When the Episcopal Church’s Province III Youth Ministry Network earlier this month issued a set of guidelines for interacting with young people through social media, it was on the cutting edge of a growing effort to help guide ministers as they walk through the digital landscape.

Two or three years ago when Elizabeth Drescher was researching her book “Tweet if You ♥ Jesus,” she said, the “big conversation was about why do we need to do this at all — why does it matter?”

Now, she said, “that conversation is pretty much over ”¦ now they’re really starting to wrestle with what’s the best way to do that in light of our standards and practices for professional ministry. That’s just unfolding. There’s not really a clear standard for how that’s working.”

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I was on Wall Street two weeks ago, and I’ve been in Silicon Valley this past week. What a contrast! While Wall Street is being rattled by a social revolution, Silicon Valley is being by transformed by another technology revolution – one that is taking the world from connected to hyperconnected and individuals from empowered to superempowered. It is the biggest leap forward in the IT revolution since the mainframe computer was replaced by desktops and the Web. It is going to change everything about how companies and societies operate.

The latest phase in the IT revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga – with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones and “the cloud” – those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.

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We are witnessing the emergence of something profound: Humans, historically divided by geography, culture and creed, are beginning to connect and collaborate on a scale never seen before. The driving force behind this creative wave are digital tools and networks that allow new forms of collaboration and knowledge creation.

What starts out as social networking is evolving into social production. We’ve witnessed how self-organizing groups, leveraging social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia, have launched revolutions throughout the Arab world and created the most important reference work in the English language in less than 10 years.

In spite of all the potential to innovate surrounding blogs, forums, wikis and social networks, there are legions of detractors. And no institution is more skeptical about the benefits of social media than education. But there are also few institutions that have more to gain from social media.

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As a Christian and a leader, what does it mean to use technology well?

As a follower of Christ, I have to be diligent at following him in all facets of my life. The fastest growing new area of existence is the virtual existence. I have had to increase my awareness of the presence of God when I use technology, the Internet especially. I discovered a couple of years ago, much to my chagrin, that when I would go online for extended periods of time, I would unconsciously shut off the part of my brain that searched for God. Somehow I decided that God wasn’t there; I wasn’t looking for him. But now I try to incorporate into my virtual existence all of the things I do in my physical existence in practicing the presence of God. I found that online, it can happen just as well as it can in real life. The barriers online that don’t exist in real life have to do with embodiment””not being able to be with the other person that you’re engaged with face to face. That kind of challenge is an added dimension that makes practicing the presence of God online harder. As I say in my book Digital Disciple, there are tremendous opportunities for connection online, but every connection comes attached with the danger of isolation. So we have to work on moving toward those connections and not ignoring the nature of those dangers. If we believe that God is who God says God is, then we have to believe that God is in all things, including the things that humans have created, like virtual reality.

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[In September 2011]…the Rev. Jesse Dymond began his work as General Synod’s first online community coordinator. A priest in the Diocese of Huron, Mr. Dymond brings a wide range of experience in parish ministry, theological reflection, technology, and communications.

Canadian Anglicans will be seeing more of Mr. Dymond as he tweets, posts Facebook updates, and finds new ways to connect people online. Since the focus of his ministry will be to cultivate online community, we gave him more than 140 characters (the Twitter limit) to introduce himself. Read on for the interview.

What do you do at General Synod?
For now, I’m working behind the scenes: networking, planning, and taking care of our involvement in existing communities such as Facebook and Twitter.

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“Hungry” is the headline on a Craigslist post from Phoenix. In Boise: “I NEED WORK!!!” In Chicago: “Laid off vet needs to pay rent.” In Little Rock: “Please help us!!!” In Richmond, Va.: “Need a miracle.” In Oklahoma City: “Broke girl needs help fast.”

Craigslist, a network of online communities that offers free classified advertisements, is a portal into the misery of people who are struggling to find jobs. Posts from people who are desperate for work read like Haiku poems that detail hard times and fear.

Some people post sad tales that might or might not be true, and ask for cash donations or loans. Most, though, offer to do almost anything legal for pay. Need Ikea furniture assembled? The going rate is $20-$40. Need your garage organized? That will set you back as little as $10 an hour. Jobless people offer rides across town or to the airport. They’ll tend to aging parents, repair cars or replace kitchen faucets.

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Never have scientists had so much readily accessible, real-time data about what people say. Twitter, the service that allows users to send text updates of up to 140 characters out to the public, publishes more than 200 million messages, or tweets, a day. Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

As Twitter’s message traffic has grown explosively, so has the scientific appetite for the insights the data can yield. Dozens of new scholarly studies over the past 18 months by computer-network analysts and sociologists have plumbed the public torrents of data made available by Twitter through special links with the company’s computer servers. This research has harnessed the service to monitor political activity and employee morale, track outbreaks of flu and food poisoning, map fluctuations in moods around the world, predict box-office receipts for new movies, and get a jump on changes in the stock market.

