theo|digital

I’m posting chapters from my masters thesis in theology and media ecology.  See more here

I dream of seminaries as DJ schools, culturally engaged centers of remixing.

Steve Taylor (Out of Bounds Church)

This chapter was inspired in part by Imogen Heap:

The key thing about Imogen Heap, aside from her strong artistry, is the way she crafts her records as nearly a digital native. She uses twitter not as a marketing tool, but as a feedback loop and content creation center: inviting fans to contribute audio samples to what will be a complete album.

“Remix” is the province of the digital native, who effortlessly grabs slices of material and reverses, repeats, or modifies it to create a new meaning, with both the old and the new shining through.  (check out media professor Jamie O’Neil for great thoughts on this). Junior high boys do this all the time: just go hang on YouTube.

If this was true, the next question for me was:  how will this work with scripture?  Already the the text is newly juxtaposed everywhere from Logos Bible Software to Facebook.  Does this change our perception of the nature and authority of scripture?

I think it will.

• Chapter 7 Scripture Remixed–Re-creation and Identity p110-125 (pdf, 781k)

Glints of laughter + tinsel strands of truth = one Merry Christmas.  From smack in the middle of the political circus, Colbert (inadvertently or not)  preaches the gospel again.

This one is definitely jumping in meme status: just got by hit with it from multiple friends. “thought of you” kinda stuff. Why’d they think of me??

I’m posting chapters of my masters thesis.  See more here.

For 170 years we have been obsessed with machinery that would gives access, and give it fast, to a Niagara of information. Obviously, the Internet does that and we must give all due praise for its efficiency. But it does not help us, neither does television or any other 19th or 20th century medium (perhaps except the telephone), to solve the problem of what is significant information.
~  Neil Postman

Having to squeeze my thesis into a linear, black & white, double-spaced chunk of paper was ironic, considering I was writing about digital media. Even so, I did my best. I even started this chapter with a YouTube video:

This one (or previous versions of it) has been super popular. No doubt some of the stats are tilted for effect. But it shows how strong the tie between relationship and information is. In fact, this latest version picks up what I’ve asserted for five years now: Facebook will be more important than Google, because it has the power to sort or filter information based on our relationships: which is a natural human function. Think word of mouth.

In this chapter, I envision the church as the natural community that can practice discernment in the filtering of information, and specifically imagine the use of scripture in the community.

• Chapter 6 Scripture and the Church as Filtering Communities p91-109 (pdf, 986k)

I’m posting chapters of my masters thesis as I finish packing them to PDF. See more here.

The research hasn‘t caught up yet, but a simple Google search on “teens text each other in the same room” pulls up thousands of conversations by parents who don‘t understand their digital native kids.

One dad of a sixteen year old girl writes, “During dinner, I noticed that the girls had their mobile phones out and were text messaging. However, what I did not realize at first is that they were text messaging each other…while sitting at the same table!”  Another parent responds, “I hate that! I have no idea why kids text when they are sitting next to each other.”

Digital immigrants are mystified. Why do kids act as if they are not close to each other? Their confusion is justified—they do not live with a reconfigured perception of distance. For the digital native, physical proximity has become irrelevant for relationship. The technologies of instant messaging (IM) via personal computer, or SMS messages via handheld cell/smart phones allow the same experience of textual dialog whether one is down the street or across the country—or ten feet apart.

–

This chapter may be one of the more difficult to follow: I blaze through two questions that had bothered me:  When is scripture? and Where is scripture?  Though not framed quite that way, these have been important questions in the history of Christian thought on the doctrine of scripture. I show that in the environment of the digital native, both questions are collapsed upon themselves:  scripture is both past and present and it is everywhere.

• Chapter 5 The Global Village-Scripture in Time and Space p79-90 (pdf, 1mb)

I’m posting chapters of my masters thesis on Scripture in a Digital Context.  See more here.

This is not a pipe

One of my favorite places to visit in Chicago is the world-class Art Institute, and over the last decade I’ve often stopped in when I could free an afternoon (although much harder to do now it changed to from voluntary donation to mandatory fee).  Among my many favorites there is Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, whose clever paintings are the perfect pair to the media ecologist’s mindset. Repeating the insights of priest-scholar AKM Adam, I start this chapter with Magritte’s portrait, The Tune and Also the Words, and how it perfectly illustrates the question that drove my thesis “If the Bible is not a book, then what is it?”

But there’s a lot more work in this chapter.  I next seek to explicate the basic stages of communications media history:  and I try to put this in parallel with the use of Christian Scripture in each stage.  This resource didn’t really exist, and so simply compiling this chart took a long time in my research. It was a great tool for getting overall understanding, however.  I cover:

1. Oral:  The Patriarchs
2. Early Chriographic:  Sinai and the Giving of the Law through the Exile
3. Early Chriographic 2: Jesus and the Early Church
4. Later Chriographic:   Church Fathers
5. Early Print:   Protestant Reformation
6. Later Print:  Wesley; American Tract Society
7. Electric:  North American Christianity
8. Electronic / Mass:  Global Christianity
9. Digital:  Glocal Christianity

Finally, having shown that the Word of God to the People of God has often not been a Book, I propose my own theological definition of Scripture.  Broadly set and drawing on language from both theology and communication theory, I say that Scripture is “the mediated revelation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and its illocutionary intent in salvation-history.”

Nerdy?  Yep!  But this is an exciting part for me. Try it out.

• Chapter 4 The Bible as Medium p55-78 (pdf, 1.4mb)

You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, “Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us.” 4 When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, 5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, 7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10 So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.”

You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. 11 Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

Dt 26:3-11

I thought I’d be able to post these in relatively quick succession, but again have been too busy to do so. This week I’ll try to get up several more, starting here with Chapter 3 (See more here).

