What is in Kelvin's Head?

Should churches use e-mail? Or indeed blogging?

17/01/2013

Yesterday’s post about the internet and what we can learn from the demise of HMV didn’t raise that many comments but it certainly did the rounds, being more shared on Facebook than anything that I’ve written in months. It was picked up as a conversation topic by the Anglican Church of Canada’s The Conversation too. I think The Conversation is a private social network which that church runs. I’m interested in that in itself but I’m going to leave learning about that for another day.

Today I want to pick up on something that was said in the comments. This came in from Bosco:

Iâ€™m not as convinced as you about the value of email. Convince me. I suspect it is a dying medium â€“ but we should still hop on while it is still alive, conscious that young people donâ€™t use it. It is still-useful last millennium technology.

I know what Bosco is talking about. The use of email is often said to be falling and falling much faster amongst the young than the old.Â (Oops, I mean younger and older, don’t I?).

I’ve a feeling that email is not going away quite that fast. More that it is changing. It seems to me that as people are getting more and more ways of communicating then they naturally choose the most appropriate for what it is they want to communicate.

If you want to meet up with friends, it is much easier to plan things on a social network than by email. However, that presumes that you are all on the same system.

Ubiquity is the thing here. Most people I know are on Facebook. However just about everyone I want to communicate with has an email account.

Email is good for some things. Twitter for others. Facebook for others.

Depends on audience, urgency and what I’m trying to say.

As a sideline, I’d say that I’m seeing a decline in blogging. And paradoxically a continued rise in the importance of blogging.

It seems to me that there are fewer blog posts being written. Quite a number of people who have tried the blogging lark are finding it a bit of a bind and giving up. After all, social networks beat blogging as a way of letting your mates know what is in your head every minute during the day and that was what a lot of people were using blogs for.

The blogs that are lasting are, unsurprisingly, those where the author has a clear idea of what they are trying to communicate. I think I’m like a number of people who are keeping up the stream of consciousness on twitter whilst saving blog posts for more substantial posts. Fewer blog posts – better quality. What’s not to like?

I think that I primarily use blogging to perform and converse, email to inform and converse and preaching and social networks to beguile and converse. However that may just be me. The primary thing is that they are all about conversation.

Some of the choices that people make about their choice of online communication medium are all about tone. Email has become a relatively formal way of communicating. My guess is that it is still the case that most people communicate more by using email than social networks when they are working whilst the opposite may be true when they are not working.

Am I right about that?

church communications, death of email, young

7 responses to “Reclaiming the web”

Paul Hutchinson

14/10/2015

Thank you for making me think in a different direction just before pausing for lunch. I have never had a blog, so came quite late to Internet social discourse, and have engaged more since joining one major network in 2010 and another in early 2014 – normally using those networks rather than a comment box such as this. Not all of us are natural creators of substantial original content, but like to be thoughtful in brief exchange, and so both those major networks, though cursed with many difficulties, serve those brief exchanges quite well. I do agree that the endless recycling of links (on both of them) can be wearying, and I do wish that some old friends would be a little more self-critical. But the price of any kind of social discourse is that one is vulnerable to the otherness of the other.
I feel I ought to be writing a more substantial comment here, but hope that this is enough. The time is not always there to offer deeper reflection: but sometimes a blogger needs to hear at least a small splash from the stone thrown down the well!

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1. Kelvin
  
  14/10/2015
  
  Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’m aware that not everyone is a content creator, but perhaps what I miss is the sense of discovering different communities online and keeping the comments more or less in one place helps with that.
  
  The glory days of 50 or more comments on a post are probably over. I suspect I mourn the sense of community being created even more than I miss the interesting reflections of others. Retweets and shares are always welcome – but they are the means of amplification. Becoming loud isn’t the same as becoming wise, nor the same as becoming connected.
  
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Seph

14/10/2015

It’s a damnable shame—and mostly the fault of Facebook. Twitter at least has an etiquette of sorts, wherein it is considered impolite not to respond to the original tweet, which is usually made by the blogger in question.

Facebook, in short, is the scourge of the Internet. I have often been in groups which have decided to do all of their organizing on Facebook, despite my protests that I’m not on Facebook and don’t want to be, and really an e-mail list would be just as easy, and would they like me to set one up. This inevitably leads to my marginalization within the group, as no-one bothers to keep me abreast of the discussions to which I am not party.

Can you tell I’m upset about this?

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Daniel Lamont

14/10/2015

I am only an occasional user of Facebook but I know what you mean, Kelvin. And indeed, I never read the comments ‘below the line’ on newspapers like ‘The Guardian’. You offer some useful advice. I read yours and one or two other blogs on a regular basis but don’t always comment. However, I can see that the author of a blog would like some feedback. I would be sad not to have the blogs that I do read because they do give me a sense of what people are thinking and an odd sense of community.

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Father Ron Smith

14/10/2015

My own contribution to the blogopshere is, I’m afraid, Father Kelvin, limited to comments I make on other people’s blogs (such as ‘Thinking Anglicans’ and ‘Anglican Down Under’ – a local NZ forum; plus my own blog ‘kiwianglo’, where i pluck articles that interest me personally from the web and provide my own commentary. This still interests me, personally, and provides my few readers with information they might not otherwise be bothered to glean for themselves. Like you, I am no longer an avid Facebook fan.

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David Campbell

16/10/2015

Hi Kelvin – thoughtful as ever – and yours is invariably the first blog I turn to each day. That you bring pressing issues to a wider audience and to people who know, or used to know, the church you serve is a great thing. I’m still blogging relatively strongly, but it’s certainly a different blogging experience when work is set in a very different context and especially community from previously, writing these days mainly for myself about things that interest me, although not quite at the address you have in your Blog Roll. http://www.limpingtowardsthesunrise.com is where it’s “all” happening.

Reply
1. Kelvin
  
  16/10/2015
  
  Thanks David – nice to hear from you. I’ve amended the link.
  
  I don’t think many people use blogrolls to find blogs these days but whenever I remove it my mother complains…
  
  Reply