Home Again

We arrived home from London Tuesday afternoon. I spent Tuesday evening and most of yesterday home with my family, and headed back to the mines today. The trip was incredible on many, many levels - incredibly challenging, encouraging, and overwhelming. I'm still processing a lot of things. I had thought to post reflections during the trip, but to be honest, by the time our days were finished, I was pretty much exhausted, both physically and spiritually. It seemed a good opportunity to take an unplanned blog fast, to allow myself the opportunity to reflect and absorb what we were experiencing.

I did do a bit of journaling while I was there, which I hope to publish in the next day or so. I'll also be sharing my reflections on the trip in a more general sense, as well as some thoughts on ministry, contextualization, and American culture that I've been processing. In any event, things should pick back up to normal around here now. It was a great experience, but I'm also glad to be home.

On the Road Again

Well, I'd hoped to get a bit more content up this week, but I couldn't pull it together. I'm off tonight for a twelve day trip to London. I'm going with my cohort from Biblical; we'll be working with a group from an agency called World Team while we're there. Should be fun but it's a long time to be away from the family. I'm optimistic about being able to get online - from what I understand our hotel has wifi but I haven't confirmed that. If not, things may be sparse for the next week or so.

On a related note, if the schedule allows, I'd love to catch up with some of you folks from London while I'm there - I know there are a few of you out there. ;) Drop me an email if you'd like and we'll try to connect. I don't know our schedule in detail yet but I know we'll have some free time so I'm cautiously optimistic about being able to do so.

Interview with Shane Hipps (p. 2)

Part 2 of my interview with Shane Hipps, author of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture:

Interview with Shane Hipps (p. 1)

I've had the privilege of discussing a few thoughts from The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture with Shane Hipps. Shane's website, by the way, can be found here. The interview is full of great thoughts, so I'll be posting it in two parts.

Look for part two tomorrow evening!

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Media and Choice (The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture p. 3)

In my previous post, I discussed the Four Laws of Media that Shane Hipps presents in his book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture. The underlying premise, of course, is that the forms of media that we use shape the way that we use information. I want to further those thoughts on the effects of media by considering something that I discussed some time ago about the nature of culture. I suggested then, following the lead of sociologist Edward Hall, that culture is simply the collection of semantic systems of a society - in other words, culture is communication. It's the aggregate of all of the meaning-making elements that allow us to transfer messages from one person to another.

This intersects, I think, squarely with the Four Laws of Media that Shane has discussed. Media are integral to our communication systems. Media shape the way in which we pass messages and, in many ways, frame the meanings that can be assigned to those messages. Take the clock, for instance. The clock is a medium that we utilize to communicate and measure time. It also shapes the way we think about time. For western cultures, time is linear and perishable. Each moment is unique and will never come again. Time, as a result, is seen as a commodity; we are obsessed with it. In some sense, time can even be seen as wealth - to have time for leisure is a mark of affluence. This view of time, however, is not at all ubiquitous. The clock is what enables western cultures' perception of time to even exist - without a means of measuring it and marking it, our view of time would likely be cyclical and seasonal, as it is for many cultures across the globe.

The complication, then, that this presents for our consideration of the effect of media on culture is simply this: we are faced with two different kinds of media choices. Some of these choices are explicit and controlled. For example, a decision to use PowerPoint (or whatever you Apple folks use ;) during worship gatherings is an explicit decision that can be evaluated as such. The use of the media is at the discretion of the community. However, other media choices are implicit and unconscious. Or, perhaps better stated, there are some media shifts that are so massive that they change an entire culture or cultures. The printing press was one such shift. Electronic media are another. We, as a culture, think differently at a foundational level as a result of the explosion of new media. This is not a choice that we can make - we can't opt into the Internet, for example. It's already pervasive and shifting the way in which we think and communicate as a culture. Our systems of meaning have already changed. These kinds of media choices are less about whether we will utilize the new media - frankly, those choices are irrelevant when the shift is significantly fundamental. The choice that we face instead is more about contextuality. We need to understand what the gospel that we present means in the new systems of meaning and thus begin the task of recontextualizing the message for a new world.

