Long distance telephone service used to be a thing. When AT&T was split from Bell Systems (sorry about the ancient history from my childhood) federal regulators sought to bring competition to the long distance marketplace. AT&T, US Sprint, MCI and others advertised heavily to woo customers to choose them as their long distance carrier. It used to be that the longer the distance a call covered the higher the rate was. I myself may have been given a stern talking to for running up a huge phone bill, over $150, while talking to a girl over Christmas break while in college.

Today the world is a smaller place. First the advent of cell phones made “long distance” a thing of the past. Cell phones began to replace traditional landline phones once the technology went all digital. The devices themselves and more importantly the cell phone towers required less power and far less bandwidth than broadcasting the old analog signals. As high speed internet began replacing the limitations of dial-up, internet connectivity put the world at our fingertips. Today you can listen to your hometown radio station, get news and weather updates, enter a Zoom chat or Facetime friends and family no matter where they are. Distance is no longer a barrier to instant, high quality audio and video communications.

The Christian Index, the Georgia Baptist newspaper, recently published an article about their state newspaper being read in 187 countries. Here is a link; they offer quite a few stats and analytics. So far in the month of January The Master’s Table has been read from 49 different nations. It’s no surprise that most readers are in the US but the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia come in 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively. I mentioned Jimmy Humphrey on Saturday and his podcast about online and live-stream church services. While Unity Baptist does not broadcast a live stream, my sermon audio is usually available later the same day and is often downloaded by more listeners than we have in attendance. I can remember when church pastors and other preachers paid for time on the local AM radio stations. 15 minutes goes by quick and only a big church would pay for a 30 minute or hour long broadcast. Today anyone anywhere can live stream all the time for basically nothing. Sometimes you get what you pay for but I’m just saying it’s possible. There are enough quality live-streams and podcasts that no one person could consume them all. And there are also still preachers on the radio and guys like Charles Stanley on television.

Radio and television time used to be for those with deep pockets. Newspapers circulation was limited to a city or region. The Christian Index ended their print publication a few years ago and is now exclusively online. Distance is no longer a limitation to reaching an audience. There are pros and cons to everything, though. For instance there are 37 million YouTube channels but only 4.4 million of them have 1,000 subscribers or more. You can reach a global audience, but so can everybody else. The average consumer has so many voices vying for attention, from subscription movie streaming services, YouTube channels, Facebook videos, hundreds of cable tv channels and live feeds offering everything from sports, to movies and tv shows to internet “influencers” that create and respond to social trends.There are so many voices. Chose carefully which ones you will listen to. What some identify as information overload is really filter failure.