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The number of college admissions officials using Facebook to learn more about an applicant has quadrupled in the past year, underscoring the effect social media has on U.S. culture and academic life, a survey shows. Googling is nearly as prevalent.

The rise suggests a growing acceptance of the practice, despite concerns that it invades student privacy.

“This is the world we live in now,” says Paul Marthers, vice president for enrollment at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “If you were able to find out that somebody misrepresented themselves in their application, I think it could be used to help you make a decision.”

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[Principal Chris] Duncan said he normally wrote an 800-word article on education or school issues, but he was prompted to take a different approach after having to help a 16-year-old student who suffered serious abuse on Facebook.

“It was one of those reflex actions,” he said.

“I put it [the newsletter] out and thought this is going to offend half of the school community, but the feedback I’ve had is overwhelmingly positive.”

Mr Duncan said he was aware of students who had been sent into an “appalling state” due to abuse they received on Facebook, with some children being more vulnerable than others.

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The tools of communication have changed. Use of social media has exploded, and the new services have influenced the way we interact with one another.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, LiveCast, blogs, gaming sites, online comment forums and many other interactive electronic platforms — they are fast and easy ways to fire off electronic messages, to forgo formalities, to avoid proofreading. And it’s common to reach a multitude with a few key strokes.

With speed and breadth, however, comes risk. As people rely more and more on social media, privacy diminishes and the opportunity to offend increases.

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The Archbishop of York and a number of bishops are leading the way in inviting millions back to church this weekend for Back to Church Sunday 2011 (25th September). In addition to meeting people where they’re at, at a range of public events (from Sunday car boot sales to jazz nights), they are encouraging people to send friends invitations either in person or using social media.

The Archbishop of York, the Most Revd Dr John Sentamu, Tweeted an invitation to come back to church today, Monday, 19th September. He said: “This Sunday (25th September) is Back to Church Sunday. http://www.backtochurch.co.uk . Why not invite your friends too? Pass the message on!”

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A California startup is extending social media to the dead.

I-Postmortem Ltd., based in Palo Alto, allows clients ”” while still alive ”” to create an interactive memorial to themselves through photos, letters, poems, and audio and video files.

After death, a client can also send timed messages ”” to a son on his 21st birthday, say, or a daughter on her wedding day.

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Just three months into its launch, the New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary has already gained footing in exploring improved ways in which pastors and lay leaders might use new technologies to strengthen their communities.

“This increasingly rich theological discussion seems to be striking a chord of interest among religious leaders who are thinking about the impact of technology on religious life,” said the Rev. Verity A. Jones, project director and former publisher and editor of DisciplesWorld magazine. “I am encouraged that the discussion is getting some traction.”

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I enjoyed this–check it out.

While many pastors and parents have heard horror stories about children straying into dark corners online, few are aware of just how common these problems have become ”” even in their sanctuaries and homes.

This is the kind of danger and sin that religious leaders often fear discussing, precisely because these realities have not remained bottled up in the secular world. Thus, Heil urged his listeners to ponder the following statistics in his presentation, drawn from mainstream research in the past year:

Ӣ Two-thirds of Americans under the age of 18 have reported some kind of negative experience while online. Only 45 percent of their parents are aware of this.

Ӣ Forty-one percent of children say they have been approached online by some kind of stranger, possibly an older predator.

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Enjoying a refreshing pilgrimage has never been more accessible or affordable, as the Bishop of Oxford issues an invitation to join him on pilgrimage via ‘tweets’ on the Twitter website. His progress – along with inspirational prayers taken from the new book Pocket Prayers for Pilgrims and useful links to information on his chosen destinations – will be read on mobile phones and computers free of charge by all who follow the Church of England’s national Twitter identity c_of_e at http://twitter.com/#!/c_of_e.

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“So much of the information out there about using web and social media marketing is geared towards selling products and services,” commented Jake Dell, Episcopal Church senior manager of Digital Marketing and Advertising. “We saw the need to write a guide that Episcopal congregations could use and would speak to them, but at the same time we wanted to ”˜borrow’ as much as we could from the business world. We didn’t see a need to re-invent the wheel.”

Included in free Social Media and The Episcopal Church are: six Best Practices; “How To” tips for each practice; and separate sections on church websites and dealing with negative social media.

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Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.

A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.

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(The above title is from the print version–KSH).

My 8-year-old son has used Facebook just once. “Call me, Uncle Marc,” he wrote to my brother from my husband’s account. When he didn’t get an instantaneous response–Uncle Marc was at an Allman Brothers concert–he was not terribly impressed by the site that has nearly 700 million people under its spell.

So I am not among the many parents who freaked out when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his desire to upend the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires websites that collect user information to get parental permission via credit-card verification, for example, for anyone under the age of 13. “That will be a fight we take on at some point. My philosophy is that for education, you need to start at a really, really young age,” said the baby-faced Facebook founder.

