Jesse Rice - The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community

THE CHURCH OF FACEBOOK

Published by David C Cook

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David C Cook U.K., Kingsway Communications

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All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes,

no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form

without written permission from the publisher.

The Web site addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a

resource to you. These Web sites are not intended in any way to be or imply an

endorsement on the part of David C Cook, nor do we vouch for their content.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, TODAYS NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 2001, 2005 by Biblica. Used by permission of Biblica. All rights reserved worldwide.

The author has added italics to Scripture quotations and quoted material for emphasis.

LCCN 2009932745

ISBN 978-1-4347-6534-5

eISBN 978-1-4347-0066-7

2009 Jesse Rice

The Team: Andrea Christian, Nicci Hubert, Amy

Kiechlin, Jaci Schneider, and Karen Athen

Cover Design: Rule 29

Cover Images: iStockphoto, royalty free

First Edition 2009

For Mom.

Contents

: Connection

: Revolution

: Dispensation

: Illumination

: Adaptation

: Regeneration

INTRODUCTION

Imagine that its a typically brisk but sunny day in London and, bundled up appropriately against the chill (and with your tiny digital camera in hand), youre touring around some of the many famous sites the city has to offer. Youve just passed through beautiful St. Pauls Cathedral and youre kicking yourself for not coming yesterday; admission is free on Sundays, after all, and youre on a tight budget. You step out of the massive domed neoclassical building onto the northern bank of the Thames River, opening up your map of central London as you do. Scanning it as the edges flap in the breeze, you notice that just across the Thames from St. Pauls is the Tate Modern Gallery. The Tate is home to some of the finest modern art in the world despite the fact that it looks like a giant industrial barn where one might milk several thousand cows. You decide it would be interesting to see what the gallery has to offer, and with the raucous sounds of a busy London Monday buzzing in your ears, you look up from your map and across to the other side of the river. And without taking another step, you realize exactly how youre going to get from here to there.

The Millennium Bridge opened in June 2000, and it is a work of the finest thought and craftsmanship. It was the first pedestrian footbridge to be constructed across the Thames in central London in more than a hundred years, and it cost just over twenty million pounds to build. The bridges architect, Sir Norman Foster, had been a fan of Flash Gordon comic books as a kid, and drew on some of his memories of Flash when first imagining the bridges design. Foster recalled that, when Flash needed to get around from place to place in order to save the world, he would hold out his hand and extend something that looked like a Jedis light saber to create a blade of light upon which he could cross over from one point to another. As you stow your map and start making your way across what has now officially become known as The Blade of Light, you begin to understand Fosters intention in creating much more than just a functional bridge. Youre also delighted to find there is no toll for crossing.

The bridge itself is highly unusual in its design, and one of the first things you observe midway across is the view. Your view of the Thames is almost completely unhindered by traditional suspension cables, the fruit of a two-hundred-person design and engineering team that labored in earnest for several years to realize Fosters vision. Rather than the support cables that hang down in a reversed arc that youd typically find on a suspension bridge (San Franciscos Golden Gate is a perfect example), the Millennium Bridges cables are tucked on the side and underneath, appearing as wings that fly along the length of the bridge. The entire steel structure is four meters wide (about twelve feet) and almost three hundred and thirty meters long (just over three football fields), making it the sleekest suspension bridge in the world. Unlike anything seen before, it was truly an engineering masterpiece.

Or so it seemed to everyone on the dawn of opening day.

June 10, 2000, marked the grand opening of the Millennium Bridge, and thousands of people gathered early to be among the first to travel across its span. The large team that had designed, built, tested, refined, and retested every last detail of the bridge beamed with pride. All of London seemed to hold its breath as the ribbon was ceremoniously cut, and the cheering throng stepped onto the bridge. A dozen news reporters, multiple film crews, and every last person with a tiny digital camera like yours captured what happened next. And what happened next was the very thing that immediately shut down the brand-new Millennium Bridge.

As the crowd advanced over the bridge, the combination of all the footsteps from pedestrians sent a distinct vibration throughout the structure. Each wholly random step from each entirely different individual produced a certain amount of energy that spread and began to synchronize across the entire span of the bridge. This synchronized pattern continued until the whole structure began to sway and bend from side to side, wobbling like the blade of an old metal saw. In order for the crowd to keep from toppling over onto one another and to continue forward movement across the bridge, each person had to begin to waddle unnaturally, taking wide steps out and to the right, then out and to the left, and so onwhat one participant later referred to as a skating gait. Very quickly the entire crowd was stepping in the same way at exactly the same time. Just like the vibrations in the bridge, the pedestrians also became synchronized. Still photos and video footage from the event convey what looked like an inebriated but unified group procession down a wedding aisle or, more precisely, a choreographed ice-skating show. Of course, this choreographed movement only exacerbated the problem, creating more wave-generating energy and compounding the swaying effect until the whole structure became totally unstable.

The media went wild, immediately dubbing the Millennium Bridge a flop. Some masterpiece of engineering, they jeered. It was like being on a boat, reported one shaken pedestrian. Another expressed shock that we all had to conform to the movement of the bridge. The design team, composed of some of the most brilliant engineering minds from around the world, was forced to admit it had never imagined the outcome that surprised everyone on opening day, despite endless testing and reworking. I was a little disappointed, said the lead engineer in typical understated British style. We had worked really hard to sort out all the details. The freshly minted pride of London was shut down for repairs almost as soon as it had opened for business. It would have remained a bulky hunk of steel uselessly spanning the Thames, but eighteen months and five million additional pounds later, the Millennium Bridge completed its retrofitting and reopened without so much as a wiggle.