By the time you read these words they will probably be out of date. The rate of change in matters on-line has become truly phenomenal. Even the Prime Minister has been taking lessons in netiquette. I think it's time for me to give up being a prophet and start writing history (as an Old Testament figure might have said).
Where are they now?
In my piece "Boxed in beyond 2000" I raised a number of questions relating to e-commerce. In those days (summer of 1998) Amazon was strictly stateside and a standard order took six weeks to arrive. Now the packages are delivered within days, unless there's a postal dispute at Slough. You may recall that I pointed to Cable and Wireless as one of the likely movers and shakers in shopping on-line. Here I have been proved wrong. C&W have not changed their name (as I hinted was to be expected) nor have they maintained an up-front presence on the digital high street. Other products have pushed through instead, including a clutch of financial products and services with natty names. These often sound like the love-child of a rather more staid backer - thus, Egg has been laid by Prudential, and Smile offered by HSBC. The card war that I predicted is still on the horizon, but the early salvos have clearly been fired. The return of (some) charges for ATM withdrawals is a warning that the "golden mean" of full negotiability is about to be challenged. I believe that the banking sector will continue to shrink but staff reductions and branch closures will be too few and too late to stem the massive haemorrhage of funds as others make their bids for the capital currently locked up in the bankers' clearing cycle.
In "Belonging in the 90's" I turned to the future of community life in an age of pick 'n' mix where everyone has their nominated trading partners. I wish I had thought to predict that during 1999 the Church of England would receive an invitation to become the "preferred partner" of the Spiritual Zone of the Millennium Dome. Sadly that would have seemed too wild and wacky even to my teasing sense of humour. But truth is stranger than fiction, and it took a parliamentary committee to unearth that little gem for me. It seems that heads rolled when those at the top found out. What I did predict was a movement away from a single cohesive and seamless Internet, towards a multitude of "internet style technologies". One way of looking at this would be to note the emergence of non-PC devices hooked up to the Internet, and their demands for new display languages. Mobile phones, digital televisions, hand-held computers - each of these requires a page layout that is context sensitive. What is written to exploit the full capacity of a seventeen-inch professional monitor will not look too brilliant when shown on a wristwatch display. This will give the browser writers even more excuses for idiosyncrasy, and it could well be that our present level of compatibility between browsers (which still leaves a great deal to be desired) may actually represent the high water mark of convergence.
Put your hand in the hand of the accredited supplier
Service providers will inevitably look for design features that will keep you within their family of suppliers. "I found it on Freeserve" is a bit like saying "I found it on my BT line", but in marketing terms it represents a coup of enormous proportions. Get the customer to forget the naughty old Internet with all its confusions, temptations, pornography and risk of being taken for a ride. Instead, come in to Freeserve provided by your friendly Dixons et al, where you can be linked with preferred partners, view web content and place orders in absolute safety and security. That's how a "free" provider can make a profit - they get a kickback from the suppliers with unknown names who are enabled to ride on the trust engendered by a British household name. As yet it's all good stuff and plenty of people are being encouraged to venture online because their doubts and fears are assuaged. In the long term, the providers could of course end up with an incredibly valuable set of data comprising purchasing profiles, renewal dates, personal preferences and red-letter days such as birthdays and anniversaries. I think there will also be an increasing tendency for service providers to become closed worlds with no interest in offering universal connectivity. That's where my anxieties about the "cowboy channel" mentality start to kick in.
