Mankind’s questions unscroll day and night on a computer screen in an office hallway in Mountain View, California.
So the article begins. Michael Malone observes the striklingly small enclave tucked away in a hallway at google, where a lone figure sits and observes the fruits of the labors of his query collating application
Workers here at Google were once fascinated to watch the queries climb up and off the screen, two per second, 173,000 per day. But they rarely stop to glance anymore. Most Google employees long ago lost interest in the words and the astonishing numbers they represent: Each of these questions, culled randomly from six giant server farms scattered around the world, represents 1,500 inquiries, totaling 260 million Web searches per day.
Perhaps it’s not a novel thing anymore, and at Google, there are new things happening, and the excitement usually follows that. But for us, in the Church, shouldn’t there be more of us huddled around? Shoudn’ there be activity in our denominational communication offices and even amongst our members, seeking to produce an response that can become available to the audience from whence these questions come?
In the wall behind the display, there is a cut- out section, like a drive-up window. Just beyond sits Greg Rae, one of three engineers who created this program two years ago. Now, as the site’s log analyst, he devotes much of his day to studying the ceaseless scroll. Wearing gym shorts, T-shirt, and wire-rimmed glasses, Rae is a very tall man in his twenties who looks ready for a workout followed by a long night in a university library. He has now watched several million queries roll by.
The “log analysts” and the related “response mechanisms” that we as a concerned and “ready to dialogue” people could and should be working into our “ministry strategies” and thus our ministry dollars and investments. But I see no such activity. I see no “MIT Media Labs” with the Church’s name on them. The closest thing I can recall reading about was the article (also in WIRED) about the Catholic Churh’s astronomy research happening in Arizona (in the December 2002 issue, The Pope’s Astrophysicist). I know there are small operations going on in numerous places that follow this mantra (like Lumicon , who seek to provide resources for things like multimedia worship, who also got a little blurb in , once again, WIRED magazine: Lights, Camera, Religion)
Why is it we read this stuff in WIRED, and not in the Church communications? Here we are, on the cusp of a Wireless revolution (see such writings as Smart Mobs) , and the Church has barely begun to get the “presses rolling” with regards to the web (reference to the Printing Press and the similar period of acclamation and assimilation the Church had to go through to “get with it” in that communication technology transition ).
Whether out of ignorance, faith, or belief in the safety of numbers, an estimated 52 million people around the world, 42 percent of all search engine users, entrust the site with some of their deepest, most vulnerable thoughts and desires.
Geez, doesn’t this just embarass us? Can’t we place some people to …at least “watch”…but preferrably to watch and observe and ask the kinds of questions author Malone asks:
… 22 hours into this endeavor, I find it hard to turn away. I have the haunting sense that at any second, something valuable and vital will appear at the bottom of the display, only to disappear at the top five seconds later. I force myself to stay alert for the questions that burn through the humdrum, that force you to try and picture the person who just typed it.
These are the cries for help.
Regardless of what one thinks about what kind of comunication is happening on the Web, there can be no doubt that there are real people on the other side of all those keyboards. These queries scrolling across this culling program’s output screen are representative of a goldmine of questions. I have often pontificated on how the Church and her communication agencies need to be figuring out how to do “Search Engine Science”….to understand the techniques and technologies of the Search in order to help the “Search for Meaning”.
It is nearly midnight when the last and most disturbing of these cries appears. It arrives buried between searches about seafood restaurants in San Diego, thongs, mafia cheats, and bisection bandwidth topology.
Santa Clara, Calif. > What to tell a suicidal friend
This query hasn’t come from Kuala Lumpur or Genoa or Montevideo, but just outside Google’s front door. A drama is unfolding only a few miles away, and there is no way to help; I don’t even know the person’s name. I can only sit and watch the words crawl up the screen and disappear. This is a contract between man and machine, and I can only observe, not intervene.
Stricken, I glance over at Rae, who has returned from night league volleyball, his spiky blond hair still wet. He, too, has seen the query and is typing away furiously. Finally he stops and looks up at me. “They’re going to be OK. They got referred to the right places.”
“You can do that?”
“Yeah, well, I can see how the system responds. And if it doesn’t give the right information, I’ll find better sites and attach them for future queries.”
“But you can’t help the people who ask the original question.”
“No.”
“Just the ones that follow?” Rae nods.
“You’ve just got to do the right thing. The hard part is figuring out what the right thing is.”He thinks a moment, then gestures at the screen. “I know people trust in this thing. They believe it will have the answer. And I don’t want it to fail them.” As Rae talks, 50 more queries scroll up the screen.
Question for us: How long will we remain silent? For me, my concern is not so much to provide “white papers” of spiritual “answers”, but ways to connect people asking questions to , well…..more people asking the same questions. Again, the conversation , and the “connection” provided there, are roads to the answers. We need to know, and they need to know, that we are not alone.