This chapter of my thesis is the second of my two literature reviews. Chapter 2 is a survey of the doctrine of scripture through time.  Chapter 3 is my due diligence on the communications theory group of media ecology,  Both are huge topics, so all I could do as I wrote these was worry about how much I was leaving out.

If I remember correctly, I think I cut 5-10 pages from this chapter, trying to keep only the points that were too huge to miss, or points that  I would use later on. This was tough to do… because although I didn’t write the paper in chapter order, it was written over the course of a year, and was occasionally recharted during the process.  And this stuff can be difficult to hold in your head all at once!  For instance, I introduce McLuhan’s tetrad (an evaluation grid he created) in this chapter because I planned to use it later.  When wound up cutting the later analysis, I forgot to return and cut this portion of the introduction.

Anyway, this chapter is a quick  tour by way of key names:  Marshall McLuhan then Walter Ong, then briefer treatments of Neil Postman, and James Carey.  For McLuhan and Ong, I note their method and also their personal theological biases found elsewhere in their writings.  Its interesting that these two huge media ecologists were both Catholic theorists.

• Chapter 3 Foundational Literature in Media Ecology p39-54 (pdf, 0.8 mb)

Whoa.

This is my transcript of the speech.  I posted brief thoughts separately.

Jon Stewart
Rally to Restore Sanity
Transcript (draft)
From C-Span Feed

——

• Transcript Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity Keynote Speech (pdf 190k)

2:41:50

So.  Here we are.

<applause>

We’ve had some really incredible musical performances here today.  I hope you enjoyed them.

<applause>

We’ve had what some would classify as comedy as well <laughter>, and now I thought we might have a moment, however brief, for some sincerity, if that’s okay.

I know there are some boundaries for a comedian, pundit, talker-guy, and I’m sure I’ll find out tomorrow, how I have violated them. <laughter>

I’m really happy you guys are here.

<applause>

Even if none of us are really quite sure why we are here. <laughter>

Some of you may have seen today as a clarion call to action.  Or some of the hipper more ironic Cats as a “clarion call” for “action.”  Clearly, some of you just wanted to see the Air and Space Museum, and got royally screwed.  <laughter>

And I’m sure a lot of you are here to have a nice time, and I hope you did.

<applause>

I know that many of you made a great effort to be here today, and I want you to know that everyone involved with this project, worked incredibly hard to honor the effort that you put in, to give you the best show; the best that we could possibly do.  We know your time is valuable, and we didn’t want to waste it.

<applause>

And we’re all extremely honored to have had a chance to perform for you on this beautiful space:  on the Mall in Washington, DC.

<applause>

<2.44.36>

So, uh, what exactly was this?

I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions.  This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or to look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear—they are, and we do.

But we live now in hard times, not end times.

And we can have animus, and not be enemies.

But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two, broke.

The countries’ twenty-four hour, political, pundit, perpetual panic conflictinator <laughter> did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.

<applause>

The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen.  Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire. <laughter> And then host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected, dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

<applause>

There are terrorists, and racists, and Stalinists, and theocrats.  But those are titles that might be earned:  you must have the resume.  Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers—or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez—is an insult, not only to those people, but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate!

<laughter> <applause>

Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.

<applause>

The press is our immune system.  If it overreacts to everything, we get sicker, and perhaps eczema.

<laughter>

And yet, with that being said, I feel good.  Strangely, calmly good.  Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false.  It is us through a funhouse mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waste and maybe taller.  But the kind where you have a giant forehead, and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin, and one eyeball.

So why would we work together?  Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin-assed-forehead-eyeball-monster?  If the picture of us were true?  Of course, our inability to solve problems would actually be quite reasonable.  Why would you work with Marxists, who are actively subverting our Constitution, or racists or homophobes, who see nobody’s humanity but their own?

We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is, how it is on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it a shame we can’t work together to get things done.

The truth is:  we do.  We work together to get things done every damn day.

<applause>

The only place we don’t is here <gesture to Capital Building> or on cable TV.  But Americans don’t live here or on cable TV.  Where we live, our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done.  <applause>

Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives.  Americans live their lives more as people that are a just a little bit late for something they have to do. <laughter> Often something they do not want to do.  But they do it.

Impossible things, every day.  That are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.

Look, look on the screen.  This is where we are—this is who we are—these cars.  That’s a school teacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high.  He’s going to work.  There’s another car: a women with two small kids—can’t really think about anything else right now.  There’s another car, (<wind blows screen> swinging’ don’t really know if you can see it), the lady is in the NRA and loves Oprah; there’s another car, an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah.  <laughter>

Another car is a Latino >, another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman, another an atheist obstetrician, Mormon J-Z fan. <laughter>

But this is us!  Every one of the cars you see is filled with individuals of strong belief, and principles they hold dear.  Often principles in direct opposition to their fellow travellers.  And yet these millions of cars must find a way to squeeze one-by-one into a mile-long, 30-foot-wide tunnel, carved underneath a mighty river—carved by people, who, by the way, I’m sure had their differences. <laughter>

And they do it.  Concession by concession.  You go, then I’ll go.  You go, then I’ll go.  You go, then I’ll go.  Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car?  Is that an Obama sticker on your car?  Uh, well that’s okay:  you go, then I’ll go.

And sure at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned… and not hired as an analyst.  <applause>

Because we know instinctively as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light:  we have to work together.  And the truth is, there will always be darkness.  And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey

<laughter> <applause>

But we do it anyway.  Together.

Do you want to know why I’m here?  And what I want from you?

I can only assure you this:  you have already given it to me:  your presence, was what I wanted.

<applause>

Sanity will always be, and has always been, in the eye of the beholder.  To see you here today, and the kind of people that you are, has restored mine.

Thank you.

<applause>

<end 2:54:50>