It’s Monday morning and time for an easy to start to the week. Check out a lovely bit of media for you viewing pleasure…

I wonder if McDonald’s realise how spiritual this ad actually is. I love it. I find myself being drawn in to emphasise with the young guy. It is quite an ad for an American company. For McDonald’s to be drawn into the hot topic is quite a statement.

I truly believe that this whole ad campaign has a massive effect on the way people will view the homosexual debate. Will it become publicly cool to be gay. Will ‘the boys’ stop the gay playground mocking? I do wonder if the church is going to be challenged to shape up and analyse the phrase ‘all are welcome’.

I was reading over at Mashable a great article by Brian Solis the author Engage. He was giving 21 rules for Social Media Engagement. I spent sometime this morning reflecting on them. Me and my friend Huw Tyler over at ShareCreative have been considering and discussing Social Media and the pros and cons of it for a while now. Mainly because we feel the church has a massive opportunity to engage creatively in a medium that is spreading content like wild fire throughout the world (remind you of anything).

Social Media has become seen by organizations as a rich channel for them to connect with their markets. As I ready this article ’21 Rules for Social Media Engagement’ by Brian Solis I was struck by a few things.

1. Social media engagement is the ‘in’ thing to do be doing at the moment. Churches and Christian organizations are flocking to Twitter and Facebook in there droves, to engage better with there people.

2. Brian points a few key things that Church could consider before it engages with this medium. Firstly he says its ‘the intentions that motivate engagement’, if we motivated to engage just because everyone else is then social media becomes pointless and we won’t grasp the rich value that this engagement can have. Secondly he says ‘It’s a simple investment in visibility or presence’, this has been the issue in the church for way too long. We have not invested in getting out there and being involved in the great life that takes place in our communities. Social media doesn’t give complete this part of our calling it

only enbables to have a platform to being a deeper engagment with the culture and communities we all seek to bring the good news too.

more thoughts to come…

I saw this today on Mashable and loved it. Wonder if we truly realize what impact Facebook has had on communication and on the way we do community.

Stories are as old as humankind. Cave paintings going back 25,000 years or more dramatically portray the story of the great Paleolithic hunts undertaken by our earliest ancestors. Glyphs recovered from Mayan pyramids and tombs of the Pharaohs tell a symbolic story of how the view of our place in the cosmos evolved over time. Throughout Celtic Europe, the bards held a place of the highest esteem for their disciplined talent of maintaining and passing on the stories of tribes and clans. The scriptures of our great religions take the form of parable and story, instructing and inspiring us to a higher good. Each of these is an example of how the very foundation of our human existence—the essence of who we are—is reliant on story.

We can safely surmise that without story, there could be no culture and without culture, our species would surely not have survived. How would we have learned to hunt, to gather, to plant, to create the first cities, if it were not for stories? Many so-called ‘primitive’ myths are often no more than stories that teach when to plant and when to harvest. In pre-literate times—the 99.99% of our human existence before the advent of the written word—stories were the primary means of transmitting everyday, practical knowledge from one generation to another. They are how we’ve accumulated and shared our “intellectual capital” for hundreds of generations.

Stories are a priceless culture-shaping tool. They help us to understand how we “fit in” to the larger social order. They are the principal means for transmitting what’s really important to the tribe, the clan, and the community. From stories we learn the very relative notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, what is expected and how we must behave. And we learn—vicariously—the consequences of failure. Fairy Tales are really morality stories that graphically demonstrate to children the consequences of their behavior.

At their best, stories are incredibly persuasive because they ‘speak to us’ at a very meaningful, emotional, and often-unconscious level. When a story makes the hair on the back of our necks tingle it is because that particular story has touched a very deep nerve in our personal or collective psyches.

The ‘storied’ brands and companies know this and they harness the energy of story to their competitive advantage. Nike isn’t just selling sports gear, anymore than Harley-Davidson is just selling motorcycles. Instead they are selling a story, a compelling story that touches us at a very deep and meaningful—and often unconscious—level. It is a story that makes us want to actively participate, to behave in ways that enable us to integrate it into our personal life stories. It is no coincidence that the most popular tattoos in the US feature, in some way, Harley Davidson.

Take Nike as another example. This is not merley a story about athletic gear. Imagine the scene as the 7237th finisher crosses the line at the Boston Marathon. Although spent and exhausted, she smiles weakly at the powerful emotions surrounding her accomplishment. In her own way she knows she is every bit as good as the first place finisher. Nike has not just provided her with shoes; it has facilitated her participation in an age-old story. This is a story of hard work and focused effort, perseverance in the face of pain and the ever-present possibility of defeat. Ultimately it is a story of triumph, however that is personally defined. This is a powerful story and Nike has harnessed it to its obvious competitive advantage.

Stories influence every facet of our lives. They are as ubiquitous as the air we breathe…and as important. Their power is there to harness, if we know the way.

This video from Ok Go is a great example of my faith journey. It’s messy and one thing after another leads to connect a lot of dots. I really like this as an example of my journey of faith. Hope you all enjoy it and get as much out of it as I do.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar — a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan’s work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Marshall McLuhan in my mind is nothing short of a genius. A prophet and prodigal. This is taken from a brilliant short book called the Medium is the Massage.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal,political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.