A recent report from the Associate Press, says that people are dropping cable in greater numbers in the last quarter and most are not replacing it with a similar service somewhere else. The reason why this is happening is up for debate. Some, ie the cable companies, are saying it is the slow economy that is causing people to cut back their expenses. Plausible. Others are saying that Hulu and Netflix, among others, are finally making a significant impact on people's viewing habits and they are simply removing a cable provider because they are not needed anymore.
I think the second explanation is likely to happen sooner or later, so if it's happening now it would be all that surprising. If this is what's happening this will mark another significant movement in what television, and programming, will look like in the future. Network TV hasn't really adjusted yet to the reality of cable, and now this could be a significant move in a new direction.
I personally would have to say that all of television has not really made the accommodations to today's possibilities or lifestyles. How many people still watch the shows they want to see at the time they are originally broadcast? There are certainly a lot, but with a few exceptions, most people I know are watching things they have DVRed (is that a word?) or are watching on demand. The whole idea of set programming is a thing of the past, but certainly not all networks, or shows, are grasping this reality.
I remember going to a lecture in 1992 by someone whose name I wish I could recall because I would love to hear what he has to say now, but his company talked with Fortune 500 companies to tell them what technologies would be available in the future. At that time he said the technology existed so that anyone anywhere in the world could download any movie ever made any time they wanted. Remember this was 1992! Personal satellite dishes of the time where the size of small compact cars. And while 18 years later we still haven't fully yet realized that claim, our technological capabilities and expectations are way pas that. The world is changing rapidly, and people either get on board or they get left behind.
When I got my first computer, we were using 5.25" floppy disks (although I also had a tape drive if you can remember those). The disk held 160K, and then came double-sided which held 360K. Then I moved up to a 3.5 "floppy" which held 1.44 MB. Amazing storage capacity! Then I was into Syquest disks, which could get 80-120 MB depending on the disk. They also set you back several hundred dollars a piece. Then a zip disk, starting at 100 MB (that's 100 "floppies"), then a jaz at 1 gig (100 zips, or 1000 floppies). These were also very expensive, but I remember being amazed at home much they could hold.
I now have a very small 2 GB stick in my cell phone that I paid a little more than $10 for, and I back everything up on an external drive that is 1 terabyte that I paid $90 for. This is all in less than 25 years. If anyone is still operating on a system that uses a 3.5 floppy, let alone a 5.25" floppy they are obsolete. They simply cannot do anything in the modern world with that machine or technology.
Now the question is, how many of our churches are still operating on those outdated systems? Sadly for some this is something that they are not doing figuratively because they are literally still using these machines. And we wonder why so many people consider the church to be out of touch with what is going on in their lives. We have programming that is set to take place at only one time, on one day, like old television broadcasting, and if you miss it, well that's just too bad, you'll have to catch it in reruns. Except that we don't even have reruns, so if you miss it you can never catch up.
That is simply not the world we live in anymore. So the next question is how do we as the church respond? If people are "cutting the cord" to their cable companies (or satellite, or landline phones, etc.) because they don't need them anymore, where does the church stand in the midst of this change? It seems pretty obvious to me that most younger people (including my generation) are also cutting the cord to the church, if they ever even had a cord, because they don't think they need the church, and the church does little to prove that people need it.
We expect that people will come to us because that is the way it has always worked, or at least in the short-term memory of the church that's the way its always worked. But that is not our reality anymore. We are still trying to sell a computer system using 5.25" disks, or a television set using rabbit ears, or a rotary phone, to generations that are downloading videos, books and television shows on their iPhone.
So what do we do?
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