After a 7-hour flight from D.C. to Munich and an 11-hour flight from Munich to Cape Town, (both of which were made bearable by the modern pharmaceuticals industry), I landed in South Africa at 5am on Friday morning. Along my journey, I happened to meet the world’s happiest gate agent, the world’s loudest flight attendant, and the world nicest cab driver. After a shower and the slight disappointment of finding no Starbucks, I took off for the conference center.

 

After a quick tour of Cape Town International Convention Center (CTICC), Lausanne Social Media Manager, Dion Forster, began to describe Lausanne’s social media strategy. First he mentioned blogging. Blogging I understand. Blogging is a long-form essay about theology or culture, or possibly a lament about the fact that there is no Starbucks in Cape Town. As Dion continued talking, I also heard something about Facebook. Facebook I understand. People I actually know—or at least have something in common with—start conversations, then other people post comments and perhaps link to something interesting. It’s like being the life of the party without actually having to be in the same room.

 

Then Dion started talking about “Twitter.” I don’t do Twitter. In fact, I don’t even get Twitter. My perception of Twitter is that someone decides that every thought he thinks during the course of a day is interesting to other people.  For instance, if I started tweeting and you decided to “follow” my tweets, you’d receive updates like “The farmer spread the cow manure today and it really stinks.” “Colleen just decided to be a horse for Halloween.”  “I really feel like watching The Ghost and Mr. Chicken but can’t find it on DVD.” Occasionally, you’d read something like “I think that the biblical support for Greg Boyd’s views on spiritual warfare and open theism is solid, but his theory regarding God’s violent nature in the Old Testament sounds like a case of someone desperately trying to prove a point with too much philosophy and too little scripture.”

 

I feel about tweeting the way senior editor of the blog Out of Ur, Skye Jethani, does. “It seems that our culture has lost respect for the written word,” he writes “and is continuing to lose its capacity to engage in meaningful communication. Twitter is to thoughtful communication what Skittles are to fine cuisine.” Like Skye, I mourn the loss of the well-structured essay. If my ideas are significant enough to communicate to someone else, I’ll take the time to craft them, not just dash them off with no more thought than a thank-you note. I have more respect for language than that. 

 

As Dion continued to explain the Lausanne strategy (yes, he was still talking), he said that the goal is to get as many people as possible—on as many platforms as possible—involved in the conversation.  This strategy includes the quaint, old-fashioned blog posts on my personal page (www.theruthlessmonk.blogspot.com), but also includes posts designed to start extended conversations on both the Lausanne Global Conversation site (https://lmconversation.wpengine.com/en/conversations) and the Lausanne Facebook site.  The Global Conversation site will also contain delayed audio and video feeds from the conference.  Finally, tweets will appear on the Lausanne Twitter site (www.twitter.com/CapeTown2010) highlighting audio, video, links, or even—yes—blogs that might be interesting to the reader.

 

As I began to think through all this, I started to understand the advantage of having a trusted central source such as the Lausanne Twitter page where people can post “teaser copy” that they can browse through in just seconds. Maybe after browsing, a reader finds something they’d like to “try on” and then becomes so interested that they want to join the conversation. In this scenario, twitter is almost like a downtown main street where the buyer can look inside the windows and decide which store they’d like to go inside. I also see the benefit of a central site like The Global Conversation where anyone can post longer format essays that dig more deeply into a topic and that require a more detailed response from the reader.

 

I may or may not continue to tweet after the conference, but I am beginning to understand how social media can serve not only to keep people connected, but also keep them involved, engaged, and continuously thinking. And thinking is always a good thing!