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.

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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)