I am making this audio available because the good people at Lausanne have a backlog of audio to upload and I heard it might take a few months for this one to see the light of web.
This is Dr Dion Forster, Social media team leader for Lausanne World Congress, speaking as part of a panel at the Congress in Cape Town, Sep 2010. Dion blogs at An Uncommon Path. I recorded this as a memo on my ipod so the quality is not perfect.
Download audio - Dion Forster at Lausanne Mp4 [14 minutes, 30Megs - sorry - i will upload a trimmer version soon]
I made reference to Dion's talk in my recent lecture at US Center for World Mission, entitled Social Media and the 1024 Window.
In the beginning of Dion's talk, which I discussed at length, he quotes German theologian Helmut Thielicke.
"The Gospel must be contantly forwarded to a new address because its recipient is repeatedly changing his place of residence." Helmut Theilicke
I agreed with Dion's excellent choice of quote and highly recommend you listen to his speech at Cape Town. Especially when he says wonderful things about my blog. [THANKS DION!] I also added my own thoughts to the topic in regards to the necessity of understanding new media, which behaves differently than old media, and requires a different approach.
I suggested to the group at USCWM that we move from Transcribing to Transcoding, especially as we look at creating meaningful online content for the new mobile platforms such as phone, ipad, kindle, etc.
Writing for the screen is different than writing for a page. And with the new mobile platforms, we are moving into something that looks like a tablet but acts like a scroll.
So, if we are serious about transcribing the message so that it has its same impact on mobile devices and the screen, then I might be tempted to adapt Helmet Theilicke's statement to say . . .
"The Gospel must be constantly transcoded to a new appliance because the recipient is repeatedly changing his platform of reading." TallSkinnyKiwi
