First published: Joint Church Press: Methodist Recorder, Baptist Times, Church Times, Church of England Newspaper, 14 September 2000
LOCAL CHURCHES ONLINE
Now that we are in the 21st century something that I would have hoped to have seen by now is for each local church to have its own website with at the very least service times and contact details. Government and education initiatives are leading to increased internet participation of schools at local levels, whereas churches still seem to lack the resources or courage to go online at anything more than a national institutional level.
In order to ascertain the extent of church information at a local level I visited the main sites of the leading Christian denominations. Apart from the Methodist Church, already mentioned, the others varied in the ease with which local church information was available. All informed the visitor of the organisational structure of the relevant church but some made it easier than others to access local sites, where available. Work still needs to be done in this area, perhaps by encouraging the availability of expertise at a local level rather than waiting for national initiatives to filter down to rural churches.
LINKS TO MAIN DENOMINATION WEB SITES
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/location for a list of churches and where available, websites, by diocese
http://www.tasc.ac.uk/cc/ appears to be the official Catholic website
http://alapadre.net/chunking.html for a list of approximately 30 or so local Catholic Church websites
http://www.baptist.org.uk/
FREE AND FAST ACCESS
Free and fast access has been the Holy Grail for UK internet users, still awaiting the inexpensive and culture changing access that our American cousins have. Whilst UK subscription free access is all but universal after the advent of Freeserve, nearly all the recent models of call free access have collapsed in shame. The most amusing was the Alta Vista scheme which had to confess to being unable to provide the service when national media launched an 'Alta Vista user manhunt' - there just were no users! Other providers were equally unable to provide completely free access as local call charges and BT restrictions meant that ISPs' footing the bill was uneconomical and unrealistic. In the meantime, the old adage that 'you get what you pay for' continues to ring true and paid for services such as AOL continue to attract hundreds of thousands of users.
GOOD DESIGN
It is estimated that always-on, fast (more than 10 times current modem speeds) cable or ADSL internet connections will take up to ten years to change the way we view web content. Flash movies, streaming video, audio clips, software downloads, still take an age to view, so good web design needs to be content and navigation driven. What we mean by this is that it is not the cover that counts, however attractive, but what lies within. Good accessible web pages need to combine easy to find up to date information with attractive but fast and non-distracting multimedia design.
WORLD WIDE WEB
A family friend remarked just this week that one could hardly call the web 'world wide' when the world's majority still can't access it. Perhaps it ought to be called 'first world web' he joked, half seriously. Global online statistics suggest 360 million users, half of whom stem from English speaking nations such as the US, Australia, Canada and Britain. Another quarter of this figure represents Europe and Spanish or Portuguese speaking South America. Of the remaining millions figures for Asia are masked by Japan and Australasia, as is the continent of Africa, for which South Africa accounts for three-quarters of all African users. Nevertheless my recent travels in Jordan, Sinai and southern Spain, found Internet cafes a plenty, especially just outside the rose red city of Petra in Jordan where we found better internet facilities than medical ones, unfortunately, it was the latter we were in need of.
WOMEN ON THE WEB
More women in the US now use the web than men, indeed the majority of US 'adult' sites on the web are now run by women. Take-up amongst teenagers is also strongest amongst girls whose usage is growing at 2-3 times the rate of teenage boys. In the UK 20% of women and 33% of men regularly access the Web.
UK GROWTH
By the end of 2001 half of all UK adults will have access to the web and its in excess of 2 billion pages. However, according to the Which? Online 2000 survey 15 million British adults believe the Net to be irrelevant and are not planning to ever go online.
WHY USE IT?
The major reasons for the use of the internet amongst young people and businesses alike continues to be email communication and information research. The perception that 60% of all web traffic is 'adult' content related may only imply that a minority of users download a lot of unwholesome material. Purchasing goods such as CDs, books and videos online continues to account for a large proportion of the UK e-commerce expenditure which more than doubles each year. Over 6 million people in the UK now access financial information online and a third of these purchase financial services over the Web. It seems that the recent highly public Credit Card security flaws in big name institutions such as Woolworths, Barclays and PowerGen, has not overly deterred UK shoppers, after all, you are still more likely to be robbed in the high street or by the waiter taking a carbon copy of your restaurant meal bill. The Web was designed to spread communication and information but for small to medium enterprises to see it as worthwhile the still small percentage of Internet users who spend online needs to increase. To counter consumer fears many sites such as www.Jungle.com now allow you to order online but put a cheque in the post.
