The future of communication is the future of community
Technology and choice are not
aiding community much at all...
I ran across a website today with predictions of the future of
communications. Its general outline is fairly believable: there will
be new technologies, and mergers of corporations, and the result will be that in
ten years or so, we'll all have highly personalized news services delivering us
exactly what we're interested in.
The piece ends with a somber prediction that some will use it to greatly expand their depth and range of knowledge, but most will only pursue trivia. That would be a re-playing of the promise and reality of television.
What concerns me more, though, is the way it will continue the fragmentation of community, which is already well underway. Conservative Americans tend to watch Fox News Channel; liberal Americans avoid it. We lose shared information and experiences. What we see and learn tends to fix us more strongly in our opinions. I suspect readers of this blog are well aware of other blogs' condemnation of allowing Terry Schiavo to die. There are dozens if not hundreds of websites saying that. How many know what's being blogged on the other side of the issue? We just don't go there. And they don't read ours. We have a completely different set of information coming to us, by our own choice.
For better or worse, a few generations ago that wasn't true. Students in school read much the same literature; Americans listened to the same few sources of radio news. The three big networks provided almost all our TV news before CNN, and their perspectives were similar. It may not always have been right, but it was shared.
Communities of the future will be composed of people who share common experiences, but they won't be neighbors. They may be separated by thousands of miles. We're going to have to work harder than ever to bridge the gaps. Followers of Christ have a responsibility to study and know the truth, but we should also be reading and listening to viewpoints we disagree with. We learn that way, and we stand a much greater chance of staying connected with the world of people God has told us to love.
The piece ends with a somber prediction that some will use it to greatly expand their depth and range of knowledge, but most will only pursue trivia. That would be a re-playing of the promise and reality of television.
What concerns me more, though, is the way it will continue the fragmentation of community, which is already well underway. Conservative Americans tend to watch Fox News Channel; liberal Americans avoid it. We lose shared information and experiences. What we see and learn tends to fix us more strongly in our opinions. I suspect readers of this blog are well aware of other blogs' condemnation of allowing Terry Schiavo to die. There are dozens if not hundreds of websites saying that. How many know what's being blogged on the other side of the issue? We just don't go there. And they don't read ours. We have a completely different set of information coming to us, by our own choice.
For better or worse, a few generations ago that wasn't true. Students in school read much the same literature; Americans listened to the same few sources of radio news. The three big networks provided almost all our TV news before CNN, and their perspectives were similar. It may not always have been right, but it was shared.
Communities of the future will be composed of people who share common experiences, but they won't be neighbors. They may be separated by thousands of miles. We're going to have to work harder than ever to bridge the gaps. Followers of Christ have a responsibility to study and know the truth, but we should also be reading and listening to viewpoints we disagree with. We learn that way, and we stand a much greater chance of staying connected with the world of people God has told us to love.
Posted: Sat - March 19, 2005 at 08:56 PM |
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"Do Christians believe we hold the truth? No, it holds us; we submit to it and to the One who gives it. We seek the truth to know it and follow it, that it may grip us tighter yet."
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Published On: Dec 06, 2007 01:03 PM
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