I’m so angry these past few days.  I can’t escape from the sense of utter waste that my having no job represents for the Church.  There is such a dire need for scoping out the territory of the online landscape;  to seek out the conversations by persons seeking meaning and causes to believe in,  and affirm that the Church is there and is listening and has people who share their passions.  But in order to do this,  a valiant effort has to be underway.  I think of people who have launched and remained in lifetime studies of sociological, psychological,  and spirtual impacts of the online relationship and online self and “Wired” society (or ,  increasingly, “WireLESS” society).  People like Howard Rheingold in his watershed The Virtual Community (now in a second edition),  or Sherry Turkle and Life on the Screen.

At the very least, I can do ASP and a lot of diverse Web tasks!  I’ve been a professional Webmaster for 5 and a half years,  and a pro-bono Webmaster since 1993.  I was even a webmaster before I knew HTML and had before I surfed the Web for the first time, because before the Web hit the scene (or at least, MY scene),  I was thinking about such things as “A Compuserve for the Church”,  where I discussed with ecunet folks how the Church needs to be about constructing online “villages” or “worlds” , perhaps along the idea of a Virtual City consisting of Schools,  Libraries,  Coffeeshops,  Churches,  and Town Squares (and even Marketplaces).   Now,  with the online population exploding,  and people becoming “untethered” from the wired-operated Internet and finding ways and places to connect in many locales (via WiFi),  the urgency for the Church to have some prescence and ability to converse intelligently is growing to epic proportions.