"Wired for Life" led me into the realms of personal privacy, website integrity and issues of copyright versus plagiarism. Internet technology is the quintessential expression of post-modernity, in the same way that moveable type was the vehicle that delivered us from the medieval to the modern. I would like to return to this in a subsequent article, so let's turn straight on to re-visit my piece entitled "Face to Face". This was where I looked back to a 1997 quote in "The Times" where Martin Lee, Marketing Director of Waterstone's Bookshop, had ventured to say that "almost nobody believes that the Internet is ever going to account for more than ten per cent of sales". Having pounced on what I saw as a most unfortunate comment. I was intrigued to read, again in "The Times" (29 September 1999), that Martin Lee has left the company. "Marketing directors of Waterstone's usually go on to big positions elsewhere in the industry," said a former colleague, who added that Mr Lee did not have a new job lined up. Waterstone's has recently opened a destination store in the former Simpson's shop in Piccadilly. The food is great, but Amazon need have no fears concerning the books. I enquired at a sales desk for a particular title, and the assistant called up the details on a display terminal. "Yes", he said, "we have a record of that book and the computer tells me we have minus three copies in stock!" It's a fun place to browse, but I wouldn't want to do any serious shopping under their roof. Not when I can skim through all the online bookshops and track things down so simply and so speedily.
Dreams and destinations
I introduced the expression "destination store" in the last paragraph. This is the term being given to the commercial equivalent of a "gathered congregation". It's the place you reach after passing several other such en route, because you choose to go out of your way to get a really worthwhile experience. A destination store will let you touch and feel. It offers advice and information. You can enjoy a snack or watch a demonstration of how to do things better. Surprisingly, I see this concept working well in combination with home shopping. Think of it as a weekly gathering for worship followed by six days of daily prayer and bible study. You visit the store once a week, at whatever time of day or night is most convenient for you. You sample new products and bone up on new insights. When something grabs you, you click on the bar code scanner that the shop has given you. Back home, you upload the product numbers to your computer and do your online shopping for goodies that will be delivered to your door, possibly straight from the producers, and therefore maybe not all arriving at the same time. Tesco home shopping has taken a first tentative step in this direction, but these are early days as yet. At least, that's what I said to console myself after grappling with software that "failed to create the configuration object", a website that sometimes appeared incredibly slow or non-existent, a further warning message (in French!) about saving the contents of my virtual trolley, and finally a missing pack of grill steaks followed by a rather long winded refund process. Never mind. I'm sure all will all come right in the end.
What are the implications for the Church, I keep on asking. I suspect that churches who see themselves as serving the whole of a given locality will be most under threat by these developments. Those with a single meeting space and rigid seating arrangements will lose out to the more fleet of foot. There will be some really hard times ahead for churches where leadership is top-down rather than bottom-up. The Church of England has already accorded separate integrities to those with differing views on the role of men and women in the life of the church. There is now pressure for similar provision to be made for those who differ in their understanding of human sexuality and its appropriate expression. Does this mean "Bishops for all"?
Certainly the balance between home and away will undergo some radical shifts, in work and in shopping. I also think that health care will be dramatically affected by these new relationships. NHS Direct is only the beginning. It will not be too long before you will sit at home and be checked out by computer diagnosis at a distance. New homes will be built with a standard interface portal, a first floor window that can be opened and connected to a linkspan rather like that which leads you from the departure lounge into your plane, except that in this case you will be wheeled through the portal and into a special pod containing all the equipment needed for your routine surgical operation. The pod will arrive and depart like a builder's skip. It will be staffed by fully qualified peripatetic medical personnel. If an emergency arises during the operation, a helicopter will airlift it (and you) to the appropriate major hospital centre.
Again I ask, what does this mean for the Church of God? Where are our destination stores? I see some of our cathedrals as heading in that direction, also some of our town centre churches of various denominations. As yet I have no knowledge of any green field sites set up by Christians, but I'd love to see one. It would be a multi-media complex, and instead of screens one to twelve there would be pulpits one to twelve and altars one to twelve. Somewhere exciting and challenging for the whole family to visit together but not necessarily stay together in one group.
During the week there could be a renewed emphasis on prayer and study in the home. enlivened and enlightened by online time. You will, of course, have more than one Internet access device, just as you now have more than one TV. Perhaps one of those terminals might form an integral part of your prayer corner, a small but significant piece of sacred space within your home?