By now, the phrase “There’s an app for that” likely just makes your head hurt, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Case in point: the recent blog contretemps over the confession-guidance app spurred Elizabeth Drescher to offer this bit:
… careful, socially-sensitive design cannot be guaranteed to save the doctrinal day in a world defined much more by improvisation than by obedience. That is, regardless of how developers intend for an application to be used, the very nature of the culture shaped by digital social media allows that users will come up with new, creative, and, in the case of an app like Confession, wholly heterodox ways of using it. In the end, developers never really own the applications they create. They are not selling passive use. They are sharing access to new ways of engaging longstanding traditions that can be further adapted through wider use. These apps, then, are malleable cultural resources rather than merely functional tools.
Which makes you wonder: in what “wholly heterodox” ways are these otherwise benign religious apps waiting to be put to use?