Wondering about Twitter?

Having a hard time getting used to trying to say things in 140 characters?

Worried that Facebook is supplanting real relationships?

Welcome to the world of being human.

Throughout time, people have revolted against new forms of communication. In a his new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, Dennis Baron looks at the human tendency to shun new ways of communication. BusinessWeek published a great review last week, which pointed out things like the quote listed below.

Consider the mid-19th century’s Twitter: the telegraph. About America’s “great haste” to establish instant transcontinental communication in the 1840s, Henry David Thoreau scoffed: “Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

Three decades later, the telegraph’s inventor, Samuel Morse, declined to buy the patent rights for the next new thing—the telephone. It provided no permanent record of a conversation, he complained. In 1880, Western Union (WU) refused the offer, too, asking “whether any sensible man would transact his affairs by such a means of communications.” When the typewriter came into widespread personal use in the 1930s, The New York Times editorialized against the machine on the grounds that it usurped the art of “writing with one’s own hand.” And, Baron writes, “because typing resembled printed texts, critics groused that typewriters gave too many would-be writers access to authorship,” an argument that should sound familiar to today’s blog bashers.

So the salient question is this: should the church embrace new technology, or be hesitant to try a new way of communication? The church is the guardian of the best of the past. But it is also the vanguard of the new. So which way should it be?

My thought: The heart of the Gospel was a shift in communication: The Word, which was in the beginning, became something different. The Word became flesh.

What do you think?