What Would Jesus Tweet?!

An interesting question was posed to me yesterday, wondering if I thought Jesus would use social media.

Hmm, good question. He certainly is all over the Internet already.

bradley howell

Though we don't have any evidence that Jesus himself wrote anything down, he consistently referred to and used the stuff of everyday life. Yes, I think its quite possible that Jesus would use social media as a way to connect with those in his relational circle.

So, what would Jesus tweet?

Who knows!

Whatever it is, it would embarrass his family. They would try to get an insanity order to take him off.

Jesus probably would not repost stories that implied if you were a real Christian who was not ashamed of your faith, you would pass this to everyone you know.

Instead he'd probably post: you have heard it said_______, but I say_________.

The religious establishment would likely try to use his own words against him.

After spending time alone in prayer, he would text Peter to send the boat over to pick him up. Then walk out to the middle of the lake just to freak him out.

The look on Peter's face would have made a perfect mobile pic status update! Judas would probably be the first to 'like' it.

He would probably turn his phone off when he was with other people, in prayer, or when it was just time to sleep.

He might enjoy videos of kids doing cute kid things.

I can imagine Jesus tweeting bits of the sermon on the mount. I don't imagine him taking a picture of 5 small loaves of bread and two fish with the post "Dinner for 5000".

Well, maybe if it had a cat in it...

What about you, do you think Jesus would use social media? What do you think Jesus would tweet?

R U An Inadvertent Cyber Bully?

Have you ever left an app with instant message abilities open on a different tab or even different window? Then you might have been a cyber bully perpetrator and didn't even know it!

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This is common practice for many of us to have multiple tabs open online at the same time. Some of those tabs are open to social media sites like Facebook that have IM features to it. No big deal?

Well, probably not, unless you have any early adolescents as part of your IM contacts.

Cyber bullying is most prevalent among younger teens. More than half of teens who have experienced cyber bullying in the past several months are most likely to report that the form of bullying was by being ignored online.

That's right...being ignored.

This can happen intentionally, but it can also happen accidentally. Early adolescents tend to be concrete thinkers, they take the world at face value - everything is what it appears to be. Mr. Bean is a caricature of this. If they want to IM with you and your online icon is lit up, then subconsciously to an early adolescent you are available.

But if you are not? The lack of response is unnerving to a young person.

However, there is hope!

If you have a habit have using multiple tabs, make sure your message alerts are activated. If you are going to be away from your computer for a while, take the time to log off any IM enabled sites. Finally, teach younger teens and pre-teens to understand that a lit icon does not necessarily mean another person is there. They can understand this, they just need prompting. Also, teach them to be aware of how their icons may appear to their friends. This learned behavior can vastly reduce the number of perceived cyber bullying incidences.

How have you seen misunderstandings happen online because people were not physically sharing the same space?

Is Mr. Bean Really That Funny?

The presence of Mr. Bean was one of a several entertaining highlights in last week's Olympic opening ceremonies. There are those who find him painfully funny and other's who simply dismiss him as British humor. Regardless, Mr. Bean is one of the few characters that is embraced across a wide range of cultures. Why?

Rowan Atkinson has described this character as a 10 year old boy trapped in a grown man's body. 10 year old boys intuitively accept the world at face value. On top of that, this particular 'trapped' boy appears to be fairly introverted and has an aversion to using verbal skills. An adult encountering the world as a 10 year old boy creates a sense of awkwardness that is rather humorous, if not painfully so. This childhood experience is shared across many cultures, even if adulthood has slammed it out of us. This is a life stage experience we tend to forget.

For my friends who either work with pre-teens or find opportunities to engage them online, Mr Bean is worth a second look. There are some adults who expect pre-teens to act like grown ups online and get frustrated when they don't. But the reality is that they can't - they are not adults! If you need a reminder of what the world looks to a 10 year old boy, watch some Mr. Bean sketches - he paints a great caricature of life as a boy in a world that expects more from him!

