Advice

I was listening to a podcast earlier this week and it was talking about the long history of the advice columns. I don't remember all the details, but they started sometime in the 1600's and the first one immediately gained competition and they grew in subscriptions and spread geographically. They have been relatively popular, although, changing in topics, pretty much from their creation.

If you think about it, these initially filled a kind of group communication role before there was conference calls or the Internet. They let you post anonymously and receive feedback from "experts". You could see other people's problems and concerns in a way that just wasn't available in proper society.

As I listened to this podcast, I could help but think about how much this role if filled by the Internet. You can google nearly every topic, every problem. Any issue you have, you can probably find a support group for. Want to see people complain about their problems, open up Facebook. In seconds you can find dozens of problems and dozens of different solutions for each of those problems. In a certain light, social networks are like a giant advice column.

From here my mind started to consider the problems with this. The problems with having the amount of information available to us. The first is this, because there are so many writers and groups on any given topic, it is hard to have a sense of community. See the advantage of reading a Detroit paper about a Detroit person, who has an issue, is I have a geographical connection to them. I know the places and things around them. I feel connected. If the only thing connecting us is a problem, that connection goes away when the problem does. The second thing is this, I can find a wide variety of advice, much of it conflicting, on any topic. This all comes from people I don't know, who may have a particular bent on something I am unaware of. So, while I can find advice on anything, who do I trust? I am not even connected enough to any of them to ask.

This brought me to the thought, which I want to pass by you today. It seems we living in a time when we can read the words our friends and build a community out of them. I can and do, play games and discuss topics of the day with people from Florida and Texas and Virginia and New Mexico. While geographically separate, we are one community in a way which wasn't possible in past generations. Yet, the most common social medium we are connected to, Facebook, seems to be completely devoid of real practical, particularly Biblical, advice. I want to change that.

Now, for full disclosure, I am not a Bible Scholar or a preacher. I would be coming from the long line of advise givers who claim expertise, but that expertise is debatable.

This would not be a daily thing, which would replace this blog, it would be a periodic thing as questions came in.

I would repost the e-mails sent to me, but I would try to keep the author private. I would try to back up all of my advice with scripture, but not give "churchy" answers. I want to avoid theological terms and just give back the common sense I think God's word gives us.

So, what do you think? Bad idea? Too prone to gossip? Too hard to protect identities? Or, good idea? You think it would be something which would be useful and interesting? Please help me figure this out.