Today we wit down with John Dehlin, host of Mormon Stories and Pioneer who blazed the trail into historical transparency regarding Mormon History and Social Dysfuntion using the internet as the vehicle. His podcast pioneered a new phase in Mormonism where Scholars talked openly and and the Church could be held accountable for its unhealthiness.
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Living in Provo, I apostatized in 2001. Back then there was no one to talk to. No FB. No social media. Nothing.
I did talk to my “believing” colleagues at work only to be shocked how many of them secretly doubted.
Several years goes by and Mormon Stories appears on the scene. Dehlin’s podcast was a lifeline. As the years go by I find that JD’s assertions line up quite closely to mine which provided much needed validation.
There are a couple of dozen Mormon Stories that in my mind ended up aging quite well and being epic.
I believe this year that JD’s emphasis of “informed consent” is incredibly important. In two words it no only directs a bright light to the Q15’s moral blind spot, but is also summarizes the value of a good portion of Dehlin’s work.
I’m so grateful for Dehlin’s work and I’m hoping that he’ll be able to continue to navigate the tricky waters of such a specialized podcast involving such a powerful organization.
BTW, so glad both RFM and Bill Reel were willing to conduct interviews with Mormon Stories, sharing their experiences and perspective with all of us.
Yes, well said!
Responding to the discussion about “where did blogs go?” I think there’s been a few movements in tech that have guided user expectations toward converging on podcasts.
The one angle I’ve spent the most time thinking about is the dominance of social media sites and how that choked out out other technologies to the point that many users don’t know how to use them anymore.As you know, back in the good ol’ days of the internet, you had websites and that was basically it. If you wanted to keep up with a site, you had basically two options: go visit it every day (by using a bookmark, a tool nobody talks about anymore), or subscribe to it via a feed reader (another tool nobody talks about anymore). Feeds took a huge hit after Google ceased support for Google Reader.
Then along came the social media sites with their centralization and catered feeds. For many people, they didn’t start using the internet very much UNTIL social media became dominant, and so there was a huge audience in these walled institutions that could not be reached otherwise. Content creators began focusing more attention on their social campaigns and building presences there. The website, the host, the RSS feed, and the bookmark were no longer important things. All that mattered was the platform, something which the content creator nor the audience could control.
At this point in history, it’s obvious what the downsides of this have been, so I won’t go over them here (watch “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix). The podcast, however, is a leftover of the old internet, from before the reaping of attention in pursuit of irrational demand. It was able to survive thanks to the Apple Podcasts system, a very simple thing that creates a central catalogue that makes it easy to look up and subscribe to podcasts. A podcast app is really just a glorified feed reader that can look up feeds on the Apple catalogue.I believe that if something similar existed for blogs, the blogging world could get kickstarted again. In fact, as I write this, I’m feeling like that might not be a bad project to work on.