GodBlogCon Started Tonight

I'm at GodBlogCon, not exactly live-blogging.

John Mark Reynolds opened the conference, and I took notes as he spoke. My notes are mostly incoherent. Good thing I saved them and didn't post while I typed.

Reynolds was discouraging and inspiring at the same time, explaining his belief that the new technology, the New Media, will go the way of all other technology: It will expand to a certain point and then be solidified in the hands of the few who succeed. Demand for higher quality will rise, and the smaller players will be squeezed out. Whether that will take five years or twenty remains to be seen.

Religious discussions do not take place in significant ways in Old Media. In some ways the New Media will be like the Old Media. It will be solidified in the hands of the few who succeed. Big Money will censor, and it will probably eliminate the Christian voice.

He challenged us, then, to think about the place Christians can and should carve out for ourselves: Decide to become radically Christian and look at the still-open space in the internet and present a vision of the way we wish the world was, yet constrained by the facts on the ground. We need to be willing to reflect new paradigms. Dream. Create myth. Tell stories. Tell the world, "This is the way I think a follower of Jesus Christ should live."

His example of myth was the story of American exceptionalism that came out of the American Revolution and captured the imagination of people around the world, allowing for a society where more people would flourish than in any other.

But this myth isn't enough for us, because we are Christians first, and we need to incorporate the very best of what has been the way Dante took the best of science, theology, philosophy and merged them together. His vision of the technology we might use is online gaming, like Everquest, to create virtual worlds where people can come to try out new ways of life that can show us what this life can be. Imagine Virtual Los Angeles, but without the racism, where people can see and "live" what a color-blind society could be.

It's hard for me to grasp the change from "flat" blogging to virtual visioning, but his warning is clear. Just as Christianity was forced out of Hollywood thirty years ago by a secular minority, we run the risk now of being forced out of New Media by a minority with Big Money and its potential for technological tyranny. Reaching people for Christ will be made more difficult if we stand back and watch where technology goes, rather than trying lead.