Belonging 2.0
October 29, 2007
Andrew Zirschky, a friend of mine and Ph.D. student at Princeton Seminary, is giving a presentation this week: Belonging 2.0: How Technology influences Teenagers’ Perceptions of Community, Identity and God. If you’re in the Princeton area, you can come to the Armstrong Room in Princeton’s Luce Library at 7pm ET and if you’re not, you can watch a live video stream here.
It should be a great presentation - I’ll be there helping Andrew with the live video feed and interacting with people watching the USTREAM webcast. Here is a description of the workshop:
Social media, text messaging, and other forms of technology-driven interaction are changing the way adolescents understand and experience belonging, community and membership. From the crafting of extended online identities, to the redefinition of friendship, teenagers’ emerging perspectives about what it means to be “social” have important implications for the church. This lecture will explore the effects of social technology such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube on adolescent notions of identity and belonging, and will consider opportunities for a faithful response by Christian communities.
Update: If you missed the presentation, here is the link for the archived video.
Posted in Technology
Adam Walker Cleaveland: I am a 28 yr old 
October 29th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
What a great conversation!!! Will there be brochures or notes passed out?
I would love to get a hold of the content presented.
Thanks Adam. I am assuming 7pm is East Coast time.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:57 am
will the video feed be hosted anywhere after the presentation? not sure i can make the live feed, but i’m uber-excited about the topic…
October 30th, 2007 at 11:13 am
@Jeremy - yes, 7pm ET
@Tim - I’m not sure if the video will be hosted somewhere. I’m guessing it will be - but not 100% sure on that. I’ll find out.
October 30th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
after looking through ustream.tv it seems like it may just get archived there? if so…amazing…thanks for the link to a sweet, helpful site
October 30th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
The video stream will indeed be archived at UStream TV for later viewing. Also, in case the technology fails (knock on wood) during the event we are videotaping the whole thing and will put it on UStream after the fact.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:31 pm
What a fabulous conference! I’m a frequent writer on technology issues for the Church, and have been working to educate the church on how they can use Web 2.0 technology to further community and provide an “extension”, if you will, to established physical communities within churches all over.
The guys at Simon Solutions have created an incredible social networking platform called Oikos (http://www.oikoshq.com), which offers churches and other organizations a way to create a secure social community for their church/youth group/Bible study/ etc.
Unlike myspace where anyone can see profiles and communicate, Oikos addresses the security concerns that many churches face: how will we provide community, yet make sure that people are able to interact in a safe environment where they can let their guards down?
It sure is slow going to convince Churches that they need this type of Web 2.0 communication tool, but I think many are missing the boat if they don’t at least provide something like this for the youth of their churches.