Monday 25 August 2008

A Whole New World

It is well known that I have always gone weak at the knees for new technology. I have often visited my local shopping centre with the single intention of browsing the latest gadgets and software.

However, living a very busy and full life, I have never found the time to write a blog. This is very surprising for me, as I am usual dying to try out these things the moment they are released into the ocean of the World-Wide Web. it is just something I have never felt the compulsion to do.

Yet, I can remember when my friends first became interested in this sort of thing. Primary Seven, academic year 1998/99. One decade ago. At that time, it was usually a moan about how mum and dad wouldn't let the kids go any where near those sites. Those were the days, although few in number, when parents were very sceptical about this new technology and watched its use very carefully. It also cannot be denied that, at that time, dial-up was the only available option and so, even if you wanted to, it would have been very unlikely that you could afford to roam the net freely.

Then, last week, I received a letter from the Church of Scotland Mission and Discipleship Council inviting me to attend the National Youth Assembly 2008. As a member of the United Reformed Church, it was a pleasure to be invited as an ecumenical guest and everything seemed quite conventional at first, until I came to the paragraph on technology.

I have attended quite a number of events over the years where we have been encouraged to join social networking sites in order to share photos and gossip about the event and, as a result, I am now a member of Facebook and Bebo, sites I would never have even touched with a barge-pole if I had not been specifically asked to.

However, it came as somewhat of a shock to hear that this technology was going to play a massive part in the conference with quite a lot of the information and papers connected to the event being published on-line. Also, a lot of the debates were going to be extended to blogging and micro blogging sites. I panicked! I didn’t know what half of this meant or how it was going to possibly work.

In the past few days, I have read up about some of these concepts and am now just getting the hang of them. Hopefully, I will be competent enough by the time the conference begins!

I cannot say that I am one hundred per-cent comfortable with it all. It seems to me that we are going to have a hotel full of people sitting around screens, phones and PDA's rather than actually interacting with each other. While this will help people to gain a much larger perspective on issues by gathering views from everyone involved with the conference at the same time rather than just talking with those whom they happen to meet randomly, I fear that we will loose that experience of physically meeting others from churches around our wonderful country, hearing their stories, quite randomly and physically seeing the emotion in people's movements and faces.

I call upon the organisers to at least make some time available during the programme for this physical contact, and, looking at the programme, it seems they already have.

Do not get me wrong, I am fascinated to see how this works. It has fantastic potential both for inside and outside sessions where debates which would otherwise have been cut short can go on for as long as we desire, finding new ways of solving our problems and moving forward.

So if you happen to see a crazy, confused looking male with glasses at the NYA2008, it is likely t be me. Please do come over and help me. It will be much appreciated!