Technology spreads the word

Being the geek that I am, I'm always thinking in terms of technology and how that impacts current events. On Sunday night right after President Hinckley, word spread very quickly around the world. Most people in Utah knew within a hour of him passing away and the story was on national new sites within 2 hours. I have heard from many people that Wikipedia was updated before most people knew. All the traffic to the KSL website (the local NBC station owned by the Church) actually caused major delays, and most of my friends said that they had problems getting to the site. Before I knew, he had passed away, I was trying to access some websites at BYU and had noticed that it was much slower than it is normally on Sunday nights. My wife, said that she had trouble placing phone calls on her cell phone as she tried to call family and friends living outside Utah. The Internet was a buzz with the word. The following quote is from lds.org

The passing of President Hinckley was discussed extensively on the “blogosphere.” The day following his death, a new blog post was published about him every couple of minutes. According to Blogpulse, a service that tracks trends in blogs, President Gordon B. Hinckley was the third most mentioned person in the blogosphere on Monday, 28 January.

Now, that is a real testament of how technology can be used to spread the word. The amazing thing is that all this technology we use today did not exist or was not in wide spread use when President Hinckley was called as Prophet. Without this technology, the Church would not be able to spread the gospel to the whole world as effectively as we can today. I firmly believe that the Lord has blessed us with much of this technology, for his divine designs and he is kind enough to let us play with it for other things. If you take a look at the Church's increase use of technology during President Hinckley's lifetime, some amazing things have been developed and used take the gospel to the world.

Although I haven't done the research, I willing to bet that President Hinckley's funeral, will be watched by more people around the world than any other person's funeral. It is going to be broadcast via the Church's satellite system, and over the Internet in over 50 different languages. I'm sure that the audience will be measured in millions.