Going Digital

The rise of the Internet’s World Wide Web in the mid-1990s launched an unlikely hero into the media spotlight: Johann Gutenberg, the 15th-century inventor of movable printing type and technological forefather of the vernacular Bible. Reporters, Internet columnists and even some scholars began parading Gutenberg before the public as a kind of poster child for the digital revolution. The Net, we were told, would do for modern society what Gutenberg’s invention had done for the Renaissance: spread the fruits of mass education by democratizing communication. Everyone would become a publisher. By late 1997, public discourse about the Net was so deeply anchored in Gutenbergian mythology that skeptics of the digital revolution were sometimes dismissed without a reasonable hearing.

In hopes of digging deeper, I revisited the long-departed world of Gutenberg and of the first major mass communicator to use Gutenberg’s technology — Martin Luther. I wondered what more significantly shapes the use of new technology, the nature of that technology itself or the social and economic context in which it developed? More specifically, how might a strongly religious context, the rise of the Reformation, have influenced how the printing press was distributed and institutionalized? Does it make any sense to compare the life and times of Gutenberg or Luther with those of Bill Gates and Pope John Paul II?

In our understanding of the digital revolution, I think we stand about where Gutenberg and Luther did, with plenty of ideas and little firm grasp. If confusion is democracy, we are rolling in the green. The techno-gurus offer their poster children to all takers — often at quite a price on the lecture circuit. Business is rolling in the cash as well as losing its shirt with trendy ideas and faddish management books that have ignored far more business wisdom than they have created. Religious groups, too, are busily cultivating the digital landscape, often funded by donors who hope that pornographers or other evil folks will not commandeer the future. And then there are scholars and professors, myself included, who claim to see some truth in the so-called digital revolution. Bless all of their souls, for we shall need as much help as we can get.

Like all of us, Gutenberg (1394-1468) inherited a social and technological world created by previous generations. Monks gave their lives to the painstaking process of copying one page of a manuscript after another, until finally another “book” was completed for religious leaders. Reading itself was largely the domain of priests and, to some extent, their wealthy, educated patrons.

When Gutenberg was a young man, someone in Western Europe invented block printing (already used for centuries in China), in which “printers” carved outlines of words or pictures on a block of wood and then inked them for the “press.” The movable-type printing press, for which Gutenberg is so well known, was invented in about 1450, 70 years before the outbreak of the Reformation. In this process, masterminded at least partly by Gutenberg, printers placed reusable, individual letters or characters of type in a form to create a printable page. Hand copying of manuscripts was time-consuming and highly individualized; no two manuscripts were exactly the same. Printing, on the other hand, created a means to make artificial copies that merely imitated the “authentic” reproduction process of the scribes. Printing was considered artless and crude — a kind of cheap imitation or virtual copy of the real thing.

Printers and scribes competed for customers into the second half of the 15th century, when printing finally won the day. Scribes catered to the luxury market by crafting elegant, high-quality manuscripts — much like the difference today between handcrafted and factory-made furniture. But as the prices of printed volumes declined, scribes found themselves without work — like COBOL programmers in the 1980s. At first, scribes sought legal protection for their former monopoly, but they eventually gave in to the inevitable by inserting printed sections into their handwritten works. Some scribes even became consultants, advising printers on how to design their pages to look like calligraphic art.

Early printing was financially risky. The ability to print books did not guarantee a means of marketing them successfully. Printers were driven not by the religious and artistic impulses of the scribes, but by the economic realities of the marketplace. The early years of promise also created the stress of uncertainty — perhaps a feature in the rise of all new media. No one demonstrates this more than Gutenberg.

The public mythology about Gutenberg locates him in a saintly world of disinterested inventors. The truth is that he was an entrepreneur who took one financial risk after another, using other people’s money, and who maintained a secrecy that was designed to keep any potential competitors from gleaning his ideas. Gutenberg worked so surreptitiously that the best documents we have about his business affairs and technological inventions are from the courts, where he battled unhappy investors who had tired of his many promises and few results.

Throughout his career, Gutenberg repeatedly solicited additional capital, but refused to offer his “product” for sale until he had perfected the process. He became a kind of entrepreneurial schemer who continuously had to develop new, fundable ideas in order to keep the money on the table for his major preoccupation — the movable-type press. Gutenberg created the mold for casting precisely similar letters and numbers. He also developed an ink that would adhere uniformly to the type. He took various partners and developed other business enterprises along the way in order to fund his desire to hit it big in printing.

