From the Sita-pati Correspondence Files.
From September last year (09/2005):
One devotee that I wrote to about using cellphones to preach dismissed the idea, saying that he didn’t own a cellphone, and never would. I also don’t own a cellphone - I believe that history will cast cellphones in the same light as cigarettes. Currently cellphone manufacturers market heavily to pre-adolescent children, even though the government in the UK has warned that growing children should not be exposed to use of cellphones except in urgent situations.
….
Anyway, back to the original point I was trying to make: there is a tension between “simple living, high thinking” and the yukta-vairagya principle.Since people are using cellphones, we have to leverage this in our preaching. If people are walking around with them on them all the time and receiving information through them, we should try to provide some Krishna Conscious information. At the same time we have to be careful not to deviate too far from our core mission and get involved in an over endeavour.
From March last year (03/2005):
It is still early, but I believe that this is our ideal target for reaching people. Forget waiting for people to go to an Internet cafe to check their mail - we will deliver our content directly to their person.
In the future the devices will have bigger screens and we can deliver a nice flyer.
Something else that could be good would be to capitalize on the “Gauranga” campaign in Scotland. It has one of the highest “buzz factors” on the Net, amongst outsiders, of all our programs.
How about a “Gauranga ringtone”?
That’s just an idle speculation - right now we are not positioned to act on this. We don’t have the capability to project force onto this platform. In terms of developing our force projection capability, I think this is a good direction to keep in mind.
The main point I think is that we just need to be conscious that this appears to be the way things are headed, and to keep looking for opportunities to develop the skills / grab people with the skills / think of practical strategies to take advantage of it as we move into the future.
At the moment the publicity for Mission Impossible III involves modified bus shelters with an infrared transmitter that will download a ringtone and wallpaper to your cellphone for free.
I still firmly believe that beaming a Sunday Feast / Atma Yoga flyer into people’s cellphones is the way forward.
I’ll get a photo of the bus shelter so that you can check it out. I saw another ad for Absolut Vodka with Lenny Kravitz on it, and you plugged your earphones in to one of two headphone jacks on the bus shelter and got to listen to an exclusive track that he recorded for the campaign. Just about blew my ear drums out. There was no volume control.
All of our street book distributors at Gaura Yoga have cellphones. Not necessarily the most high-tech in the product-lines, but they fulfil their purpose. They fill their phone books up with interested contacts they meet on the street, and then text them when there is an occasion of their interest happening. Texting has proven (surprisingly) to be a very beneficial way of keeping in contact. Texting can be used to take ‘contact’ to ‘cultivate’. It’s easy, cheap (free on the wknds for vodafone to vodafone), immediate, and not too intruding. People are coming to the centre from receiving a text- what’s the harm, it’s simply ‘gettn wit th tmes’!
Every endeavour requires sense control, so we monitor that too. Like I’ve written before: Even devotees can get caught up swimming in the jungle of technological wizardry. There is no proviso in Krishna Consciousness to stay in the land of antiquity, but there is clause to only use the opulence of this world for the noble purpose of enriching our consciousness (yukta-vairagya). Utilizing these technological gifts demands a subtle intellect and vigilant watch.
So, we use the packaging that maya offers to present Krishna consciousness. We’re blogging, we’re telephoning (somewhat), we’re emailing, & we’re texting… however they want to receive Krishna, let us use it.