Digital Proficiency Matters

Let me be upfront. I am not a digital native. I am a resident alien in all places wireless, HTML, and electronic. In seventh grade, while all of my peers were excited about fancy keyboards which would allow a person to press a button and play Ode to Joy with a Salsa Rhythm, I committed my heart to my steel-framed, upright grand piano which came to Colorado on a train from Chicago as a 16th birthday present for my great-grandmother Ada Belle Musgrave sometime in the 1910’s.

In college, people I knew rushed to set up this thing called an “email” account at the closest computer lab, just because they could, and I figured a phone call, letter or face to face conversation was just as good.  I graduated several years before facebook was founded and google wasn’t even a word, much less a search engine. Heck, I even got a degree studying opera, a vocal music artform which teaches a person how to fill an auditorium with sound without a microphone.

I still don’t own an e-reader because I love the smell and feel of books and because half the anticipation of going to the library has to do with what I might discover there, rather than in finding and conquering the most recent best-seller my favorite author just released. I dragged my heels on getting a smartphone, and to date, I haven’t figured out how to use it to take a picture, upload that to twitter with a comment while still engaging in a meaningful conversation with whatever group of people I happen to be around at the time.

In fact, I only know this last bit of technological coordination is possible because I witnessed it while standing in the House Chamber of the Des Moines Capitol Building on January 31, 2011, when Zach Wahls addressed the Iowa House Judiciary Committee in a public hearing on a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in Iowa. You may have seen his video on youtube. I was there in person, and I had no idea that those moments would be witnessed by so many people outside that chamber (the youtube video has 2,881,848 views right now). One of my friends was filming the event, tweeting the event and monitoring the conversation directly around us in the House Chamber. At the time, watching her was simply an awe-inspiring  feat of technological dexterity.

Since then, I have come to recognize the experience for was it was: participation in the new, networked Fourth Estate.

In the church, we are starting to get savvy about the ways in which technological innovation can be used to advertise our church services, programs and special events. We are starting to see the ways in which Amazon has revolutionized the way we do curriculum and book studies, but how well are we harnessing the possibilities of sharing our significant work and witness-the way Zach Wahls’ witness was shared: from multiple phones via multiple viewpoints, across the internet because something about what he said caught people’s imaginations on fire?

As we in the church wrestle with contentious social issues (from religious freedom to reproductive choice, from stem cell research to the ethics of eradicating disease vectors) we may feel like we are caught in the middle of conflicting media voices and afraid to speak up against a neighbor’s political ideology. Yet, it may be, that we neglect to claim our own power as United Methodists (in my case) to drive those comment thread conversations and to turn those twitter feeds “to the right.”  It may be we are not paying enough attention to the ripples we actually do make in the ocean of internet chatter.

While we choose not to tweet because none of our own friends are on twitter, we miss the chance to shake hands and introduce ourselves to the other social justice advocates in the room and across the globe who are rallying right there with us. We might be missing out on unexpected dimensions of global connection simply because we forget that practically every human hand has a cell phone in it, and friends in Nigeria, Guatemala and Estonia are only a text message away. While we do our best to shore up eroding social connections built in the 1970’s, our children and grandchildren are self-publishing books, starting schools for child prostitutes in Liberia, and sharing their passionate dreams for a better future by mobilizing people to actively participate in the processes of government before they themselves are even eligible to vote.

And these points matter, because as ungainly as my own technological skills look to others in my generation, our UMC is even more of an undocumented immigrant in this strange, new, digital land.

 

 

 

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