Yesterday I was bemoaning the Theology/Technology quagmire; which is the “fine mess” I find myself in.  I have what I consider a unique combination of “qualifications”,  which seem to have me fall short on both sides of the ledger.  The secular companies rarely look past the “lack of techical degrees” and tend to look with suspicion upon my ASP skills because I use a tool like Dreamweaver to build my initial base functionality.  To me,  it seems that this is an issue of how “low level” one goes in their programming.  ASP programmers who use notepad (basically go it alone,  using their rote memory…..even many of these are now using “code snippets” for repeated bits of code,  which is basically what Dreamweaver provides for me.  It inserts all the creation of connections and recordsets and the data access parameters,  and then I go in and pepper the code with if-thens, etc.)

On the Church side,  my technical skills seem overkill to organizations where their concept of online community means email lists.  There does not yet seem to a base strategy for exploring social tools.  A whole online sociology beckons the Church to enter into this field of study for the sake of involvement with and in the world,  at the point where conversations are happening and people ask questions and seek meaning.  A WIRED article this month, Inside the Soul of the Web,  observes how at Google,  there is watch kept by a computer installed in an office hallway,  on hundreds of thousands of questions posed as Google searches,  representing mankind’s questions. 

So why is Google devoting a large , collating, aggregating machine,  summing up these “human questions” ,  and there is not a Church denomination or agency that has thought of this first?  Isn’t this what one would consider the domain of a people who are charged with the task of being spiritual companions to such questions?  Here is an instance where technical knowledge (it took a group,  such as Google,  with some knowledge of the tools and possibilities available, to devise such a “culling and summary device”.  And therein lies the main reaon why Churches need to be setting up their “Media Labs” such as that set up at MIT (see previous article). More on this in Google Watch

There is an immense need for people who can see the connections between technical possibilities and the ministry issues,  and it takes someone with a foot in each door to help bridge the gap between the programmer/developers and the visioneers,  where a great gap of communication exists.