An e-mail I found hard to stomach
Recently I enjoyed a lovely lunch at a newly opened restaurant in London's West End. I booked through one of the on-line travel and entertainment websites. The meal was fine, but what happened later was not so good.
It started harmlessly enough. I received an e-mail from the restaurant, inviting me to support their claim to be the best new eating place in a poll being conducted by a London paper. A bit of a cheek, I thought, since my address must have been passed on by the online booking agency. Worse was to come. The originator had included my particulars in a huge list of "carbon copy" entries. This meant that I could view the cyber identities of others who in recent weeks had lunched at the same tables - and they could see mine. Over the next few days my mailbox overflowed with people expressing their opinions about what had happened, and copying their views to the whole circulation list.
How could this clear breach of trust have been avoided? The simple answer is that the sender should have used "blind copy" rather than "carbon copy". But that is of course beyond my control. So how could I protect myself from this kind of menace in future? Perhaps I should set up several mailbox identities, one for use by friends and family, another for online purchases, one for my working life, and so on. While I was thus musing, an e-mail arrived from a colleague in a neighbouring parish. It appended a copy of a round robin recently circulated by a national church pressure group. My colleague was not a member of that group, but he knew someone who was. That person had forwarded to him a copy of the mailing that he now passed on to me - with its original circulation list still visible in the header. My neighbour commented "useful source of e-mail addresses!" but I disagreed on principle and deleted the item at once.
I wonder if someone who is a data protection buff would like to comment. As far as I am concerned, an e-mail address is not meant to be kept secret, but if anyone makes unauthorised and targeted use of it in conjunction with some other personal data (such as where and when I bought a lunch, or what causes one happens to support) then that really is not on.
Will you be wapping tonight?
Wireless Application Protocol is coming to a mobile phone near you. The people who encouraged you to do it all from home now want you to start doing it in the park, on the train and at the restaurant. As if it isn't dangerous enough already with all these people chatting into their phones as they walk down the street or drive the car (naughty, naughty!). Imagine what it will be like when these same folk are zapping away at the keyboard to book their holiday, place their bets, pay their bills and trade in stocks and shares. Somehow I don't believe it will happen quite like that, but I've been proved wrong before. My misgivings this time are partly to do with small screens and titchy pointing devices, but that's not all. An online purchase made at home is usually a careful and well-considered purchase based on initial information followed by a time of reflection. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be rushed if I'm moving money from one bank account to another or buying a major appliance or booking an airline ticket. One slip and I could end up with things going pear-shaped. Like the time that the supermarket arrived at my doorstep with an order that was identical to the one they'd brought me the day before. The driver was most put out when I turned her away!
Where I do see a value in linking mobiles to the internet is the receiving of e-mails. I have been using this facility for several months and find it very useful despite one or two niggles. Most of the phone providers expect you to set up a distinctive e-mail address, which they receive and convert into a series of short messages to be sent out to your mobile. This did not appeal to me, since I wanted to continue using my established address - despite the risk of occasional flooding. I therefore took the opportunity to switch to Virgin Mobile, partly because I liked their tariff, and partly because of the sophistication of their e-mail handing. I keep my existing e-mail address and I can have all my mail sent out to the phone or I can set various filters on the sender, the recipient(s) and/or the subject. This could ensure, for example, that I only see messages from certain people or relating to certain topics. You don't have to sign up with Virgin as an internet service provider: as long as you can check your mail using POP3 then the system will work for you. Virgin Mobile checks my mailbox every so often during the periods I specify and forwards a copy to my phone as appropriate. Nothing is deleted from mail server, so all messages are still there to be read by my normal off-line reading routines whenever I next log in. E-mails are split into blocks to conform to the "short message service" protocol, which means I have to read each message "back-to-front" because on my phone the last message in is always the first one out. Theologically sound but practically rather inappropriate!
Another little gripe I have is that I can only send messages in upper case, which is likely to be interpreted as shouting to my e-mail recipients. Things will improve - I hope! Virgin already plan their own software to enable longer messages to be sent without recourse to WAP technology. They currently charge ten pounds a year to receive unlimited e-mail. Sending costs ten pence per item, the same as a standard text message, obviously more if you have to spread the text over several messages (maximum 160 characters per mobile text message, an industry standard). But then you wouldn't want to type a great deal; it's very tedious having to stretch a mobile phone keypad to produce all the letters of the alphabet and more. One manufacturer advertises a rather natty little plug-in keyboard, which can be connected to certain types of phone, but I've never seen one in use. Handy for the hotel room, I would say, but a bit of a chore to cart it around with your phone all day long.