BOOKS ONLINE
In The Mighty Micro, 1979, Dr Christopher Evans predicted that in the 1980s "the book as we know it…will begin a slow but steady slide into oblivion" as it would have been replaced by electronic storage. More than 20 years later Microsoft and others are still saying the same, but the book just will not lay down and die. Certainly, it is being read in new forms with online and CDRom media encyclopaedias, as well as the latest e-book reader software and its variants available for Palm, Psion, PCs and Pocket PCs. Some authors are even releasing their latest works, chapter by chapter, on the Net. In 1998 an e-book was nominated for the Booker Prize. In excess of 10,000 books are already available for free download from the web sites such as www.gutenberg.net or www.bibliomania.com. The aesthetics of electronic books may offend those who like the smell and feel of dusty antiquarian tomes but being a bibliophile myself I have literally thousands of both and use electronic media for fast indexing and searching, cutting and pasting into other publications, and to avoid over stressing those well loved volumes that are just falling apart due to age or are out of print. The demise of the book as we know it can hardly be true given the leading popularity of www.Amazon.co.uk for purchasing books over the web and book search sites such as biblion.co.uk and The Bookfinder-General (www.nwnet.co.uk/BFG) finding rare volumes for you. The largest collection of second hand Christian books is also available online at www.clique.co.uk/pendleburys/.
The Harry Potter book craze and concern also exists online. A quarter of American states have attempted to ban it but children of all ages are devouring it. UK churches are either protesting against it, or offering their premises for filming or performing the latest 'Harry Potter Hogwarts liturgy'. It is not for us to answer the debate here but the Net is both a useful and sometimes misleading place to find answers. A ministerial colleague recently received an email and web page attachment concerning the J.K. Rowling books asking him to forward it and his concern to others. The problem was that the criticism was not soundly based, whilst Rowling's books are no Middle Earth or Narnian Christian allegory they do promote good over evil, she herself confesses to believe in God and says that if you are worried by the books just don't read them. Whilst researching the aforementioned forwarded web page with the headline "Harry Potter books spark rise in Satanism among Children" I noticed its origin in the web page address at the foot of the page: http://theonion.com which the recipient did not realise was a spoof newspaper and though it reported extracts of an interview in the Times with Rowling I was able to check the Times back issues database online and confirm that it was spurious.
Following other Harry Potter links online also led me to www.landoverbaptist.org's news item news1199/potter.html about children being driven to insanity by Potter books. Again, though, it was the small print that caught my eye, right at the end of the article of a supposedly real American Baptist Church web site were the words "This Parody is Copyright…". Nevertheless, valid informative sites do exist if you wish to research the Potter phenomenon - please contact me for a list or check out the links from this article online (harrypotter.htm).
HEALTH AND SAFETY
Medical issues still account for a large proportion of Internet searches. Recently, an NHS trust manager was given months to live but using his daughter's computer and the Internet he was able to track down a US surgeon who successfully operated on a supposedly inoperable life-threatening cancer. The Times quoted him as saying "The Internet saved my life". Safety fears continue to abound on both sides of the Atlantic with youngsters meeting strangers in Internet chat rooms and sometimes arranging subsequent meetings. In the US over 300 people went missing in 1999 as a result of Internet liaisons. Safety protocols are available within Internet browsers if rightly configured, otherwise off the shelf software products such as NetNanny or CyberSitter will do the trick. This is another reason for parents to understand about the Internet and to know as much as their children know. Various Cyberangels groups exist online to guard against pornographic and paedophile risks and cult information sites such as www.xenu.net/cic or www.reachouttrust.org are readily available. An enterprising teenager has also set up a site for victims of bullying and received over 150,000 visits in its first month online.
A FINAL WORD
Sir John Drummond has said recently that "the Internet is not culture" but it is part of our culture and is spreading culture by making information, history, education and faith, amongst other things, available to a discerning and ever increasing audience.
Article by Jonathan Went (BMSoftware, NetResearcher.co.uk)
jonathan@bmsoftware.com
Jonathan Went advises on and supplies Christian software, acts as a Net researcher and journalist, an IT consultant and web designer, and runs a correspondence Biblical Hebrew made easy course. He can be contacted by email (jonathan@bmsoftware.com) or by phone on 01603 667393.
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