Wired News reported recently on the amount of digital media in the world. Surprise surprise, it's alot. To quote Wired:
The report, assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content cascading through our world today. The researchers assumed that an average digital file gets replicated three times.
Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes - 161 exabytes - of digital information last year.
That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.
The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totaled the globe's information production at 5 exabytes in 2003. One of the sponsors of that report, data-storage company EMC Corp., commissioned IDC's new look.
That's a lot of data. For what it's worth, they are estimate 1 zetabyte (1,000 exabytes) by 2010. This is yet another statistic ushering in the simple fact that the world is changing around us. Businesses are changing. The digital age is causing whole industries to be reevaluated as the web is moving to 2.0, yet where are churches today? How are we growing, changing, evolving in our methods online?
ChurchRelevance.com offered "two key responsibilities for ministering in an age such as this":
1) Keep doing what God wants you to do.
2) Just because God’s wisdom and guidance is superior, does not mean you should stop learning.
My question is simple. How are we using our exabytes? our gigabytes? are we effective in our ministry? are we wasting our time? In this age of Web 2.0 has the church made the turn as well? or are we still floundering around in a brochure-driven identity?
Only time will tell. However, the web has revolutionized whole industries. What has it really done to the church? What does the Internet as a mission field look like?
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