I stumbled over the following figures on Church Marketing Sucks blog a while back and thought they were worth commenting on... first the figures.
Ars Technia reports on a new study on the focus of individuals' time on the Internet. Here's what
they found of people's time online:
In 2003:
- 34% of Internet users' time was spent reading content.
- 46% of their time was spent on online communications.
And today:
- 47% of their time was spent reading content.
- 33% of Internet users' time was spent on online communications.
These numbers almost completely reversed in four years.
What does this mean for the church? Well I'm no genius but I'm guessing it means more churches, church leaders, pastors and others associated with ministry should be blogging and connecting with content via the
Internet. Social Networking is obviously a huge part of our net experience, however these figure point toward an obvious shift. Perhaps a hunger for content... or is it connection with depth. I wonder if it's the search for content within the context of social networking, which is to say we are creating online content based communities where real networking and social interaction (communication) takes place.
I digress. These figures obviously also mean that people are turning from books and toward the
Internet (wiki etc) for information gathering. Problem is that at the current time the quality of content you "stumble upon" on the
Internet is iffy at best. This leads me to believe that what is needed is a informing or quality assurance mechanism whereby the various content is organized into levels of authority. This naturally happening within the blogging world and on
Technorati etc. However, very few are aware of
Technorati and other such vehicles to find authoritative and "good" content.
I've strayed from my original thought. What does all this mean for the church? Or better yet what should it mean? At face value it means we need to be providing quality authoritative content for the
Internet. Thus more churches need to begin the conversation of Christ and Culture on the web platform. It's a
missional issue in many respects for they that
maintain a build it and they will come
mentality have missed Christ's call to be
missional. Of course being
missional is much more than creating web content.... but it's a start and the numbers point toward an increased hunger for content based info on the web.
Any thoughts or did I lose you?
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