As more of our ‘real lives’ migrate to ‘virtual spaces’,  there’s a growing market for research exploring how we behave inside those spaces, as well as how our virtual experiences change us”

from Digital Nation 1:01:40 video here

This struck me as a key challenge for those of us in the church.  If “corporations” see the ROI in doing such research,  how is it that so many church folks are so exuberant about online possibilities absent such research?  And why is it that such research is absent?  It seems we rely on  “opinion” polls about what people think and what they want,  not what actually happens to them.  I found the segment about “multitasking” really interesting.  Many youth today are quite sure that they “multitask really well” as the young lady in the segment says with such certainty (at 8:10,  near the start of the show). And yet,  when the studies and experiments are actually done, they find that just about every learning activity suffers when additional “attention” items are added. 

It seems tome that this suggests that we jump the gun in the exuberance about “doing worship” that involves online interaction outside that space.   Not that I object to involving OTHERS in different physical locales,  or maintain that they could not participate in some meaningful way.  I believe that such involvement IS possible, and would advocate searching for such ways.  But simply adding the “feature set” employed by the “outside world”  (and we DO indeed LIVE in that world,  but we also are called to be NOT CONFORMED to it – so we can and MUST speak of an “outside world” that is distinguishable from the “inside” in which we find ourselves: the Church. 

To what extent are we like the confident young lady who is sure that she “multitasks very well” in our quick adoption of a multitasking , online,  hyper-connected worship experience?  Again,  I’m not saying don’t experiment and try things,  and that this idea is “alien” to the possibilities of a God who made us creators of tools.  I’m just saying let’s do the “multitask” studies and pay attention to what effects it has on that elusive definition of worship.