Gutenberg’s tight secrecy, accompanied by his burn rate, led to his decline. He would even dismantle his experimental equipment during his various lawsuits so no one could figure out what he was up to. One of these lawsuits finally wiped him out financially. His financiers won all of Gutenberg’s materials and equipment, and hired away Gutenberg’s foreman, who knew how to use the technology — an early case of corporate raiding, perhaps. It was they, not Gutenberg, who published the so-called Gutenberg Bible sometime before 1456 and used Gutenberg’s technology to print the elegant Latin Psalter (1457) and the Catholicon (1460), a reprint of a popular encyclopedia compiled in the 13th century. Meanwhile, Gutenberg, destitute and almost blind, eventually received from the archbishop of Mainz an annual allowance of corn and wine, along with a suit of clothing. There is a lesson here for the depressed areas of Silicon Valley.

Since Gutenberg clearly had the elements of movable-type printing before investors shut him down, why did he fail to launch the world’s first book-printing business? The answer appears to be that Gutenberg did not see himself in the printing business per se, but in the religious-manuscript business. Gutenberg’s aesthetic paradigm defined the book as an extension of the manuscript, not as a distinct creation. Manuscripts, however, were not just the creation of scribes, but also the craft of highly gifted illuminators. Gutenberg’s movable-type technology itself would simply not enable him to compete on the illuminators’ aesthetic terms.

Unable to foresee the nonreligious market for simple printing, he yoked his business to a religious interpretation of the godly craft of illumination — to the idea of “text” as a means of authentically pleasing God. He repeatedly delayed the launch of his technology until he could solve the problem of creating grand illuminations within his printed books. Those delays cost him his business.

As one historian put it, Gutenberg “succeeded in automating the scribe, but not the illuminator.” Or as I would put it, Gutenberg framed his aesthetic paradigm for the printing business within the religious-manuscript market of the day. This paradigm did not suit the iconoclastic times that were around the corner. The Protestant emphasis on “the Word” would create new secular and sacred markets. Protestants liked simple, printed books, and might have loved amazon.com. As Elizabeth Eisenstein, who wrote one of the classic works on the rise of mass printing in Europe, put it, Protestantism was “the first movement of any kind, religious or secular, to use the new presses for overt propaganda and agitation against an established institution.” The Protestant church reformers “unwittingly pioneered as revolutionaries and rabble rousers.” What some people might call a “democratic” development, others might call a “propagandistic” movement or paper spam.

Religious and financial interests merged in the Protestant Reformation, where printing was both a lively business and a potentially powerful form of religious communication. Martin Luther became the first mass-mediated publicist or propagandist. As historian Mark Edwards claims, Luther “dominated publicity to a degree that no other person to my knowledge has ever dominated a major propaganda campaign and mass movement since. Not Lenin, not Mao Tse-tung, not Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or Patrick Henry.” For several years during the Reformation, evangelicals like Luther quickly and effectively reached large audiences with “thousands of pamphlets discrediting the old faith and advocating the new.” These pamphlets were cheap, easy to distribute, quick to read and easy to conceal. They were hawked on the street and in taverns, and advertised with jingles. Luther’s New Testament vernacular Bible, with commentary, set the stage for later commentated Bibles that guided the reader’s interpretation.

Luther had a knack for the new communications medium; other evangelicals were not nearly so effective. Luther himself democratized the medium by pushing out his products and making them cheap to print and distribute in the interest of printers and publishers. For one thing, reprintings of Luther’s pamphlets made money for printers, who did not have to worry about copyright law. Luther himself was interested not in cash infusions, but in distribution — give away the product free and you might create a market! For another, Luther’s pamphlets were inexpensive compared with vernacular Bibles, so why not get the gist without all of the expense and hard work? Even some Roman Catholic publicists printed and distributed Luther’s anti-Catholic pamphlets. Luther roundly criticized sloppy, profit-driven printers who marketed the Bible, but his quest for a vernacular version of the scriptures also inherently tied believers’ spiritual thirst to the capitalistic energies of an expanding mass-communications business.

This merger of financial and religious interests made printing the first truly mass medium in Western history. Even so, the printing press was not a “mass” medium in the sense of reaching everyone; most people were spectators of the religious drama that was unfolding in the new medium — as in the early years of the Internet, when most people did not have access. But the press could nevertheless reach more people more quickly and more cheaply than any previous medium. Like e-mail today, the press could distribute messages to many people — if they had access to the technology and knew how to use it (that is, if they were literate).

During the first half of the 16th century, Catholics and various Protestants, especially Luther, competed in the new court of printed public opinion. Between 1518 and 1546 alone, printers produced at least 6 million vernacular religious tracts — one for every two members of the German-speaking lands. Apparently Protestants did a better job of communicating their messages; their treatises were often less expensive, more compelling rhetorically, and hence more widely printed, distributed and read. But the Protestant messages might also have been more open to various interpretations, enabling readers to hear in them what they wanted to hear, prefiguring what Jacques Ellul in this century called the “propaganda” of the media. As Edwards concludes, “In general, the messages sent were not always the messages received, and the historian who seeks to reconstruct the early Reformation message and its appeal must pay at least as much attention to the context of its readers (and hearers) as to the text that they read (or had presented to them).”