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When Pooja Nath was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India, she felt isolated. She was one of the few women on campus. While her male classmates collaborated on problem sets, Ms. Nath toiled in the computer lab alone.

“Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,” she said. “But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.”

The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation of her start-up in Silicon Valley, Piazza….

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Google is trying once again to challenge Facebook’s domination of the social networking business. Its main social networking site “Orkut” is very popular in Brazil, but in the rest of the world, Google trails Facebook.

But the company has a new attempt to catch up.

The new social network is called Google Plus, and you’re not allowed to join it. At least, not yet.

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[Rowan] Williams outlined several challenges churches will encounter this century and urged them to use new means of communication and social media to spread the gospel more effectively.

“There is virtually nowhere you can go in the world where you won’t see a mobile telephone. The church needs to learn how use these new means of communications more effectively for the sake of the gospel. If we have social media, they can also be media for communion,” he said.

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Oh, Facebook, here we go again.

The social media giant is facing a new wave of concerns over privacy protection after launching its latest feature, which allows users to identify their friends automatically in photos without their permission.

The photo tagging tool, called Tag Suggestions, was put into place in December, but it was listed as unavailable until recently.

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Some time after the dotcom boom turned into a spectacular bust in 2000, bumper stickers began appearing in Silicon Valley imploring: “Please God, just one more bubble.” That wish has now been granted. Compared with the rest of America, Silicon Valley feels like a boomtown. Corporate chefs are in demand again, office rents are soaring and the pay being offered to talented folk in fashionable fields like data science is reaching Hollywood levels. And no wonder, given the prices now being put on web companies.

Facebook and Twitter are not listed, but secondary-market trades value them at some $76 billion (more than Boeing or Ford) and $7.7 billion respectively. This week LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, said it hopes to be valued at up to $3.3 billion in an initial public offering (IPO). The next day Microsoft announced its purchase of Skype, an internet calling and video service, for a frothy-looking $8.5 billion””ten times its sales last year and 400 times its operating income. And those are all big-brand companies with customers around the world. Prices look even more excessive for fledgling firms in the private market (Color, a photo-sharing social network, was recently said to be worth $100m, even though it has an untested service) or for anything involving China. There has been a stampede for shares in Renren, hailed as “China’s Facebook”, and other Chinese web giants listed on American exchanges.

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[The running online commentary]…instead of being a distraction ”” an electronic version of note-passing ”” the chatter echoed and fed into the main discourse, said Mrs. [Erin] Olson, who monitored the stream and tried to absorb it into the lesson. She and others say social media, once kept outside the school door, can entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing.

“When we have class discussions, I don’t really feel the need to speak up or anything,” said one of her students, Justin Lansink, 17. “When you type something down, it’s a lot easier to say what I feel.”

With Twitter and other microblogging platforms, teachers from elementary schools to universities are setting up what is known as a “backchannel” in their classes. The real-time digital streams allow students to comment, pose questions (answered either by one another or the teacher) and shed inhibitions about voicing opinions. Perhaps most importantly, if they are texting on-task, they are less likely to be texting about something else.

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At an age when his parents won’t let him go to the mall alone and in an era when he would never open up to a stranger, [Scott] Fitzsimones, who lives in Phoenix, already has a growing dossier accumulating on the Web. And while Congress has passed laws to protect the youngest of Internet users from sharing much information about themselves, once those children become teens, the same privacy rules no longer apply.

“It’s the Wild West for teens when it comes to privacy online,” said Kathryn Montgomery, a privacy advocate and communications professor at American University.

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Read the tweets here–fascinating.

A Pakistani computer programmer, startled by helicopters, took to Twitter to complain about the noise Sunday — but inadvertently gave a play-by-play of the high-stakes capture of the world’s most-wanted man.

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China will implement a new regulation to further control the online industry after a dispute between two Chinese Internet giants, Tencent and Qihoo 360, caused harm to their users, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said Wednesday.

Zhang Feng, director of the ministry’s Department of Communications Development, made the announcement at a press conference concerning China’s first-quarter industrial operations.

“We have finishing soliciting opinions for the new regulation and will publish it soon,” Zhang said.

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Hundreds of bloggers have already made enquires about attending a special meeting being arranged by the Pontifical Councils for Culture and Social Communications on May 2nd, just after the beatification of Pope John Paul II. Officials say the meeting was proposed to establish a dialogue between the Church and the new media of blogging.

“If we look today where culture is strongly formed and shaped, it’s the blogosphere. Bloggers have an enormous influence, ties an important community, its an important category, so its right that there to be a meeting of bloggers within the Church in order for the Church to take account of this reality, to dialogue with it, to listen to it, to listen to it, to be aware of it,” says Dr. Richard Rouse, an official at the Pontifical Council for Culture.

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