Dan Tapscott’s book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” is mostly written to a business audience, but isn’t just for people in business. People in youth ministry need to know what he has to say too.
Like Thomas Friedman’s “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” which worked to explain globalization and how it would affect everyday life, Tapscott’s “Wikinomics” is all about how the several phenomena that make up Web 2.0 (the Web, but where everyone participates in creating the content, not just absorbing what’s out there) affect us.
Wikinomics is about “peering” or setting up huge teams of collaborators to solve problems, each one working on what he or she is particularly good at. It’s about “prosumers” (think your students on YouTube) who create and consume content. The authors talk about “ideagoras,” places where unfinished ideas and solutions looking for problems can meet and discover they apply to the same thing. And the people who work to make all this knowledge and cooperation possible are the “New Alexandrians” (named for the Great Library of Alexandria) who collect ideas and publish them in open forums so that one company or person doesn’t restrict access to them.
The concepts in here are critical to doing ministry in a time when our students expect to be able to make things, collaborate and get multiple opinions on their questions. To have a conversation with a student, after all, it’s not usually enough to only know one perspective– we need to be able to intelligently talk about the other ideas our students have heard.
Since our students are growing up in a place where everything can be shared (here’s one of mine with his famous backflip) they expect us to ask them to contribute to the ministry, and to their understanding of God, not just observe what we have. (I know that’s a very basic idea in ministry, but the level of participation students are going to expect in the next 2-5 years is going to be huge.)
The idea that we all help to create the meaning and value in our world is going to be a help and a challenge to youth ministers. A help, because the students who want to help run the place are going to have crazy-great skills to do it. A challenge, because we’re not in the business of saying “We create everything, and everything’s okay.” There are some lines in the Christian story that we can’t cross. But I have a feeling that the next generation of icon-makers and Bible scholars and evangelists and ministry leaders are going to be influenced (even if they don’t know the exact terms Tapscott uses for them) by the ideas in this book, and so we need to know what they are.