You now have clearance to enter your designated parking space
Having bashed the new-style WAP technologies with my scepticism let me offer you the chance to get back at me by mocking (yet again, perhaps!) my visions of the future. The technology that I foresee will retain the WAP notion of continually updated information displayed on a small screen beside you (or feeding your optic nerves directly from an implant in your body). It will be allied with a two-way voice channel linking you to what I would describe as your guardian cyber-angel. This will be the equivalent of air traffic control, responding to your requests by providing warnings, clearance and advice concerning all matters relevant to your environment. There will, I think, be a real person there to assist you, but backed up of course by a whole variety of technological aids.
So: as I set off in my car I am greeted by Dave, who is my Wireless Personal Assistant (WPA) of the day. He tells me he is assigned to me until noon, when he goes off shift and Cindy takes over. I tell Dave I'm driving to Birmingham for a gathering at 11 a.m. and he arranges for the necessary road traffic briefings to come through automatically. My personal news preferences are already set, and the system retains a vast database of my inclinations when it comes to eating, entertainment, medical requirements and so on. If I want to take a break, my WPA (pronounced "wiper") will direct me right as far as the specific parking space and my meal as pre-ordered will be ready for immediate consumption. Back on the road I might find myself chatting directly with someone who shares the same interests, then later in the day I could be a cyber-tenor at networked choral evensong or a roaming-partner in an online prayer meeting.
How much will all this cost? Well, it could be very expensive or virtually free. All will depend upon just how much advertising I'm prepared to hear. If I'm a poor guy I will be subjected to all kinds of blurb but I won't have to pay a penny for what I receive. If I'm rich I will be happy to pay a large sum in order to be protected from a load of junk, although the more sophisticated type of promotion will always be likely to sneak through in one way or another.
Costing the new evangelism
Would you be prepared to pay for your church to be placed firmly on the cyber-map for all who pass by, by land, water or air? Certainly there are plenty of others who will ensure that their message is brought to people's attention. But what exactly is "your church" in this context? Is it a specific set of buildings occupied at set times by certain groups of people? Or will the life of the church become much more pick and mix, with Christians (as everyone else) free to quickly and dynamically link with others of like mind as and when the occasion arises?
The nature of the sales proposition is changing. Run quantities are slashed as everything is produced "just in time". The batch process dies out and everything is made to measure, just as it was in the days before the factory process was established. Purchasing groups and sales cartels are no longer monolithic, but have a life span measured in dragonfly days. Long term commitments hardly figure in the deal. In response to this, Christians must prepare to review the way in which we invite folk to meet God and engage in an ongoing process of radical personal transformation. The One whom we present is of course unchanging and the message is in its essence exactly the same throughout the ages. But our human perception of time and space has changed dramatically down the centuries. This has had enormous effects upon our notion of what it is to be and to live as sentient beings on this earth. The explosion in our concepts of time and space (time shifting, parallel universes) is such that only the new museums will have room for fixed points such as Family Eucharist at ten thirty every Sunday. The ecclesiastical equivalent of the Sealed Knot ("The ASB Preservation Society"?) will re-enact the old rituals for school parties who will dress up in 1980's costume just for the day.
As the fabric of human society is continually being dis-membered, it is all the more important for Christians to be in the business of re-membering. Though we are many, we are one body. If such a hope is to be sure and certain then we must avoid coming over as nothing but a faint echo of a distant age when everything in the garden was lovely. We have been told to gather up the fragments, that none may be lost. We should therefore grasp the spirit of the present age by the scruff of its neck and re-present it to the world in ways that significantly increase its permeability to the spirit of God.
There is certainly a rough ride ahead, but we have been here before - remember the panic around the time of the Reformation, when the Church was caught on the hop by the emergence of the printed book? Monastic observances were challenged by new forms of individual piety. Bright people outside the clerical hierarchy gained access to the world of learning as they got hold of mass-produced books. In a word, there was change - and not everyone thought it was a good thing. Today we stand yet again on a new threshold - and believe me, you ain't seen nuffin yet!