Over the past several months I’ve worked Nextdoor into my loop of social media sites I participate in.

If you’re not familiar with Nextdoor, here’s how they describe themselves:

Nextdoor is the private social network for you, your neighbors and your community. It’s the easiest way for you and your neighbors to talk online and make all of your lives better in the real world. And it’s free.

Understand this. Nextdoor is still in its infancy. There’s a ton of posts about lost animals and people selling junk and people complaining about stuff.

But if you stick around, if you invest a little, if you squint… you can start to see why I think Nextdoor has the potential to disrupt the dominance of Facebook, particularly among adults.

There’s something culturally interesting that could bring much needed change that’s worth watching here…

Here’s 3 Reasons

1. Hyper Local Wins Over Hyper-Segmented – Facebook is built around connecting a global world with your now globalized friendships. What I love about Facebook is that I can stay connected with people I’ve known for a long time but aren’t close to my by proximity. Facebook also allows me to gather people around the world around things I care about. But this hyper-segmentation misses something very important– place. Facebook drives communities apart by encouraging people to talk to only who they want to and ignoring the rest. Nextdoor turns that on it’s head, sometimes forcing you to deal with the crazy cat lady on your block instead of complaining about her on Facebook to your college dorm mates. Just like in real life, proximity ultimately wins out because it impacts you on a daily basis whether you chose it or not. You can’t ignore the cat lady forever, right? You think you can… but ultimately you have to face her. Facebook has no mechanism for this. Sure, you could create a closed group for your neighborhood but you’d always have leaking because people might belong to their neighborhood, their old neighborhood, on and on. There’s power in hyperlocal that Facebook has engineered you away from.
2. Normalizing the Weirdos Among Us – Nextdoor is in it’s infancy. So there are very annoying things… in some ways it’s become a joke in our house because we’ll see something, say a shopping cart on our block, and we’ll say “I give that a couple hours before someone reports in on Nextdoor.” Certainly, Nextdoor is giving a voice to the, um, more suspicious among us. But the long-term beauty of this is that it’s solving Facebook’s biggest problem among adults… the loud mouth, over-opinionated adults mouthing off without ever having to face the people they are popping off to. With Nextdoor you don’t have that luxury. If you mouth off about your conspiracy theories or post lunacy about Donald Trump or tell people they shouldn’t buy a purebred puppy because there are adoptable dogs at the shelter… there’s a VERY HIGH likelihood you’ll see that person at the grocery store or walk your dog by their house. And that “social filter” is much more powerful than Facebook’s mechanical filter of the “unfollow” button. I believe that as Nextdoor grows in popularity it’s going to normalize the weirdos. While hyper-segmentation has made people passionate about whatever sub-sub-sub-culture they have joined up with… to your neighbors you’re just the guy who doesn’t cut his grass or doesn’t recycle or needs to paint his shutters. When you know you might bump into someone in real life, you’re going to normalize that weirdness. At least that’s my theory!
3. Governmental Partnerships – Here’s the real secret to why I think Nextdoor will get their foot in the door among adults. They are forming partnerships, most likely paid partnerships, with local government agencies to put government officials in direct contact with the people they are serving. Here in the San Diego area we see posts from a bunch of agencies and in the City of La Mesa the city is actually advertising their involvement. That direct connection to people we need access to is good for everyone, it’s making it so that “everyone” really needs to be on Nextdoor to keep up with what’s going on.

My Prediction? Facebook will either acquire Nextdoor or will launch a neighborhood feature in the next 12 months.

Have you tried Nextdoor? (If not, sign up here) Is it big in your area? What kinds of things are you seeing successful? And what kinds of things aren’t working, at all? Let me know in the comments.

A couple weeks back I went to the Association of Youth Ministry Educators annual conference, affectionately known as AYME.

I was there as an exhibitor for the Cartel. But since the topic of this years conference was Technology and Transformation I got to attend as a learner, as well. (How awesome that they had a conference built around my expertise!) So I had the opportunity to hear from several brilliant minds around the general topics of social media, youth ministry, and how faith formation is being impacted by a social-media-fueled adolescent experience.

I took pages and pages of notes. I bought books on top of books that will take me months to get through. And at the end of it I walked away with two prevailing thoughts that I’ll be exploring over the next several months here on the blog and in work that I’ll hopefully publish somewhere else. (Both of which I’ll not be mentioning here.)

What Does Incarnational Ministry Mean with Networked Publics?

At the end of the day youth workers just need to know what to do. I’m often asked by adults who minister to teenagers about various apps, about ministry best practices, and about ways to market to teenagers effectively.

So let’s cut to the chase: Should youth workers being hanging out with teenagers online the way they used to hang out with teenagers at football games? 

• Thought One: At the root of most of my [Sonlife informed] youth ministry training is the incarnation of Christ. John 1 provides a model, just as Jesus came into the world as good news in his neighborhood, so should I enter into the lives of teenagers as a youth worker.  So that’s my background and bias…
• Thought Two: As Danah Boyd points out in her book, It’s Complicated [the premier sociological work on social media and adolescence right now] teenagers have largely had traditional face-to-face publics eliminated and have largely moved to what Boyd calls, Networked Publics.
• Thoughts Three: Youth ministry, as a profession, is in a place where accountability and professionalism in the relationship with teenagers is important. If we, as a tribe, do not address ways to do this– ultimately to keep teenagers safer and hold adults accountable for the relationships they have with the minors in their ministry– we will continue to see our profession pushed to the margins.

With those three prevailing thoughts in my mind here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t think youth workers should be engaging with teenagers on social in a regular one-on-one basis without accountability, documentation, policies, and training.

In other words, a casual connection or a logistical “Hey, are you coming to the retreat?” is one thing. But I think youth workers would be better off engaging with teenagers in real life, even going back to old-school-incarnational-ministry standards like contact work on the local campus or limiting their relational time to officially sanctioned youth ministry meetings and events.

See, to read Boyd’s work about teenagers networked publics and think to yourself… “If teenagers are there, I need to be there” is a misinterpretation of Boyd’s work. She’s saying that they’ve resorted to networked publics because they can’t find anywhere else that’s adult-free. And not having any place to just be a teenager without adults prying eyes is a big developmental thing… So if you suddenly start butting in to that one place in their entire life where they can talk freely, without the prying eyes of a parent or adult… all you’re doing is forcing them to find another place where they “really talk” without you. It’s a developmental need.

Never mind the fact that– quite frankly, teenagers think adults talking to them or sending them gifs or snaps online is creepy.

So, in my very limited time this morning, this is why I would argue that social media is not a place for incarnation youth ministry. But it is, in many cases, an excellent place for youth ministry communication.

Keep your contacts with teenagers online logistical or promotional. Leave conversations and relationship building for face-to-face.