What's your favorite Mr. Bean moment? Do you see him as a 10 year old?

Does Facebook Trash Talk Mean The End Of Social Media?

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Just before Facebook's IPO, GM announces they are taking their ball and going home, the game doesn't work and they are not going to play anymore. The next week the wealthiest investors, who don't seem to have any idea of what social media is all about, invest in the most anticipated IPO in recent history on a stock market that ironically has technical difficulties. Instead of doubling their money by day's end, they walk away with less cash...way less. By the next week, everybody is an expert and suggests they predicted the demise of Facebook. Really?! Now, as Facebook's stock continues its downward spiral it seems in vogue to declare that people are abandoning Facebook and that the brief era of social media is going the way of chat rooms and dodo birds.

Problem is, I don't think so. At least not for social media.

People intuitively desire to tell others what they are experiencing, and Facebook has been a great platform for doing that. I concede that Facebook traffic is down, but there is not another common platform just yet that the masses are willing to embrace. People migrated en masse from MySpace to Facebook in large part because Facebook was easier to use, and perhaps more socially acceptable for people who were not 16 year old girls. But it does not mean people have stopped using social media tools to get their experiences out.

Case in point, the other night we went as a family along with my wife's office coworkers and their families to see the Sacramento showing of Wicked. If you have not seen Wicked yet, GO...but I digress.  Perhaps because this group is mostly lawyers, accountants and financial planners, society has us on the balcony. Whatever the reason, it is a great place to observe people during the intermission, and observing others is something I love to do. As the break happens, the lights come on and all across the auditorium people are either making a bee-line for the restrooms, checking their cell phones, or in some cases, doing both! It was pretty impressive to see all of those little blue square screens light up across the crowd. People were tweeting, texting and checking messages. Some may have even been posting on Facebook, but I am not sure...no time to ask. The point is, they were all actively engaging in what is otherwise known as social media.

Whether or not it is appropriate to do this while your friends stand around you with their hands in their pockets will be the subject of another post.

Using technology to share experiences with others who are not physically present is social media. Chat rooms went the way of the dodo bird in part because they were too time bound to be a useful tool, and in part because there were too many people you didn't know inserting themselves into personal conversations. This was not good. However, as long as the population is highly mobile, people will embrace the technology that keeps them connected with the folks they care about the most. That is something I do not see changing any time soon.

Why You Don't Want A "Social Media Voice" In Youth Ministry

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Looking through an upcoming conference website I noticed a break out session focusing on social media. Of course, this gets my interest as I pretty much always take the time to read such descriptions. Most of these make me angry and this one was no exception.

The thrust of the breakout is that social media exists because the cry of the human heart is for community and this cry fuels further social technological advances. The description sets up a sort of snapshot take of social media, a mere and incomplete reflection of real relationships. The story is the same as many of these types of sessions: we as a society do not get the community that we crave and so we have set up these complicated computer mediated networks that simultaneously attempt to connect us yet safely keep us at arms length with each other. The answer is to simplify our lives, yet not abandon social media completely because there is a need for a Christian voice in this medium.

Let us not abandon these poor digital souls who do not know any better but to engage in empty relationships. Let us take pity on them and tell them instead there is a better way. Let us be a voice to the lost, let us draw them to our blogs so that we can be encouraged by our stats and the multitudes will know the truth and be informed that what they really want is a non-virtual relationship.

Yes...that paragraph is dripping with sarcasm.

The problem is that we are so conditioned by entertainment we use this as a background to interpret what is happening on social networks. By doing so, we limit the impact of social media to how many followers we have, and measure significance by audience. Consequently we completely miss the ministry point, and conference organizers continue to throw away precious Kingdom resources because we do not understand why our young people's smart phones are an extension of their arms.

Social media does not exist because people deeply desire community, social media exists as an expression of community. It is a place where people tell those they have a relationship with what is going on in their lives.

