In an attempt to scratch the surface of "What is emerging?" I'd like to unabashedly tweak a few words from a , author of .
In his post, Shirky summarizes his consultation to TV executives about the future of their industry in the internet age. Below, I've taken the last several paragraphs of his post and altered some phrasing here and there to make it read like he's answering church leaders about the future of the Church in an internet/postmodern/late-modern world. Any changed I've made are italicized (I mostly changed "video" to "church").
---------------------------------------
In the future, at least some methods of being the church will become as complex [think denominational organization], with as many details to attend to, as church has today, and people will doubtless make pots of money on those forms of church. It’s tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime. That’s not how it works, however.
Some church organizations still have to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old church ecoystem, where the church had to be complex simply to be the church, is broken. Expensive and expansive things made in complex ways now compete with cheap things made in simple ways. For example, the YouTube video was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera. No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it. Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
DDDDDDDDDD
{ 8 trackbacks }