Once upon a time, people planned to be in front of the TV (or before that, the radio) at a certain day and time to catch their favorite program. If you wanted to watch something again, you had to get lucky with reruns, or buy it on tape (yes, tape). Later, cable TV made reruns a little easier to find, and digital media made your favorite shows a little easier to buy. But then came streaming, and with it, on demand viewing. At the same time (and I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or not) we have seen the virtual demise of the very concept of owning copyrighted material. (I still buy CDs when I want to buy music, so that I control how I can listen, but that's a topic for another day.)

We still had live streams, but throw the pandemic into the mix and it seems that even that is going away. For one thing, people have gotten used to being able to watch a video or listen to a podcast whenever they want to. We still have live content, but I've noticed that it's a percentage game. Only a very small percentage of a show's (or person's) following will tune in for a live episode on any given day. Those with huge audiences will get enough people to make it worthwhile because a small percentage of a huge audience will be enough. But those with modest audiences will never get enough people to tune in all together.

Now don't worry - I'm not considering discontinuing the live streams of The Journey here in the Original Church community. I plan to continue with The Journey live every week (except this June) indefinitely. Having said that, it's getting harder and harder to find a time for other live streams when people can commit to being there. I recently had an experience trying to set up a zoom meeting for the upcoming Rome trip. I needed to get 13 people together at the same time, and I had a window of about a month and a half to get it in. Try as I might, and over several attempts using a scheduling website, I could not find a single time on any day of the week when all 13 people could meet together. It's no one's fault, and in this case it's not that big of a deal, since I'm going to get the same information to them by email. But I wonder why it seems like it's now impossible (when it didn't used to be) to get people to commit to a specific day and time?

What do you think? Are people working more hours than they used to? Part of the problem in this particular case is that weeknights were ruled out pretty quickly because among the 13 people, either they worked late and could not get home in time for an early evening meeting, or they work so early in the morning, they could not stay up late enough for a later evening meeting. Are people cramming more into their weekends than they used to? Or are people simply afraid to promise because they don't know what's going to come up?

I would love to hear theories about the directions we are going as a culture - not because it will change or fix anything, but because I'm fascinated with the idea that we are killing ourselves with stress, for "fear of missing out" (FOMO) when in fact what we are missing out on is something way more valuable - that is, peace and quiet, and down time, and relaxation, etc. So I hope you will chime in with thoughts about that.

At the end of the day, though, I think that the whole concept of the live stream itself will eventually die out. I will keep doing The Journey live as long as people keep showing up for it. But I don't really know what is the future of other live conversations I've tried to start here (The Pub, The Piazza), etc. We'll see, and I'm open to whatever works, but I think the future of our conversations may be more in the realm of posted videos and podcasts that people can watch or listen to whenever they want to. That's fine, but you lose the interaction of an audience, in which people can ask questions in the moment. And that's a real loss, as far as I'm concerned - again, I'm not making any decisions about this right now, but in the meantime, I do hope we can really make this community feed an ongoing conversation, so we can get that interaction. As you know, I have no interest in "comments" - what I hope for is real conversation.

So let me know what you think - and if you are someone who has never posted here yet - I would love to hear from you!