Trends

Trends Journal: July 5, 2009

By Justin Long ⋅ July 5, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools have been a factor in election campaigns around the world. Now it’s Iran’s turn: Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the main opponent of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are went online to organize for the elections in Iran. (Wired.com) Unfortunately this new trend seems to have very little impact overall in Iran’s fate, aside from to make it very public.

The debate on Twitter over the role of mainstream media in reporting the Iranian election did, however, bring one conundrum to light. Crowdsourcing a report of an event, as Twitter did with the Iranian elections, is fairly easy provided there is good Internet coverage and people who are familiar with social networking tools. Crowdsourcing an analysis of why an event occurred or what it means or what impact it will have is another order of magnitude of difficulty. In the future it may very well be that social networking tools will more easily report events, but journalists and reporters will have a more significant role in analyzing events and placing them in context. The takeaway for missions is this: no missions portal, magazine, or e-zine can hope to keep up with the crowd or even a Google News index of all of the journals and Twitter blasts that are reporting news—but any mission e-zine can do a great job of taking an event and analyzing it in the context of missions, transformation, and the lives of the unreached. Many of these events in Iran and Afghanistan are directly impacting unreached peoples, but so far there seems to be very little from mainstream mission journals about the interactions, for example, of Sunni vs. Shi’a, or the lives of the Hazara or Pashtun or Tajiks in the midst of the drug war and Taliban conflicts in Afghanistan. There’s a need for this, and it would bring a lot of Google search hits your way too!

A new survey with the Pew Forum on Religion shows that almost half of Americans have a negative opinion about Muslim countries. Perhaps one role for missions media in the evangelical world, particularly, is to bring to life the reality of life in a Muslim country.

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