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Good Morning Another English football league season comes to an end this weekend. And as the final play-off places and relegation issues are settled a debate has been rumbling ON in the background about whether the 72 league clubs will have to continue to produce a match day programme from next season. The English Football League will vote on the issue next month. But this debate has opened up the almost daily question of what mass digitalisation, and the consequences of it, are doing to us as human persons? My own doctoral research focussed on the sociological and theological ramifications for the audience of an evolving digital world. It revealed a complicated cocktail of contradictions. On the one hand we want it online/now/updated/interactive. On the other, some like the feel of a book, an actual newspaper, or good old magazine – something we can hold and say – this is my mine! Key words in many of the editorials published in the past week about match day programmes speak of belonging, family identity, passion and commitment. Many fans, including my own dad, have spoken about the programme being part of the match day experience – in the same way that some theatregoers still purchase a programme to identify with a production they experience at first hand. Paul Matz, editor of the wonderfully titled Programme Monthly and Football Collectable said this week: “Programmes are about yesterday, today and tomorrow. To abandon them would be a dereliction of duty”. When the author of the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews uses an almost identical phrase “yesterday, today and forever” he is urging his readers to stick together, to focus on the truth as a shared actual experience and not to be distracted by false teachings or weird and wonderful fallacies which can easily distract them. In the same way, never a day goes by without the internet providing another challenge to ensure our sense of what it means to be human [not to mention our privacy] is protected and our sense of believing and belonging and sharing with others isn’t compromised by technology. To that extent, the debate about the survival of the match day programme is really a backdrop to a much bigger question about what it means to celebrate what we have in common; it is about guarding the memory of shared treasured experiences in communion with others in the face of rampant transitory technological change.