TXP member Neil Atwood lives in Australia, is an anglican pastor and has four sons. He blogs about christianity and tech stuff on westserve.org. Neil loves roasting coffee. ministrygrounds.net is his site for all things coffee related.
TXP Mag did talk with Neil about real and online communities.
Q. International reseaches imply more and more people attend online communities while real life communities loose members. What do you think is so attractive for people to join an online community?
Neil: I suspect it’s a couple of things. Convenience and flexibility is one pretty obvious one, but I reckon a biggie is anonymity. Online you can be whoever you want to be. You can just lurk and learn (and no one keeps bugging you to do something or join in), or you can be as outgoing and involved as you want. You can disagree strongly with someone and say so, because no one will get in your face (literally). This can be a good thing, but I suspect more frequently it’s not.
On the other hand, some online communities can pull together people from all over the world with common needs or purposes in a way that real life communities cannot. I host a web site (Textpattern!) and forum for people with CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and related illnesses. The forum now has 300 members from all over the world, supporting, encouraging and helping each other in a way that would be impossible in a physical community.
Q. Online dating services f. e. grow by 40 and more percent per year in Europe. Are people shy to date and meet in reality?
Neil: I’ve been happily married for nearly 28 years, so I’m a bit out of touch with the dating scene personally! But I think the anonymity factor applies in that field too. People can be who they want to be – real or fake – in a dating service environment. Perhaps that’s why so many online romances fail when people meet in the flesh! But in my observation, the dating scene has become more and more a ‘meat market’. In that sense, the online approach perhaps works well, but it’s a very sad reflection on what people value in a relationship
Q: On your blog westserve.org you wrote: “I’m sick to death of the total mess our so-called advanced society has made of relationships. Any pretence of self control and concern for the other person has been thrown out.”
Which observations made you come to this conclusion?
Neil: If you read the whole article it’s in the context of my role as a Christian Pastor and a series of Bible Talks we have started on Sunday nights called “Matters of the heart”. These deal with a biblical approach to being single, going out, being married, divorce and remarriage. That comment was provoked by what I see all around me in our western cultures today. I.E. the selfishness, the obsession with sex, the aversion to commitment. But let me say I don’t expect non-Christians to apply Christian principles to their relationships. But so many people fail to treat
each other with the respect, dignity and value that promotes good relationships, regardless of religious conviction.
I observe so much of the relationship process as barely being relational at all. As I said previously, it seems to have become a meat market, and quite predatory in nature. Love and sex are confused, ‘commitment’ is just another ‘C’ word, marriage is disposable. And it’s the most vulnerable that suffer – like the children of a relationship.
For me, so much of this runs counter to what God has laid out in the Bible as the best way for human relationships to work, and it runs counter to what is good for human society in the long run. Our world needs stable, long-term relationships to survive. But that seems anathema to so many today.
Q. Do you think on the long run online communities will replace real life communities?
Neil: No. They will continue to grow as a useful adjunct to real life communities, but they won’t replace them. In the end, people long for real community, for a real sense of belonging to a community that they can see, hear and touch. I see that all the time in my work as a Pastor.
Q: Even your church starts blogging and discovered the online medium. What is the goal doing so?
Neil: Our goal is to extend our effectiveness as a Christian community. The blog on our website is still in its early days, but it’s primarily meant to be another medium for our members (mainly the 20-30 year olds) to engage with each other and express opinions and thoughts. I also see it as a means of extending the teaching/learning process from church on a Sunday. So I often post teasers to the bible talk a few days ahead to get people thinking and reading up in advance. Then they can respond after Sunday with questions or contributions to the topic. It’s slow going at the moment, but I’m persevering! Of course, as all this is readable to the wider public, it’s a chance to show that we (Christians) are real people, talking about real things, and they are welcome to contribute.
As a number of church members also run their own blogs, we are about to feed those into the main church site and so extend the sense of an extended, online church family.
Q. What is your personal guideline as an anglican pastor?
Neil: My approach to any online presence that I’m involved is openness, transparency and honesty. I use my real name, and
I don’t say anything in my blog that I’m not prepared to say publically. I make no secret of my Christian conviction online, but I also try not to push it on others where it’s not wanted.
Link
Study: Internet users are more social