Friday, September 10, 2010
The Ministry of Presence
I thought Christian Web Trends wrote one of the better pieces in the great discussion of whether church can go "online."
And here is what is important - we need to learn intimacy in our personal relationships so that we can have intimacy with God. And lest you think intimacy is not that important, consider the Trinity - how intimate is that.
I've written about this at length before. Sometimes it's good to revisit old stuff.
When we post to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, we choose what we want to reveal and we leave out what we don’t in order to project the image we want people to have of us, whether it’s funny, authoritative, spiritual, wise, high-class, connected, or whatever.His point is that social media is a lot of things - but intimate is not among them becasue that requires genuine self-revelation. I agree.
In fact we not only choose what we reveal, but we choose how we reveal it by the words, tone, and symbols we use.
[...]
First, it’s been said that in a conversation only 7% of the communication is the actual words used, the other 93% is tone of voice, gestures, and body language. When we communicate through social media we’re only communicating the 7%. And even if you’re a prolific Facebooker or Twitter, you’re likely to communicate a few hundred words a day via social media compared to the thousands of words we speak each day. In the end, only a very small percentage of what we communicate makes it through our internal filters onto social media. That makes our social media communication much more likely to be controlled and thus self-presentation.
And here is what is important - we need to learn intimacy in our personal relationships so that we can have intimacy with God. And lest you think intimacy is not that important, consider the Trinity - how intimate is that.
I've written about this at length before. Sometimes it's good to revisit old stuff.
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