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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