Recording/posting talks in Sacrament meeting

Having been a Ward Mission Leader, I know how hard it was to convince members to invite friends to hear them speak in church. Beyond that, the success rate of attendance of those who actually accepted was very small. With the church direction of getting involved in social media, it seems like the next step in this would be to record each talk in Sacrament meeting and allow members to link to talks they likes that week or ones in which they participated. I see other local churches posting their entire services online. Not that the LDS church needs to follow others, but if we want to 'demystify' the LDS worship service, why not make it available online? I understand that might take a big technology step for each stake, but if it makes members more apt to share their testimonies online, seems like a good natural fit. Thoughts?

If someone wants to record their talk and put it on-line on their own page, I don't have a problem with that.

But for the church/ward to do that with everyone's talk - I have a number of issues with that. You might want to review the allowed usage of the Internet found in Handbook 2: 21.1.22. Simply put, the members can have web pages, but the neither ward nor stake cannot.

The church is very sensitive about publishing things 'to the world'. Only the brethren have the keys to speak to the world for the church. Everything else goes though correlation. With most web sites, there's no way to limit the talks to just those who live in the ward boundaries so it would be difficult to limit the talk to the proper area.

Personally, I'd suggest that anything done be limited to recording the talks and turning over each talk to the person that gave it to distribute as they wish. To do otherwise is likely to cause hard feelings. I know I wouldn't be happy to find any talk I gave to be circulating around.

It would also be good to review Handbook 2, 21.2.10.

Seems like we have a mixed tech message within the church--flood the internet with your testimony, but don't record anything in a meetinghouse and don't publish anything online if it occurs in the chapel. I guess I'm back to posting Mormon Messages during holidays again. *sigh*
I do like the idea of recording all talks and letting the speakers have access to them to do with what they please. I don't see that option coming anytime soon based on the Handbook references above.

My thoughts? Okay.

There are things we don't often consider but the church sure does. For example, laws vary from state to state about recording people without their knowledge. Can you ensure that everyone who will be on the recording is fully aware of their participation? Also, certain music is protected by copyright. Can you ensure that "performance rights" are available for every piece of music that might be in your recording?

I recall an interview on the "Conversations" program on the Mormon Channel radio station. Elder Dallin H. Oaks talked about speaking at Stake Conference meetings (presumably the evening meeting for adults). He would tell the group that he didn't want them to make recordings or otherwise publish their notes about what he was going to say. He told them that if they wanted to publicize his remarks he would give one talk and if they agreed not to publicize his remarks he would give a different talk. He was usually confident that the audience was willing to keep the remarks to themselves and he was, therefor, free to give the talk he wanted to give.

If an Apostle can have these sorts of concerns, when he wants to address a specific group and not have it broadcast to the whole world, then we might want to consider that members of a ward feel the same way when they're asked to speak. Or maybe ward members, who aren't experienced in public speaking, wouldn't consider the consequences of their talk being broadcast until it was too late, whereas an Apostle would have a better idea of what he was doing.

So, for now, the church has encouraged us to use social media on a personal level. The church has provided the means for members to have a profile at Mormon.org and, perhaps, we should exhaust those resources before looking for another.

Of course, for an apostle there are other reasons you wouldn't want remarks recorded or distributed – anything he says could be taken out of context and framed as a controversial statement of doctrine, and there wouldn't be enough witnesses to verify if the apostle really said that, or what the context was.