No. I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth, but things have been a bit too hectic over the last few months to do much in the way of blogging.

Anyway, I read a post from Tony at Digital Evangelism Issues that reminded me of some ideas that had been stirring for a while.

The post was about the interactive music video The Wilderness Downtown from Arcade Fire’s song We Used to Wait. They have integrated some personalised elements to the music video through Google Streetview  and Google Earth and a response box. I think it is a very creative way to encourage interaction from their audience. But don’t take my word for it, go and check it out for yourself (You need to use Google Chrome for the best experience.) Or watch this clip …

I can foresee that there will many more such media clips over the next few years. I think there are two key ideas that could see this sort of thing become the norm in how we view media.

The first is integrated media. Actually we already have integrated media to a degree. A music video is a media form where video an music is integrated. With devices like the iPad and Kindle becoming popular, we can expect to see that books and magazines become less of a print-only medium, but begin to integrate more of other media, especially audio and video. When you start to think about it, you can see the attraction of a vook, where you can click on a video or audio element in a book on your iPad, as opposed to the traditional magazine or book communicating to you only through text, or perhaps pictures as well in some cases.

As we look to communicate the gospel we need to think how we can communicate our gospel stories using integrated media – text, image, video, music, etc to create a message that truly engages our audience.

And there is one element that can do more to engage the audience than any other:

Interactivity

As a child of the 80s I remember well the Fighting Fantasy and Pick-Your-Path books where you got to make choices and turn to the page which represented your choice. And some of the first computer games were interactive fiction, and computer games have developed down this path over the last few decades to the immersive games of World of Warcraft and so on.

But with Web 2.0 being all about allowing people to interact with the content they see on the internet, interactivity is going to be more and more important in any communication we have, and especially as we communicate the gospel. The Wilderness Downtown allows the users to write a message to themselves as a child, and to post it on the website as a postcard. Imagine an integrated media experience, with video, image, text, music, and also being interactive. What would it look like? What would a gospel themed media experience like this look like?