The Age of Engagement

One of the greatest changes that the internet enables is for people in different places to have a relationship with one another through the online, digital world. People can now find others who are interested in just about any specific topic, including a particular book or author, and form communities online around that interest. This is old news -- discussion groups are, with email, among the oldest uses of the internet (see, e.g., Google Groups, which incarnates Usenet).

What is a more recent development, though, is the use of online social services -- most notably Facebook -- to maintain one's online social life.

This climate means every author, every book, and every type of Bible, can be the focus for an online community. Sadly, publishers have been a bit slow on the uptake -- they have not recognized the opportunity or participated in helping to make this a reality.

Even though I'm not particularly a fan of the Huffington Post, I did appreciate and agree with some of the comments along these lines that Arianna Huffington made at Tools of Change in February, in her keynote address (insight in digital publishing knows no political boundaries). Here are the relevant graphs:

"Books don't end with the printed page. Books are conversation starters. That's really what we can do online better than anywhere else."

"The more we resist the change, the more we try to go back to some golden age that does not exist, the more we are missing the golden age that does exist right now, and that's the golden age of engagement. For the first time, news consumers and book readers don't just want to read, they want to engage with what they are reading. They want to talk back. They want to continue the conversation with friends on Facebook or let others know on Twitter what they're reading."

"Self-expression is the new entertainment.... People want to express themselves, to be part of the times we are living in -- whether it's politics or culture or entertainment, people want to heard, and now they can be heard.... And we need to celebrate that moment."

How can we "celebrate that moment" of opportunity for self-expression and social engagement online? Here are a few ideas of how we can help people express themselves and engage with others online while using digital Bibles:

• Personal Note-Taking. People ought to be able to take notes on what they are reading, and they ought to be able to share these notes with others as they see fit.
• Discussion Groups, both public and private. There ought to be a variety of discussion groups available, and people should be able to form their own private discussion groups and invite their friends.
• Integration with popular social-sharing sites (Facebook and others) -- sharing links and content, posting thoughts and reflections.
• Content feeds and widgets that people can use to post their own notes or content to other sites.

What do you think? How else can digital Bibles help people to express themselves and engage in relationships with others? Are there pitfalls that we have not discussed?