Am writing this before Thanksgiving. Before folks have finished making plans for how to rotate family members for a place in line for Black Friday deals. And before folks have decided to think about how much time to dedicate to Monday’s lunch to parouse Amazon and other web stores for Cyber-Monday deals. I’m writing this specifically after entertaining two streams of conversation via Twitter which indirectly point to a statement about tech and how we live with it, that I’m not sure is all that healthy.

The first parts of this thought come from the convo had with Jason Caston. During a recent trip of his, he remarked on Twitter how he had LTE coverage for more than 80% of the trip. LTE is the next evolution of cellular (if we can be simple about it) networks. Essentially, its a re-done way of making airwaves more faster, more secure, and more efficient for carrying voice and data transmissions. Right now, Verizon Wireless is the leading mobile company deploying this tech -and mainly because their older CDMA network technologies do not scale profitably to newer devices and greater usage.

Jason’s point towards his liking of LTE is that it is a faster connection. It allows him to essentially connect and consume information faster. Being the introspective type, his comments got me down a line of thinking and tweeting if speedy connections are always needy connections? Or, if you will, just because we can connect faster, are we connecting deeper, fuller, or more healthy than we had been before. That was a point that was certainly much further out there than where Jason and I had been speaking, so I had to just leave it. But, I had the thought that I’d at least get it up here and process some more.

Then there was another convo happening with Donny. He’d asked if there would be any post about the Microsoft Surface here. I’d thought about it, and even after seeing a demo of the Surface RT at The Geek Fest, I figured that at some point that there would be some place in these bits and bytes for some words about it. But, also I had that fuller/deeper thought come in there as well. You see, the Surface is a fairly new product, and aside from the applications which are still coming out at a decent clip for it, there’s this question about talking about it here because it offers some relevant conversation piece here. Part of me (and Donny) would argue that there is a place for it. However, its not so different a product than the tablets that have come before it – even those from MS’s partners with previous versions of Windows before – that its got a place in the conversation of what happens at this intersection of faith and mobile technology.

Is the Surface relevant to those faith-based orgs who are still trying to get a handle on the tablet-oriented tech needs of their orgs? Yes. Is the Surface tablet an antidote to the BYOD-tainted usage of the iPad and Google Nexus tablets? Probably, and could merit some discussion towards those companies looking at it from that end (not as many on the faith-based side as you would think). Is the user experience of a touch-enabled Windows platform so different that it will change, literally shift the paradigm, of how folks who have used Logos/Olive Tree/eSword/etc. now use Bible software? Nope (as a matter of fact, that’s been my main beef with this genre of software for sometime). So what then does the Surface bring to the table in terms of a voice for those things faith and tech that are relevant enough to write on? I don’t know.

Deeper and fuller. That’s something that I keep getting back to when it comes to talking about this technology shift. Is it a shift because it has more colors, comes in a less expensive package, or because its open licensed? Or, is it a shift because of the way that it allows for us to go a bit deeper with each other than in times past?

Is tech the voice voice we use, or are our voices enabled because of what tech allows?