Mobile in the Next 10yrs (The Churchy Version)

As many of you have probably seen from the MMM Twitter account (@mobileminmag), there's been some good noise in the mobile arena concerning a neat slideshow by Rudy de Waele at M-Trends called Mobile Trends 2020.

http://www.m-trends.org/2010/01/mobile-trends-2020.html

This is indeed some great stuff, and indeed meant to get our minds and hearts in place for at least having some direction towards mobile in the coming decade. Well, being that Mobile Ministry Magazine (MMM) is where I play, creating some foundational knowledge that the intersection of faith and mobile tech is the rule.

Here are the five mobile trends that I see with mobile in the Body (this is specific to faith-based movements) which should be on your radar, if you aren't already somewhere near these areas.

Mobile will be the primary avenue for telling the church's story over the next 10yrs
Mobile increases the church's need to have cross-functional knowledge of culture and context
Censorship and copyright will drive mobile sharing of religious texts to innovative solutions
Mobile will be vilified by a significant generation of traditionally-minded church and lay leaders
Education + genuine faith + mobile = education and community redefined (L. Amer India, & Africa)

My five are based on the understanding of mobile, and the morphing of our faith as its happened over time.

I'd definitely like to hear any trends that you see happening (like the diminishing of English as the language of the web, hint hint), and in course we can start discussing how VSN and our respective networks/connections can be better positioned towards these items.*

*Some items I'll not be able to cover in-depth as these are linked to some planning/changes happening to MMM this year (stay tuned for that too)

Tags: communication, community, engagement, mobile, mobility, story, trends, visual

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Clyde Taber on January 8, 2010 at 9:35pm

Great thinking Antoine! Thanks.

Permalink Reply by David Hackett on April 1, 2010 at 1:13pm

Antoine, I find your list of five mobile trends VERY compelling. Each of the five deserves a forum conversation of its own to flesh out implications, examples, best practices, etc.

An obvious trend I see is that commerce is doing the first heavy plowing of the mobile "field" - that is, the drive for profit and efficiency is prompting majority world use of the mobile, and we have abundant examples of non-faith-related mobile implementation.

Regarding #1: I too affirm this scenario.

#2: As an aspect (or even counter-aspect) of your Trend #2, the growing use globally of the mobile platform for various uses is obscuring differing cultures - to a degree. In other words, mobile is globalizing people, making them function more similarly.

#3: Evading blocks is something the Web and mobile platforms are particularly adept at.

#4: We can start now to recruit significant members of that traditionally-minded leadership bloc to have them affirm mobile. The key is showing them how it furthers even the most traditional approaches, much like Luis Palau using SMS to have people indicate crusade decisions from where they sit rather than come down to the floor and walk the sawdust trail.

#5: How might we get some truly high-quality open sourced educational materials/courses out into the mobile, maybe have a first class set of mobile-accessed Christian training made available for iPhone, Windows, Java, Symbian platforms?

And finally, as to your point on diminishing use of Eng as the language of the web, well, you can rest with that. Clearly (as can be seen at http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm) English is the language of only 38% of the Web (478 M of 1,256 M). FAR more Web activity happens in non-English.

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