Ong and LambdaMoo

Sue Thomas has an interesting piece up on the web describing her attempt to write about her experiences with LambdaMoo. Among other things she notes that Walter Ong’s work helped her describe what she was observing. At one point she writes:

At trAce I often speak with people who live and work online about their perceptions of how the net has changed them and the worlds in which they move. In every conversation the transient nature of connectedness is taken so much as a given that there is hardly any need to define or describe it. Everybody knows what it is, how it feels, the energy of it, the occasional despair at its tricks and limitations. We talk about it using the common shorthand of the net - emoticons, acronyms, program code - because the language itself is the key to the concepts and experiences we are discussing. But the problem is that, despite no specific intention that this should happen, it has evolved into a secret cultural discourse which is unintelligible to the uninitiated. I was frustrated by this because the uninitiated are the very people to whom I want to explain this new connectedness yet I could find no way to make it comprehensible.

I can't help hearing echoes here of my friends' frustration at trying to explain why church still matters to them, to people for whom religious institution is a weird and incomprehensible thing. I wonder what missiologists could learn from the work of someone like Sue Thomas?