Bursting the second .COM bubble

(and how it will affect Christian mission)

Executive Summary

The first .COM bubble was an explosion of commercial activity, which burst at roughly the turn of the century. It had the effect of reducing the number of moneymaking web sites to the useful number we have today. My thesis is that the second .COM bubble is the communication bubble, which is bursting now and reducing the quantity of communication down to community based interaction within the next few years.

The Internet enhanced the ‘flat earth’ globalization where we can communicate with anyone else connected on the planet. The bursting of the second .COM bubble is a ‘balkanization’ of the globalization, such that we communicate less globally and more within small communities to whom we relate at a deeper level.

Over the past few years we have seen a reduction in the quantity of communication (letters, emails etc) in response to broadcasting the Gospel. As a result of this balkanization, over the next couple of years, I believe we will see this reduce significantly further still. I believe people will relate more closely to their friends, however geographically distant they are, and interact less with acquaintances or organisations except on a functional level. People will relate within a ‘virtual village’ rather than a ‘virtual city’.

Since much of our mission approach is based upon interaction with people who have found us (through a web site, radio or TV station) this change must affect our mission strategy. We will need to change to providing tools to followers of Jesus who are in existing networks of non-believers and who will use those tools to aid them in sharing the Gospel. The key to this is ‘existing networks’ and not new networks.

Background information

Global relationships

When I first used email it was prior to the widespread use of the Internet was through an interconnected web of bulletin boards that exchanged email nightly across the UK and wider throughout the world. Each bulletin board system relayed the email till it reached its destination.

In 1993 we lived in the USA for two years and communicated with our friends back in the UK through early Internet connections (to JANET in the UK). We also developed new friends wider afield: My wife got to know another person called Susan in Chicago and when we visited them it was uncanny to pick up a virtual relationship and see how deep it actually was. These worldwide virtual relationships have resulted in positive and negative marriages and abuses in the real world.

The bulletin board system meant that a response to an email could take some days to arrive. With the early Internet it was faster, and I remember coming home to hear that my wife had managed half a dozen emails back and forth with a friend in Aston University that morning. When the Internet changed from ‘store and forward’ email to direct delivery, emails delivered in seconds. Spam reduction systems now slow down some email delivery, but most people still expect it to be instant.

The ability to relate to people worldwide through email was new and exciting. People would sign up to email lists and participate in discussions with people they had never met all over the globe.

That has changed and is changing: About 8 years ago my wife started a website about home-education. Approximately 3-4 people would sign up every month to a newsletter that told them when changes had occurred on the site. The list grew to a few hundred people. At that stage there were about 100 visitors per month to the site. She now gets upwards of 1000 visitors per month, but the signups to the newsletter have all but totally dried up.

Although that is only one example it demonstrates the changing pattern of communication. The Internet allowed you to send an email to anyone who had an email address, wherever they lived so long as you knew their email address. The early bulletin boards were small clusters of people and emailing within the community worked, but communicating with someone outside that network could be difficult.

My youngest son now says he only uses email to ‘oldies’ like his mum and dad; he uses Facebook to his younger friends. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others do not inter-operate; you cannot send a message from a Facebook account to a MySpace account within Facebook using some global addressing scheme. To do so you need a MySpace account. Within Facebook, people interact with their friends, you are prompted for friends-of-friends, but what Facebook and other social networking sites have done is to ‘balkanize’ the Internet.

The term balkanization is used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a group into smaller parts. What I believe we are seeing is a global balkanization of the Internet. The earth is still flat (see ‘The Earth is Flat’ by Thomas L Friedman) but being torn up into numerous small pieces. Google had observed the subdivision of the Internet into separate enclaves and in September 2008 Financial Times referred to this in an article on about Google’s (then) new browser aims.

Mega and micro – communication and communities

One of the things I address in my book (see ‘In the image… of a creative God’) in the chapter on Communication Theory was about the change from large event evangelism to small group evangelism. When radio started the word was broadcasting – broadly communicating a message to a vast number of people. In the UK this started with national broadcasts; everyone hearing the same news, the same message.

Then came local radio and specialist radio stations. This we tended to call ‘narrowcasting’. The Internet allowed narrowcasting to flourish, with thousands and thousands of stations (there are currently nearly 44,000 stations listed on shoutcast.com) each with a separate audience. Missions are competing in this arena to be heard.

The big stations are still big. I listen to the BBC World Service almost daily and their audience is in the order of 190 million adults per week. Unless there is a change in the content of the BBC World Service I will continue to listen.

But although I like to be one of 190 million listening to the radio, I prefer to be one of a dozen or so people in my Christian fellowship. Those people I want to relate to closely; to be involved in each other’s lives.

Worldwide we have seen the growth of the Mega-church. The church where thousands of people come together each week to sing songs and listen to a talk, what is sometimes called corporate worship. In the UK churches rarely grow more than a couple of hundred people and there are few mega-churches. Many fellowships of Christians worldwide are the same size as my preference, under 20 people.

What we are seeing is a separation into those who like ‘mega’ and those who like ‘micro’. Neither is right or wrong. However, my perception is the trend is more toward the micro than the mega, toward the balkanization rather than the globalization.

In terms of evangelism, in my book I looked at the Billy Graham Crusades as an example of mega-evangelism. I then contrasted it with the change to micro-evangelism based upon small groups, ‘Good News down your Street’ and more recently ‘Alpha’.

Christian media embraced the need for interactivity, with various follow-up programmes. The Global Response Management System is one such structure. It is based upon the concept of people responding to a broadcast (mega-evangelism). The Relationship Development System is a competitor, emphasizing the developing relationship between the person responding and a believer. Though a better concept, it still assumes that the responder is responding to some form of broadcast (mega-evangelism).

The difference between the ‘Billy Graham Crusades’ and ‘Good News down your Street’ was not in the interaction, nor in the size of the event but in the method by which people linked up. In the Billy Graham Crusades people responded to a broadcast, in the small group programme people were linked through existing relationships. Of course, people still often went to a ‘Crusade’ because of an existing relationship.

The way forward

If I am right about the bursting of the second .COM bubble then we need to be looking to these existing relationships, rather than an enhanced interaction of new relationships. This may mean that followers of Jesus need to develop new relationships in order that they can then lead people to Christ, but it will only be when they have earned the right to share through the new relationship.

There is a desire within Christian mission to be good stewards of the resources we are trusted with. This usually drives a good deal of effort into statistics based on the number of people hearing the message, responding to the message and taking some step based upon the message. Even organisations like Alpha encourage you to register. This helps them know how many people are running courses and how many people are therefore hearing the message and (based upon sample figures) how many people responded favourably to the Gospel.

If the move is away from a centralized message centric communication towards a small group relationship based method then the resulting statistics are likely to become meaningless. People quote vast numbers for the growth in the house church movement in China. In reality they are guesses. We can carry on trying to work out statistics as a way of ensuring good stewardship, but my perception is that could well stifle the growth of the Kingdom. Nobody was watching and measuring the Chinese house church and worrying about how effective it was.

The phrase ‘viral distribution’ doesn’t mean a computer virus spread around the Internet, but distribution of a media item in such a way that the ‘audience’ distributes it themselves without central organization. I heard about an example of this where a mission group made two copies of a video, which they gave to a couple of people. Within 48 hours almost everyone within that community had copies. It wasn’t organized, it wasn’t monitored, it just happened.

This will require a greater degree of creativity and a higher level of hitting the needs or desires of the target audience than we currently uphold. It will also require a change to more narrative rather than statistical evaluation of what we do. This will be a problem for many funding agencies and thus the funding of many mission agencies.