The primary motivation to joining a specific social networking site is friends. The biggest technological change efforts in the social media landscape is not how to build the largest audience, but how to segment your friends into relational circles, so that you can interact with only the group you intend to. Bringing a voice to this is like yelling in a digital wilderness. Additionally, teens are bombarded with so much data they cannot possibly take it all in. We do not win by merely contributing a voice to that onslaught of data. We win by being a part of a teen's offline network so that our online interactions are an extension and reflection of our existing offline relationship.

We win by listening to what people have to say.

Which leads me to wonder, how do you decide which voices to help navigate the social media wilderness do you listen to and why? How do you evaluate them?

Cyber Bullies Fueled By Sarcastic Abilities

Cyber bullying is a popular topic among adults who work with teens, and rightly so, nobody wants to see kids emotionally destroying one another. Its sad, it tugs at our heart and it motivates adults to step in before someone gets hurt. Cyber bullying is a complex issue with multiple levels of motivation mixed in with developmental limitations and inadvertent offenses. One very intentional ingredient though is sarcasm.

As early adolescents begin to think abstractly, the realization sets in that they have an ability to say one thing that implies something completely different. How cool is that! Its like discovering magic, and of course, practice makes perfect...

Give a kid a hammer and everything begins to look like a nail.

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Why sarcasm works is because it is a two sided coin. It tears someone else down while it appears to build someone else up. The majority of intentional cyber bullying activity occurs with a group of friends in front of a computer screen. Everyone wants to matter, but young teen girls constantly have their 'do you like me' radar on and this group of friends provide an unwitting audience to their cyber genius. Where off line bullying may end sooner because somebody sees the pain of the victim and eventually has the courage to step in, among more concrete thinking early adolescents, empathy for the victim will not come without intentional prodding. Someone who can think abstractly needs to connect the dots for a younger person who thinks more in the here and now.

Young teens do not intuitively have empathy for a person across a social network.

Educating young people can help, but it will not typically serve as an inhibitor for those who will choose to use sarcasm to cyber bully. Instead, we need to educate adults, equipping households with mental models that allows for adult awareness of and guiding participation with, adolescent Internet activity. Only adults living life online with their teens will help curb such a destructive behavior among early adolescents.

Questions: How have you seen or experienced the use of sarcasm to bully?

What are some ways that adults can be more aware of what teens are doing online?

Facebook Not Making The Wealthy Wealthier

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As the third day of trading gets underway, Facebook continues to not make the wealthy wealthier. By the end of trading the first day, fingers were being pointed. Close out the second and people are estimating where the bottom will be. Mark Z has said the business is driven by a social agenda and not investor's wealth. So far he is proving his point.

Other than the obvious over-valuation of the IPO, there is a fundamental difference in how Facebook operates compared to other Internet giants like Google. Companies want to be able to advertise in a way that makes sense to them, project a product in a manner that causes people to spend their money on it. Google can do that by target advertisements linked to search engine queries. As GM pointed out last week, Facebook was not effective in doing that, consequently they were pulling the plug on site advertising. From a return on investment evaluation, it was not working.

The adult majority population continues to see the Internet as a tool best utilized for disseminating information. Social networking sites however are not built on that, they are built on relationships. It is not the information a company wants me to know that matters, it is what my circle of 'friends' are experiencing that matters.

Facebook is a giant human web of relationships about 1 billion strong. Advertisers want to envision that as a giant crowd of people all staring at a screen as if they were waiting to buy something. TV did that - everyone watching experienced the same thing at the same time. A digital web of relationships does not operate simultaneously, it operates in waves. What is important is decided by the community, by the network, by the relationships.

Someday, somebody, somewhere will figure out how to make a boatload of money riding the waves of human relationships. Oh wait, somebody did...we call if Facebook.

Let me know, did you the think Facebook IPO would soar or tank? Gut feeling or valuation?