Twitter account, Check.
Facebook account, Check.
General Conference iPhone App, Check.
Looks like I am ready for General Conference 2012, or #gc2012 for all you Twitterers. This General Conference is going to be like no other before it if for no other reason than the dramatic changes in information technology.
At the 2008 event I had the wonderful opportunity to be an alternate delegate. As an alternate I had volunteered to contribute to a blog about my experience. I was nervous about that as I do not consider myself to be a great writer and I know my grammar is not top notch. Yet, I was willing to send a word back home to the few folks I thought would be reading. Turns out it was more than a few.
I was also one of the few delegates with a “smart” phone. At the time I had a Windows smart phone and I was able to access the internet and send texts, I thought I was on top of it. Then I talked with our young adults and realized they were all using Facebook, which had only recently been opened to the public at large. (Facebook began with a restriction to be used only by college students.) The information sharing the young adults were able to do with Facebook and their natural affinity for texting kept them well on top of the information curve.
Now all of us old people are using Facebook and some have even stretched into the world of Twitter and hashtags (even a bishop or two!). This is inevitably going to have an impact on the way General Conference information is shared. I anticipate more than one twitterer will bring us scintillating news such as:
- “Delegate from Iowa calls for the question! #gc2012”
- “Saw one of our delegates sleeping in the hallway, lol gc#2012”
- “Bishops look bored #gc2012”
In addition we can expect that anything that happens in committee or on the plenary floor will be available to all of us back home the instant that it happens. Want to follow the legislation regarding guaranteed appointments? Follow a delegate posting with those handy hashtags on Twitter. Want to experience the meaningful worship? Watch the live streaming at www.umc.org. How this will affect the work of the committees or what affect this will have on the already sometimes tense atmosphere we can only wait and watch as #gc2012 unfolds before us.
The real question/hope is that all this extra coverage will lead to greater transparency and not just an increase in the noise.
i pray that the technology will brinf the facts,proposals, voting results in a quick, efficiency which will resultin the newly caled vitality for the future of the united methodist church. i dopraythis prayer! will you pray it too?
suzanne williamson, tracyton umc washington state.
Thanks for the reminder of how new this information technology is to us – that just 4 short years ago, smart phones were rare and facebook was just going public. Patrick raises a good point – how to use it as a helpful tool rather than a pretty-shiny-thing distraction. Remembering we’re all new at this helps me be patient with our learning process.
Thanks Bruce. For someone born in the non-digital/pre-computer or at least very early computer age, I find it hard to know how to use technology let alone stay on top of the ever-changing tech environment but what you’re saying encourages me to keep plugging away at it.