Still battling a cold, and this has given me time to rest and reflect a bit towards MMM and the kinds of thinking that happen here. When we started, it was about seeing all those streams of connections between mobile and non-mobile use. Then, there’s devices and services that started allowing for more play within this space.

We moved to a common understanding of mobile devices, and understanding tendencies and behaviors about them. We looked at the implications of mobile earlier this year, and in a presentation next week, I get to bring forth another aspect of mobility that I think is important to consider – context.

When I looked at this new image-based search technology that IBM is developing calledSAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval), I started to ask the question of how do we interpret context when it comes to mobiles. There’s context in devices, context in locations, and even context in the text that morphs and transforms how we then dialog about the connections we have to our faith. We see something happen, and our mobiles are there as a recorder to the event. We want to engage people or environments different, and our mobiles provide a context to the best type of communicative event.

This isn’t to say that mobiles are the only elements of context, but as a media/technology, it plays a role that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I wonder how future generations will look back on this mobile phenomena, and then ask how the Body was aware of, and then responded to the implications and challenges of mobile. And at the same time, I wonder what in these times will inspire others to reach forward in innovative spaces, creating a new context for faith to come alive and reach into the lives of others.

More: Really good stuff coming out of the Mobilize conference. This post on the future of the mobile web points to some of what I have talked about in this post and others. Of course, as the Body, we go further than just the technology and get to the point of making sure that the Gospel stays at the front of all that we say and do with mobile/tech.