I think that it really is important that we learn how to listen to experiences we don't find convivial, whether that be the experience of actively gay people [for want of a better term] or non-practising gay people. At the moment it really is/seems a dialogue of the deaf and yet the Anglican church leaders have called for a proper time to hear and reflect on the issue with the people who are most directly affected. I don't know what the proper outcome of that listening should be [that's the point, isn't it?]; I can see/hear good points from both sides and none. However, I do think that we should be learning both how to listen and to aggregate our listening in ways that can lead us forward to a provisional understanding that just may be right. I do know that it will have to result in something where people on both sides feel that they have really been heard by the other, that each side can demonstrate to the other that they understand and have weighed what they have to say.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Googling the Future