Relational revolution

In playing around with Twitter and Jaiku, I can’t help but think that there’s a relational revolution going on. People are craving relationship and finding new ways of connecting with people, even building community with people they’ve never met.

Maybe it’s nothing new to you, but I’ve only just really “connected the dots” and seen the trend across so many spheres.

There are so many ways of connecting with people, with building community: on MySpace connecting with people, on Twitter keeping in touch with what people we know are up to, and likewise on Jaiku and Groovr. Then there’s blogs like WordPress and LiveJournal and Tumblr where we can put out ideas and stimulate dicussion and connection. And then there’s so many comunity building tools, from connecting with people about books at LibraryThing, or comparing notes on restaurants at Menuism or comparing travel notes at TravelPod or TripAdvisor.

That’s the technology world, impacting relationships and developing communities around the world.

And then there are relational impacts in the art world. There’s a whole area of art called “relational aesthetics” where art (sculpture, drama, music, and anything else artistic) is developing to involve participation by people who would be considered observers in traditional art.

It’s all about connecting with people, a relational revolution.

What are the ramification of all of that for the Christian church world? Food for thought…

 

Ig Nobel Laureates for 2006

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winners have been announced in a ceremony at Harvard University: Nic Sevenson and Piers Barnes of the CSIRO for research into the number of photographs you must take to ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.

They beat others to the award (“no cash, but much cachet”), who had researched topics such as:

• Why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.
• Dung beetles are picky eaters.
• An electromechanical teenager repellent: a device that makes the most annoying noise audible to teenagers but not to adults (that project later diversified to developing ringtones audible to teenagers but not to their teachers).
• Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: problems with using long words needlessly.
• Why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.

The Ig Nobels are designed to inspire and educate about science (while making people laugh!).

 

Living on the edge

Chartreuse has some interesting ideas about living on the edge: it’s not what’s the obvious that’s important, but what is at the edge. Chartreuse says:

Google’s value isn’t it’s search engine.
Flickr’s value isn’t in uploading photos.
Just like your value isn’t in what you do
It’s in who you are.

For more ideas on edge competencies, see http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2006/01/edge-competencies-what-do-googles-use.cfm

 

The politics of MySpace

Chartreuse has some interesting thoughts on what social networks are all about: the increase in technology in our world, but a yearning for that connectedness in relationship.