On the Digital Generation

Chapter 1: A Primer

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a recent global missions conference and left with tons of reflections relating to the digital community and the younger generation. Much of this processing comes from my previous experiences in my personal life:

• Local church communities I’ve been a part of have always seen digital community as non-essential, and perhaps even secondary to “real life” friendships.

• My parents didn’t quite understand the idea of making friends online, having come from a generation with no internet and heavy emphasis on familial bonding.

Unfortunately for them, I was born in the 90’s, where online communities like AIM and Neopets were starting to take form, and as someone who was enthralled by what the Internet had to offer, I openly welcomed these communities.

Naturally, this made engaging with my real-life communities a bit more difficult. While I was able to overall get along with folks that preferred an unplugged life, there was a block in the friendships because while I did my best to understand the experiences and stories they’ve had in their lives (sports, friendship drama, vacations etc.), they did little to take the time to understand the formative digital experiences I’ve had. To me, this is the “gap” between digital communities and physical communities.

Why I care

My hope for the Lausanne conference was for the church to brainstorm ways on closing this gap. While we had quite a few folks passionate in this space, it still felt that interest in it was lukewarm at best, with folks coming at digital community with hemming and hawing. Some came at it with their preconceived notions of the community being “a dark place”. Others felt that it was overall unhealthy and that it shouldn’t be the future. Regardless of what they conclude, the overall vibe I got was that:

1. The digital community is fraught with problems, and if they only understood the importance of face-to-face meetings, then things would be a bit better.

2. The digital community is filled with lots of the unknown; the language is foreign and I’m worried what influences it could bring to my friends and/or relatives.

While I don’t completely disagree, I’m deeply frustrated by this for a multitude of reasons:

• As a human, it saddens me to see a growing animosity between generations. The rise of the internet lead to rapid globalization and information spread, so the generations of today are shaped by technology far more than ever before. The world of the Gen Z is far more different than the world of the Boomer, and such differences can cause drastic disagreements.

• The digital generation is less conducive to the gospel. As a Christian, it pains me to see that countless of souls could be lost for not hearing the good news through digital means. Digital community is a way for people from all over the world to connect; it would be a huge shame to waste the opportunity to connect individuals to Christ when we’re given such a powerful gift to do so.

• There was little heart to even learn about the digital community and why they operate, let alone empower the church to reach them.

Why I’m writing

If even the leaders at Lausanne were lukewarm about this group of folks, I realized that, as a member of this generation and community, I should not sit idle and instead should share my thoughts. I really hope that sometime during my lifetime, this gap would close and that church and the gospel would not just tolerate, but even embrace the digital world as a mission field and as a place to love. There is a lot of theory-crafting and strategy that I’ll go into later, but I wanted to start with something a bit more human. I wanted to first share about my experience as a younger millennial, growing up in a digital world, and how it has shaped me.

I want to start with this because I know that the church and the older generation experience a good amount of animosity against the digital community. My hope isn’t that the church would see the digital community as something evil to “save”, just as how the Western Christian imperialists did in the past. I’d love to see a world where the church begins to see the humanity that makes up these digital spaces and to have them and the older generation see these online souls as deeply human.

I want this because my experience online has shaped me greatly, and as paradoxical as it sounds, it is through the digital community that I’ve came in touch with my humanity. If you’re reading this and you harbor some of that animosity towards the digital community, my hope is that after hearing my story, your heart will soften for the online people just as my heart has been softened by them.

What to expect

This is Chapter 1 of a be a multi-part blog series discussing my thoughts on the digital community.

1. Chapter 2 will contain my story as sort of a case-study on how digital community can lead to experiencing humanity. These are split into two separate parts; Chapter 2a discusses my time with Maplestory, and Chapter 2b discusses my time with Starcraft.

2. Chapter 3 will discuss the digital divide and will postulate why this divide exists in the church and in our society.

3. Finally, Chapter 4 will discuss ways to help that gap close, and hope for a world where netizens and citizens alike can jointly build for the kingdom of God.

If you ever have any of your own thoughts and want to pick my brain about them, feel free to email me at johnzli@hey.com and I’d love to hear you out. The more dialogue related to digital spaces, the better!