Archive for category Technology
ipad haters hate dorm room dance parties
Posted by phil in Technology on April 6th, 2010
i feel silly even writing about this, because it’s all the talk of the town, but i wanted to have your attention for a few seconds to talk about the ipad.
why do we all of a sudden have to justify why we need this new technology? every time i mention the ipad i feel as though i need to also throw up a quick elevator pitch on why i need it for a, b, c, d and e reasons. i do have those reasons, but that’s not what i’ll go into.
we don’t need technology until we make ourselves need it; word processors weren’t a near essential element to writing until we made them up, turbotax wasn’t necessary until we saw there was a better way to do taxes. i know this concept is scary to some, but it’s so healthy for technological growth.
i feel the answer to why we need the ipad should be “we don’t know yet,” and that’s what’s exciting to me. anyone who claims to know what we’re getting into with this whole ipad concept is fooling themselves. if you asked the early adopters to computers why they used them, something tells me they wouldn’t say anything about cloud computing or dorm room dance parties, yet they were eventually realized to have these new potentials. basically what i’m saying here is that ipad haters hate dorm room dance parties. but really, in the tech world it’s always been an exponential explosion of people realizing potential through crazy innovative ideas. there’s a slippery slope of computing where we say “hey we did THIS thing, so i bet we can now do this even crazier thing.”
not understanding or realizing the potential of something is no reason to stay away from it. let’s give it a shot and see what we can do with it, and if it’s still “just a really big ipod” in a couple years, you win.
Googling the Gospel
Posted by phil in God, Technology on October 28th, 2009
so i’ve decided, as i’m sure like a million other people out there have, that the internet is a beautiful tool that we have to share the gospel with other people. i mean what an impact we can have on the world in mass quantities by simply putting information out there and allow those who are searching to find it. we are literally entering into their homes and lives daily but i’d have to say we as christians are dropping the ball a bit.
there are so many legit christian sites out there, i know it. so many beautiful church websites, God centered social networks, whatever; all in beautiful web 2.0 or retro-texture glory, but i think we are missing out on a key demographic when we create things: those searching to find God.
here is the issue, a basic web search for “who is God” retrieves over 100 million responses and i’ve yet to find a page that i’d ever actually spend more than a few seconds on, because the majority of them look more 1992 than 2009. we have people searching for God and from what i’ve seen and heard, not finding what they’re looking for in a format they are used to. we need to work on making God and his gospel more visible. you see, it’s not about making the message “relevant”, because we all know how important it is to keep the gospel holy (even when it’s truths aren’t always so popular in our world)… it’s about using the mediums we have in a relevant way to portray God’s grace. you wouldn’t try to show someone a new band on a cassette tape, so let’s rethink how we do this.
now i must concede that there are a few organizations trying to make it happen. i went to orlando to visit the campus crusade headquarters last february and heard a bit about global media outreach, which is basically a ministry of campus crusade focused on internet evangelism. someone accepts christ through that ministry every nine seconds. wow! that is exciting, especially when its followed up. so things are being done, but there is still so much untapped potential.
think about the average person. they sit on their computers checking facebook/espn/email/twitter and…REPEAT. what if one day they stumbled upon a page that clearly explained christ in a way they were familiar with. how might this change their life? how can we (through God, most importantly) change people’s lives?
one of the leaders on my campus here asked me to help them to use the internet as a tool, and i currently find myself stumped for resources. does anyone have any ideas as to a site that someone searching for a relationship with God could go to?
Social Homes