I have ,  for the geek that I am,  been almost entirely absent from the text messaging world.  I have received them (and this is on the increase of late,  as various companies send me notices,  and I even got one from my dentist who was offering text message reminders for my appointments.

I was looking up stuff on text messaging to help my son find some tidbits of info and ideas for his English paper on the social interactions taking place in text messaging,  and found myself once again taken with the rich sociological things happening as technology becomes a larger and larger piece of the context of our total interactions.

Now, almost a third of the country’s 200 million cellular phone subscribers use text messaging regularly for social or business purposes.

Life and Romance in 160 Characters or Less – washingtonpost.com

I found this article via the Smart Mobs blog,  which has continued the studies first explored in Howard Rheingold’s book by that name, and to which Rheingold himself is a frequent contributor.   Rheingold wrote the book that I credit with jump-starting me into the world of social analysis of the online community technologies, The Virtual Community, back in 1993. Smart Mobs,  published in 2002,  took the same analysis to the mobile world,  and followed the rise of the technology mediated communication via handheld or otherwise easily totable devices.

I’m often so frustrated with how terribly I type,  that I have avoided such “live typing” phenomenon.  But I love the study of this stuff,  and imagining applications and implications for it in the context of the church,  and how to bring a sense of the “ongoing formation” that happens in the church that is about bringing its people closer together and more involved in each other’s lives,  as well as enhancing the sharing of story and inviting one another to constant conversations emanating from those moments that take place when we are gathered together to discern what God is calling us to do.

All of this,  in my book,  is “extension” from face to face , embodied communities,  but enables us to keep in more frequent touch and know more about each other and our various instances of “fear and trembling” as we “work out our salvation”.  Some of our journey IS able to be articulated ,  and links to helpful online resources can enhance this.