theo|digital

I’m posting chapters of my 2009 masters thesis on digital media ecology and scripture. See more here.

I began my thesis with a quote from 1854 by Henry David Thoreau. He complains that modern advances of his time aren’t always helping us.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from
serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end
which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New
York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to
Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
… We are eager to tunnel the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer
to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad
flapping American ear will be the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

150 years removed, it’s a little bit easier to smile about Thoreau’s pessimism. What a difference the telegraph made in the history of the world—playing a role in wars and culture and Christianity.  I chose this quote because it so easily illustrated one of the number one rules of exploring the culture and media:  it’s hard to see.  For even talented people, culture is the water we swim in, everywhere and remarkable transparent.

• Chapter 1: Scripture In a Digital Context (pdf, 1.2mb)

Today I’m doing something I’ve never done before.  The California Zephyr is one of the longest train routes in North America, and I’m about to ride it.  All 2, 438 miles of it—from Chicago’s Union Station to the edge of San Francisco.  The route traces through Chicago, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno before arriving in California, and it became famous for its views of the Rocky Mountains and the American West.  Apparently for the car attendants too, who at the height of train travel post-WWII played the role of perky young stewardesses, offering smiles and full-service attention, from coffee to babysitting the kids while you were in the lounge.  Today it’s obviously changed a bit, but you can still ride as a first class passenger in a sleeper Superliner, which includes amenities like the morning paper, fresh towels and sheets, and priority all-you-can-eat reservations in the Dining Car.  As an antique experience that I’ve never had, it felt perfect for a short vacation, offering something novel while providing a chance to be by myself and write and pray and think.

The trip officially takes 50 hours–mine leaves on 2pm Tuesday in Chicago, travels for two overnights, and arrives in San Francisco at 4:05pm.  Although nobody really believes that’s when it’ll get in.  Amtrak trains have the distinction of having “on-time” being a bonus.  I think if it’s up to 3 hours late, Amtrak practically considers that on time.  Past that you can start to complain a little, although it’s not like you’re gonna just get out and walk.  A few weeks ago, this very train route made the news for having a train that was stopped by snow and showed up over 18 hours late.  Ouch.

And while coming in the following day might be cause enough for some attention, what’s funny to me is how uneventful the poor timing is normally.  Nobody cares.  Part of this is that they are simply meeting expectation–there’s nothing new here.  But media ecology’s approach to technological progress in society probably has the best explanation.  People don’t think of trains as transportation.  They’re art.

That’s because newer technologies (i.e. I’m leavin’ on a jet plane) have supplanted the train as the primary means of cross-country movement in the U.S.  And newer technologies often don’t replace previous technologies as much as modify their role in our cultural perceptions.  For Marshall McLuhan, this means that some older technologies remain in place as–but as art!  His most famous observation on this:

The machine turned nature into an art form.  For the first time man began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values.  They began to marvel that earlier ages had been so unaware of the world of Nature as Art.

Think National Parks as vacation destinations.  This is a result of the assembly line.

And that’s why people don’t care if trains are late.  I’m riding the train because it a novelty item, and I learned about it reading blogs that are devoted to people who do just that.  Newer technologies have modified our perceptions.

ps – can’t wait to see what this is like.  More if I can from the train, but chances are pretty low I’ll have good access as I’d be depending on what flashes of Spring 3G I can catch from the train car.

I could pee in my pants I’m so excited. This developer demonstration of Google Wave starts to make reality exactly the trends I have been predicting for filtering communities. This Google team notes that e-mail was invented forever ago–long before we had the Web, and is modeled on the metaphor of Postal Mail. I’ve been mentioning this for a while, now–that e-mail isn’t a native technology for a digital environment because it doesn’t think like a digital environment. We know from Pew Internet that among internet communications tools, today’s junior high kids use e-mail dead last, typically for communicating with teachers or older users–not friends.

This Google development team seeks to answer the question: what if we invented e-mail today?

Google Wave is what they’ve come up with so far. It’s exactly on the trajectory I think we’ve been doing (though we’ll see if they take it… notice many similarities to Facebook, which I still think is better positioned than Google to reinvent e-mail, etc).

This presentation is over an hour and half, but a few minutes of watching is prolly worth it.

