"In my opinion, 2009 marks the year when the emerging church suddenly and decisively ceased to be a radical and controversial movement in global Christianity."
Andrew Jones
Andrew posts some reflections on the international history of the emerging church conversation.
"Why keep up a blog for friends and family? FaceBook is much simpler. Twitter is even faster. Blogs are content-heavy. The other social media sites keep it simple and light. With the turn to other social media, the number of active blogs is on the decline."
Trevin Wax offers some great thoughts on the current state of the blogosphere.
I have noticed this myself.
From 2001 until 2008 I blogged very frequently, often daily. But I've noticed that since I've started using Facebook, my blog posting has declined significantly.
This shifting in the social networking universe makes some sense. While blogging is very easy, starting and maintaining a Facebook presence is even easier. This means that over 350 million people are today on Facebook (more people than reside in the United States and every other country except for India and China) and, as a result, many bloggers are spending more time on Facebook where there are more people who read their comments.
A downside of this, however, is that it's tending toward more superficiality of expression. The driving force of this is the 420 character limit of Facebook status updates (despite the fact that Facebook does offer the Notes option which has no such limit).
The relative potential superficiality of online expression - on blogs or Facebook - is also a function of the declining cost of information. When publishing is expensive, published expression is more carefully considered, created, reviewed, and edited. When publishing is very inexpensive, patient creation and approval is no longer necessary and quality can decline. The brevity of expression can exacerbate this feature of online expression.
Thankfully, online expression is only potentially relative and not necessarily so. Facebook is very popular now. Over time, I believe different social networking venues will feature different levels of considered expression and the desired qualitative level of expression will be more easily found.
