What I got for Christmas was a technology reality check … (and cool stuff)

Happy Christmas from the Charalambous family.

We spent Christmas in Anderson, SC this year.

We got to have a 60-something degree day. Yay!

But we didn’t get to be with our families, far, far, away.

Mine is in London. Hers is in Houma, La. (Yes, that Houma, the one that got a direct hit from Hurricane Gustav.)

What a great opportunity to try out videoconferencing, i thought.

It turned out to be an even better opportunity to get a reality check.

Our easy-to-use web social tools really aren’t that easy or intuitive.

My wife’s family couldn’t get a web cam working. It kept insisting on downloading MSN-something or other. And then Tokbox wouldn’t recognize it. FAIL.

And my family? Well, my sister gets it, but she still doesn’t have a web cam. And everyone else? They still think email is cool.

So we speaker-phoned. 🙂

Methinks it’s a good idea to dial back the techno-euphoria. We’ve still got a whole generation to go of software and hardware development and social media penetration before we can really claim the convergence of online and offline is reality for everyone.

When it comes to church web strategies, it’s worth bearing in mind that a good chunk of our audiences probably consist not of technophiles of choice, but of necessity.

Note to self: Keep. Things. Simple. Stupid.