More on Virtual Community - and Top Blogs

At the risk of pointing you too often towards the Out of Ur site (though it is regarded now as one of the top Christian blogs), I just want to follow up on the last post in which Shane Hipps talked about virtual communities not being 'real' communities.
Scot McKnight has written a brief but sensible response to this - and, as always, the comments that follow the post are well worth a look.

In regard to the 'top' blogs, Matt and Madeleine Flanagan have given a very up-to-date list of the top New Zealand Christian blogs. The Flanagans give the reasons behind the rankings, based on the stats from two other sites: Half Done and Tumeke, neither of which are familiar to me. In fact, only three of those listed below are ones I've heard of previously. Plainly I'm not moving in the right blog circles!

1. NZ Conservative
2. Something Should Go Here, Maybe Later
3. The Briefing Room
4. MandM
5. Kiwi Polemicist
6. Say Hello to my Little Friend
7. Put up Thy Sword
8. Samuel Dennis
9. Contra Celsum
10. Star Studded Super Step

It would be interesting to spend an afternoon checking out these blogs to see what they've got to say. And for those with absolutely nothing else to do, check out Kent Schaffer's 60 Top Christian Blogs from around the world.

Shane Hipps

The video clip below is part of an interview Out of Ur did recently with Shane Hipps. I don't know much about Hipps except that he's the author of a book due to be released this year called, Flickering Pixels - how technology shapes your faith, and that somewhere along the line he realized he was spending his life working diligently to perpetuate consumer culture and promote values that ran counter to his most deeply held beliefs.
In this brief clip (about 4 minutes) he points out two things.
1: that you can't really have 'virtual' community. The virtual negates what community is about. He lists four points relating to community:

a. communities have shared history
b. they have a sense of permanence, which gives history
c. they have proximity: people get together with each other
d. they have a shared imagination of the future.

For Hipps, only the last of these four has a possibility in virtual terms: it gains future fast, but loses the other three in the process.

2: the second life site is, for Hipps, a disembodiment of the Gospel - as were radio and tele-evangelism before it.



I suspect you won't entirely agree with Hipps, and four minutes isn't long for him to make his case, but he's worth considering, all the same.