Greetings for the
New Year. Me te Atua e manaaki e tiaki koutou katoa i tēnei tau o
2014.
Recently at the
Sunday service I quoted from a blog that talked about a tweet sent
out by Pope Francis. This raised a bit of interest (myself included,
as I don't “tweet”) so I did a bit of research. One assumption
was that twitter (the name of the application with which one tweets)
is a young people thing. Apparently not, or not just young people.
The Pope is one
example, Barack Obama another. In fact President Obama is in the top
10 of “follower” numbers, that is people who choose to receive a
person's tweets. All the others in the top 10, however, are people
who are just famous for being famous. The bulk of twitter seems to
be all rather vacuous and a symptom of our dominant culture of
celebrity. However, in its midst, Pope Francis is followed
apparently by 11 million people over 9 different language accounts.
One of His Holiness' tweets says: “Holiness
doesn’t mean doing extraordinary things, but doing ordinary things
with love and faith.”
In a way his
twitter followers are like the crowds who gather in St Peter's
Square: they want to hear words of faith and wisdom from someone they
respect.
Some years back
people used to gather in Cathedral Square in Christchurch to listen
to the Wizard. Many years back, John Wesley stood in the midst of
town centres to preach the gospel.
Twitter is defined
as “a short burst of inconsequential information” and “chirps
from birds”, which is exactly how its creators saw their product.
But some twitter users are proving it has potential to share messages
of value, snappy enough to hold in people's minds. (A tweet is
limited to 140 characters.)
So when you tweet,
you send forth to any who want to listen your gem of wisdom (or
otherwise). I read that 40% is pointless babble, 6% self-promotion,
yet what researchers call “conversational” and “pass-along
value” together makes up 47%.
Facebook is more my
kind of thing. If a tweet is like a soap box, Facebook is like a get
together of family and friends. Potentially all of them in the one
place at the one time. I don't usually share news about myself on
Facebook – I mainly post photos when we go to interesting places.
But when my appointment to the parish was renewed, that news I did
share which saved a lot of phone calls. Facebook has been great for
keeping in touch with people who are good friends but live in other
parts of the country. Also I've reconnected with a lot of cousins
and it's an easy means for sharing family information.
The key to Facebook,
as I see it, is that I choose privacy settings that limit everything
on my page to “Friends Only”.
(The Parish Facebook
page is different – it's a public page, but publicity is what it is
for, sharing news and making ourselves more visible on the electronic
platform of the wider community.)
On Facebook we have
a conversation as friends; we share interesting things we come
across; and we fill in part the gap between the times we meet face to
face. I've made the call that every Friend request I accept has to be
of someone I have met in person.
Familiar to most
readers of this newsletter will be email – which in many ways is an
electronic version of letters in the mail – and skype – like
telephoning, but with video and, once you have the computer and
internet connection, no extra cost to anywhere in the world. Texting
is also something of a commonplace, across a range of ages. Maybe
it's a bit like morse code – sometimes it feels like you have to
learn text code to make sense of it – but it really has taken quick
and non-intrusive communication to a new level. Although in making
that last point, it does depend on the receiver whether it in fact
intrudes into the social interaction they are having when it arrives.
When you send a text you are not requiring the person to answer it on
the spot. But the sight of people sitting with others in a café
and looking at their mobile phones is rather disturbing. What's the
point of them being together?
The key to it is
that the technology has a purpose. It is not itself
the purpose. And that purpose is to communicate. Be it sharing news
or views, keeping close as family across the distances, retaining
contact and nurturing friendship, the point is people.
What is important is
what helps feed relationships: what helps us be people in good
relationships with others, with the world we live in, with God,
whatever that might mean to each of us.
Rangimarie
Peace Shalom, Robyn
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