I don't like to talk about postmodernity. I think it's overdiscussed and misunderstood. And, on some level, it misses the point entirely. What we as a culture are currently facing is, at least in part, the result of more than a century of significant shifts in our cultural media. Our systems of meaning have shifted entirely, and far too few of the people who want to engage in discussions of epistemology and the nature of truth have even thought to ask the questions of the effects of new media on those systems.

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The Laws of Media (The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture p. 2)

As I mentioned previously, one of the central premises of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture is that media are not value-neutral. Rather, they influence what and how we think about the message. This matter of shaping, however, isn't always apparent. McLuhan proposed four laws of media that describe the process by which media influence the way in which we give and receive messages. Shane summarizes these laws as follows:

• What does the medium extend?Media enhance some function of human existence. The telephone, for example, extends the voice by allowing us to communicate over great distances.
• What does the medium make obsolete?New media change the relationship between humans and previous media. At times, this means the previous media are eliminated; at others, their function changes. For example, email makes postal mail obsolete in that it changes the function of postal mail as a primary means of personal communication.
• What does the medium retrieve? There is a sense in which new media borrow from the past, retrieving a prior (sometimes ancient) media or experience. For example, radio retrieved oral storytelling.
• What does the medium reverse into? In Shane's words, "When pushed to the extreme, every medium will reverse into its oppposite intention." This is probably the most counterintuitive of the laws, but I think it makes sense if it's approached from the perspective of strengths which, when taken to extremes, can become weaknesses. For example, television extends the voice, but it reverses into a medium that silences by shutting down conversation and interaction.

It's helpful, I think, to look at this by example. Shane mentions the effect of the printing press on Christian thought (and culture in general) by applying the four laws to the printed book. I've added somewhat to his thoughts here:

• The printed book extends memory and intellectual reason. It extends the personal encounter of the individual and God.
• The printed book makes communal faith obsolete. It changes the role of the community from the place of encounter with God and memory of the Story to a dispenser of instruction.
• The printed book retrieves individual, personal knowledge of the scriptures. It retrieves the disciplines of study and the personal task of knowing and understanding the text.
• The printed book reverses into a lack of knowledge of the text. When the content is immediately available, there is less a need to know and remember the Story. The book, when taken to extremes, actually harms memory by making it unnecessary. It also harms synthetic, holistic thinking by reducing the ability to think in nonlinear, intuitive ways.

This framework is extraordinarily helpful in thinking through the question of how a given medium shapes our perspective. Next, I want to consider a tangent question that the book doesn't explicitly address: how much choice do we really have in the media that we employ?

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The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture

I mentioned previously in my posts about the Taxonomy of Emergence that I was reading The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture by Shane Hipps. I want to spend a few posts blogging about this book, because this is one of those fascinating reads that puts words to things that you've long suspected but couldn't articulate while also challenging you to significantly rethink some assumptions that you may not have realized that you've held.

The premise of the book follows largely Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, The medium is the message. In other words, media are not value-neutral. The form in which we present a message influences the content and meaning of that message. In the author's own words:

To perceive media and technology with both eyes open, we cannot simply list the various benefits and liabilities of all new and existing media in hopes of understanding their power and meaning. Instead, the task before us requires an entirely different approach to analyzing media, recognizing them not simply as conduits or pipelines (i.e., neutral purveyors of information), but rather as dynamic forces with the power to shape us, regardless of content. Such an approach invites us to ask different questions, better questions, and moves us beyond the oversimplified but common belief that media forms can be deemed good or bad based on how they are used...It is imperative that we move beyond this paradigm and realize that our forms of media and technology are primary forces that cause changes in our philosophy, theology, culture, and ultimately the way we do church.

This is such a significant question for anyone wanting to approach our present context from a missional perspective. Over the next few posts, I want to discuss the basic framework that the author proposes in which such questions can be approached, examine some of the ways in which this framework can both encourage us and also help us to rethink some assumptions about ministry in a technologically saturated culture, and finally, offer a few additional thoughts that Shane has graciously provided on the subject.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, Shane Hipps