This by Dave Winer has me thinking back in similar fashion:
After posting about the future of UserLand, a lot of comments, all constructive. What a change. It used to be that when we opened this kind of discussion, the users were crowded out by flamers. It feels in a way like we’ve popped the stack back to 1995 or so, when everyone in the then-nascent blogging world was full of excitement and hope, and the negative stuff hadn’t shown up yet. The world was smaller then, and now it’s smaller again
I hope this can be true about theological blogging; and church blogging. There was a time , when the Web first began getting noticed in popular culture, when people seeking online community of the theologically sensitive kind, that there were people emailing me all the time, mostly in encouragement and in appreciation. This seems to have had a second wind when blogging caught on. Then a period of “clumping” of all kinds of specialities of conversation within theological circles.
With the increase in the size of the online world, and the invasion of such by entertainment and adveritsing and sensational diatribes and endless politcal diatribes, the conversation seems to lose ground in precedence to those other things. It seems to be just another invasion from the forces of savage capitalism, and the individualism it reinforces.
I will often give up on such posts as this one because I wonder if it makes any sense out there. I still yearn for a way to encourage the telling of stories that emerge from lived communities called together by God to be a body that lives a life worth talking and writing about, and to give whatever kind of literary, narative account that can be however dimly articulated in this online genre.