Google Wave is getting plenty of attention, like this critic comparing it to a spork, but I think he like others is missing it. E-mail and IM and social networks are not irreducibly helpful tools combined, like the brew-and-grind. They are bring back together what naturally will be.

ps – other techy news:  Microsoft Bing.  Uses some Kayak looking tools with search.  Won’t amount to much.  Wikipedia vs. Scientology.  An interesting test case in filtering community ethics.

Professor Ginny Olson pointed this out to me today. Harris Interactive‘s recent poll on social media (pdf) (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) had an interesting question included that, for those that know my thoughts, points directly to the key insight of the next few years

(chart reproduced from Research Brief from the Center for Media Research, reporting on this same poll).

This is the right question but the wrong audience. Most did not see the connection or possibility. They are wrong. Facebook IS the “new Google,” and I’ve been putting myself out on a limb on that for a few years now.

It doesn’t have to literally be Facebook of course (although they have a good chance–Mark Zuckerberg really understanding social media and the younger generation). The key is “filtering communities” that help us sorta and prioritize information. The days of someone saying “I got 1,456,333 hits on Google for X” are numbered… this will sound like a silly idea to us soon. A massive pile of information is a given to digital natives. The key is what floats to the top and how it does it. (think Digg). Model this on natural trust relationships (like Facebook), and you’ve got a powerful information filter that shapes your world.

ps – notice that older people were slightly more likely to think Facebook threatens Google, even though they are less involved. Is this because they are not immersed and can observe the relative importance in chatter they’re hearing their grandkids?

I’m starting to find a great deal of exciting stuff on the blog of Lance Strate, the president of the Media Ecology Association and a professor at Fordham University in New York.  His most recent post highlights the following fascinating video note by one of his students.

Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.

It’s confirmed, I’ve definitely got some beefs with Dr. Schuchardt. But his scriptural redux here is even more clever than the first. Laughed out loud.

If you like, go back and watch the entire video, and you’ll notice he quotes the very mentor I thought he was likely to be following—Neil Postman—who is the father of the school of media ecology that tends to focus on the negative effects of media.

His negativity I think colors the quality of his analysis. For instance, trying to speak against mediated communication, he draws three rules for ministry from Jesus:
1. You have to be there
2. You have to speak in as un-mediated a manner as possible
3. You have to do the work of the gospel

Regarding the New Testament: for starters, what of the centurion’s daughter—healed in the absence of presence being a model of faith! Or Paul’s epistles to the churches? Are we to think that his ministry impact was diluted by the scribes, scrolls, and messangers? Hopefully not—Christianity is actually based on a doctrine of mediation: revelation in Scripture.

Further, are we intended to look at the examples of mediation in a pre-modern, craft literate society and these are normative for today? In this case, cars are no longer appropriate for ministry, I’d think.

I suggest that it is rhetoric without substance to say that God has not spoken to someone via e-mail or a TV screen, therefore God does prefer digital media. With things like Facebook only about 4 years old, aren’t we jumping the gun a little (the printed book has had 500 years, the manuscript about 3,000). But this wouldn’t be my biggest concern. It would be that Dr. Schuchardt might consider an audible voice of God would be considered unmediated (God doesn’t have vocal chords: sound waves and air are most certainly God communicating through something else), but further that “direct” communication from God is privileged over mediated communication. This is true of some more extreme versions of Pentecostalism, but I don’t think fits standard, for instance, Protestant language which would see the Word and Sacraments as the primary realities of God’s communication and action. Both real, but both mediated by the stuff of humanity and creation.

Sorta funny redux of the verse. I just discovered Read Schuchardt today, who turns out to be a Media Ecology prof (phd NYU) here in Chicagoland at Wheaton. This a few of his other comments on this lecture weren’t bad, but I have a feeling that Schuchardt is a bit of a Christian kermudgen on media experience more a la Neil Postman than Marshall McLuhan, so I’m not sure we’d be best buddies. I’m a little more of an optimist.

This is funny to me at this point, and definitely almost counts a nerd joke in the stuff I’m studying.  Two things that might help it be better  1)  Marshall McLuhan, one of the founders of media ecology, died in 1980, and 2)  He released a book in 1967 The Medium is the Massage which was a play on his quote, “the medium is the message” that was laid out in a print photo collage that foreshadowed internet media…

The remix is by Jamie O’Neil, who seems to have some great forthcoming work on the remix as epistemology, which I think I’ll want to read for my thesis. This is one of the categories I haven’t thought as much on… trying to stay closer to “information” than “media” – though after convergence, I don’t know who I’m kidding, but I gotta stay sane somehow.