But the real economics of iPad publishing tell a different story: even a stellar iPad sales performance isn’t going to do much to staunch the bleeding from traditional publishing. Wishful thinking and a nostalgia for the good old days of lockdown won’t bring customers back through the door.
Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) – Boing Boing
Amen Cory. So amazed am I at the lack of vision of publishers in recognizing a “social” market for their content. And particularly those church related publishers who talk the talk about the church providing resources to encourage and enable conversation and exploration in its communities of faith. And they fall back on the lack of response or activity in particular forums that make up minute pieces of their overall content. You can’t claim to be encouraging online community by opening up a little technologically impoverished section of your site and giving it a good slap on the rear saying “Now go and get us some of that social media juice“. Just as you wouldn’t expect a significant impact on “conversation” by declaring one small classroom the place for “discussion” while providing the best equipped and most visible classrooms with all the focus and publicity, neither can church communications expect much of a “social” response when most all of its content is presented as that to be consumed.
I’ve seen it over a decade and a half. The idea now called “social media” , formerly “online community” is something that is included in a statement of strategy (what content provider would fail to mention “social media”?), but its ongoing output of material remains one way in practice, as does the way of thinking of themselves as “content providers” rather than as resources for connecting people and looking at how to relate any one “grouping” by way of data that links users to particular kinds of content. I call that “theology of databases”. And it is almost unheard of, but yet Google seems to have recognized that (albeit theirs is a secular theology, it is a theology nonetheless). James K.A. Smith wrote about how nations have theologies, just not “biblical” ones. My larger point being that Google has done better at recognizing how to “group” and “join” users (and allow users to add new “joins” according to their theologies -Biblical theologies- which , in turn, enriches the system with insight about new points of connectivity).
Our “social media” needs a BIBLICAL theological method. I think perhaps there may be more on this upcoming.
