Trienniumedia

I spent the last week at my denomination’s marquee youth event, the Presbyterian Youth Triennium. This worship/study/play/rock fest gets staged every three years on the ginormous campus of Purdue University. It gathers over 5,000 youth from Presbyterian churches all over the country while also pulling in youth from global partner churches. This was my first experience of Triennium. In fact, it was my first experience of a church youth gathering of more than, say, 200 kids. I did that once.

John Vest has done some really thoughtful digesting of the event in recent days. This and this post and accompanying comments are really good. Since Yorocko is mostly interested in the “ministry in the media matrix,” I paid close attention to the various expressions of media brought to the event and how they affected what was going on. Here’s a simple review:

Video: in the opening worship service, there was a killer short film produced to introduce the “time” theme of the event. Clips from movies like “Back to The Future” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” were spliced into a soundtrack of pumping electronic music. It was invigorating, and the intensity of it built so that worshipers started cheering for movie clips they recognized and related. When the clip of Landon Donovan’s World Cup goal against Algeria popped up, I nearly left my seat. Later, a brief documentary film was shown to introduce Bill Nathan, who runs a home for street kids in Port Au Prince and who survived the January earthquake there. On two nights, animated movies were offered as recreation options.
Speech: each worship service featured a sermon. Two of these were roam-around-the-stage sermons with lots of personal anecdotes and accompanying images, and two of the preachers were nailed to the glass pulpit. Participants didn’t seem to me to be overly swayed by the former. They did seem surprisingly engaged by the latter.
Music: the worship band was a floppy-haired jean-clad outfit called The Great Romance. That is what it is. To their credit, they played through similar sets in each service, so that participants got to know them well enough to scream for their favorite lines. Like this one: “We were made for such a time as this/ to make a difference in the world we live.” Further, small group leaders were encouraged to play music before and during sessions, particularly U2’s “Pride (In The Name of Love). Preacher Graham Baird treated worshipers to an acapella rendition of that one. Ahem. Also, there was a choir assembled of the participants. Their introduction was one of the more powerful moments of the week. (A final music note: organizers played a pop music soundtrack in the auditorium as youth gathered for worship, and if you’ve never been part of a thousand teens hijacking the Glee Cast’s “Don’t Stop Believin‘” for their own celebratory purposes, I can assure you it is positively doxological)

Drama: elaborate and finely performed dramas were produced at each worship service. These brought together the story of Esther and Jesus in illuminating ways. In the small groups, participants enacted scenes from the gospels in both comic and serious ways.
Visual Arts: the small group manual was built around paintings. Seriously. Small groups were asked to bring an Esther or gospel text into conversation with a painting like this and this.
Photography: pictures (and live videos) of the participants scrolled across the screens prior to worship. As expected, youth screamed and waved in delight when they saw themselves make the Big Time. Participants likely shot millions of photographs: of one another, of worship, of the rain–they shot it all. I found myself wondering about the nature of the worship experience at one point, when the powerful introduction of Bill Nathan set off a blizzard of flashbulbs throughout the auditorium. I found myself wondering, “Are we really experiencing this or merely documenting it? Are we documenting it to preserve it for ourselves or to share it with others? For adolescents, is documenting something now an essential part of experiencing it?”
Text: participants engaged the Biblical text in small groups, reading aloud lengthy excerpts from Esther and the gospels. Calls to Worship and Prayers of Confession were projected and read responsively and in unison during worship.
Social Media: there was a vibrant conversation happening on Twitter all week under the hashtag #pyt2010. Preacher Bruce Reyes-Chow even showed Triennium-related tweets to worshipers on-screen during worship. That was about the extent to which social media was taken up by the organizers of the event and incorporated into the content of the event. Of course, participants were texting and sharing pictures and videos with each other all week.

Triennium is a smorgasbord of media. Sorting out the good and bad of it might be an impossible task, but I think it’s worth holding up the best uses, since it’s obviously here to stay.

Facebook and The Privacy of The Least of These

A timely text from a friend yesterday asked if I had read danah boyd’s anti-Facebook rant. I hadn’t. Well, I’d skimmed it. So I went and read it. Thanks, friend.

The privacy conversation has never really interested me. I have no illusions about the possibilities when I share something online. I’m making an informed choice to share something about myself and calculating that the potential negative consequence is worth what I gain from sharing it. I do this with strict personal rules: I don’t share things about other people without their consent. I don’t post pictures of other peoples’ kids.

I’ve always assumed that everyone else does this too.

But Boyd has carefully stated what’s at stake with Facebook’s activity. It’s not really privacy, but informed consent. Facebook has made it confusing and difficult for its users to control the people (and–more to the point–advertisers) who see what they share. The privacy settings are confusing, and for that reason, users are being coerced into sharing personal data with audiences they never intended.

When it comes to my stuff, I can handle this. But churchy social media types ought to be more concerned with other peoples’ privacy than their own. How concerned are we that scores of teenagers, for example, are having their personal data mined without their consent? Facebook is providing a platform for ill-intentioned audiences to harvest personal information shared by users who, developmentally speaking, are still learning how to navigate complicated privacy legalese. It’s opportunistic, and it presents real problems for people (like myself) who are otherwise rosy about young people’s social media activity.

The Facebeook defense has been, essentially, that people choose to participate in Facebook, and so they should be willing to accept the consequences. But when that choice is made by people who are developmentally or socially vulnerable to complex and even misleading privacy settings, the integrity of their “choice” has to be questioned.

A teen may accept an invitation to a party as an opportunity to mix with their friends. But if the host of that party invites lots of people the teen doesn’t know, people who are after the teen’s personal information for economic gain; if the host establishes a default “public” setting to the interaction–that just by being there the teen is consenting to sharing everything they do there with with everyone else–and everyone who everyone else chooses to share it with; if the teen can opt-out of that arrangement only by leaving their friends behind at the party or taking valuable party time to fill out forms specifying who’s allowed to see what they’re doing: who would say that the teen had a fair shot at protecting their privacy?

News Flash: Life Still Hard, Despite Facebook

I don’t agree with Umair Haque’s latest post.

Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab who blogs and writes for the Harvard Business Review, says that, just like during the dot.com bubble and the sub-prime mortgage bubble, we’re witnessing a social media bubble; people are ignoring the warning signs of a great collapse.

Here’s the money quote:

During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

Haque is worried that the prevalence of Facebook “friendships” are cheapening our notions of friendship altogether. If these social network relationships were in any sense real, then social conditions would be improving. They’re not, so . . . they’re not.

Haque’s right that internet connections are not making the world a better place, at least not if you’re looking for poverty, racism, sexism, and the like to be overcome. People still treat other people contemptibly, especially in online forums, and, as danah boyd is chronicling, white flight (for example) is just as pronounced online as off.

But forming new relationships to fix the world is not what social media wants to do. New social technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and even text messaging don’t bring new people together as much as they extend and strengthen existing relationships. Teenagers, for example, use instant messaging, status updates, and texts to “hang out” with their offline, real-life friends, online. They don’t go looking for new friends.

Haque’s concern is misplaced, but it’s not uncommon. People often complain that online relationships are “thin” or “less real” than real face-to-face relationships. Of course they are. But most online social media connections aren’t things in themselves. They’re ways of making existing relationships better.

And, in my view, they do that pretty well.