Nothing could be more true of the Internet today. We can talk all we want about the “democratic tendencies” of the technology, but who is really interpreting these messages and what in the world are they concluding? We have not a clue. The statistics on Net message distribution, the growth of the number of domain names, the number of individual citizens with Net access, and all of the other widely used data simply gloss over the real, underlying communication. We have created a public rhetoric about democracy anchored in technological mathematics, not in human understanding or cultural interpretation — not even in civil discourse. We are defining Net-based democracy in terms of transmission, not in terms of actual human communication. In fact, our contemporary public rhetoric about the Gutenbergian revolution does exactly the same. Some commonplaces never change. Luther created chaos before denominational cosmos, and we appear to be doing something very similar with Net culture, sacred and secular. The Net is to democracy what a stadium is to a soccer game. Somebody has to decide how the game is played.

Americans often associate democratic power with the ability of the underdog to triumph over established institutions. They equate egalitarianism with a leveling of power across many individuals or groups in society. Democracy exists, Americans assume, when everyone has an equal voice in defining reality. And we get our own voices by being part of many messages — by being mass communicators or at least mass consumers. Freedom and symbolic quantity are virtually the same. Therefore, we consider the Internet as the most liberating mass-media technology of all times.

But we are also frequently uncomfortable with the ways that evil or at least arrogant people are able to use the media to advance their own interests. The Net is great, but let’s silence the pornographers, bomb-makers and hackers who are up to no good. What does history tell us about these kinds of debates?

Will the Internet necessarily champion the underdog in culture, or even just in religion? Any inherent propensity of one technology over another to foster democracy is overshadowed by the social institutions in society, including the ways that media are financed, regulated and distributed, and the almost indefinable realities of the individual rhetorical moments when audiences will respond. By about 1470 the cost of a French printed Bible had dropped to about one-fifth of the cost of a manuscript Bible, perhaps giving Calvinism the same kind of boost that Luther had in Germany. As Eisenstein states, “Where indulgence sellers were discredited, Bible salesman multiplied.”

Moreover, new power structures and established institutions invariably come to replace the old ones, and any initial glow of inchoate democracy can easily be undermined by the rising centers of symbolic power. Today’s public references about the rise of the printing press tend to overlook the fact that the printing press shifted authority from church to the individual rhetorician. As the church and book owners/collectors lost control of the manuscript culture to the operators of the printing press, they also relinquished much of their authority to individual authors. In short, public personality — or persona — became crucially important in mass communication, as it has been ever since. The printing press tended to shift power from the more stable social institutions to the more dynamic and industrious communicators. As a theologian friend of mine likes to say, the medium helped replace one authoritative Catholic pope with many popular Protestant popes.

Finally, the openness of citizens to both democratic opportunities and responsibilities is crucial. Technologies do not produce democracy, even if they bring down the dominant institution or eclipse evil empires. As the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, has said, “Democracy and civil society are two sides of the same coin. Today, when our very planetary civilization is endangered by human irresponsibility, I see no other way to save it than through a general awakening and cultivation of the sense of responsibility people have for the affairs of this world.”

The role of the printing press in early-modern Europe shows that the impact of new communications technologies is highly dependent on context. The same technology can affect different social groups and cultures in widely different ways, can unify as well as divide, and can secularize as well spiritualize. There simply is no predetermined impact because of the crucial roles of economics, politics and culture. New media forms do not simply replace older ones. Even after sermons were printed, sermons were still orally delivered. In fact, many people “heard” Luther’s pamphlets read by someone else, both because some of the listeners were not literate and because oral reading was still a significant public act. Preachers often mediated Luther’s writings in the public square, perhaps just as Internet content today is mediated especially by journalists. Printing probably changed the nature of some public discourse, but public discourse, including sermons, itself probably changed how people read or at least how they interpreted the written and printed word. The historical impact of the printing press on religion shows how complex the impacts of new technologies in society really are. Within the Christian church the new technology fragmented theology and ecclesiology, producing Protestantism in all of its variety, dynamism, confusion and contradiction.

But as Eisenstein shows, the same presses “created a new vested interest in ecumenical concord and toleration” — namely, scientific ways of thinking and knowing. As Luther and other evangelicals used the new technology to preach the gospel — or at least their own version of it — they also encouraged printing and reading per se. Christians’ expanded thirst for reading “tapped a vast reservoir of latent scientific talent by eliciting contributions from reckon-masters, instrument-makers and artist-engineers.” As odd as it seems today, this thirst for reading fueled a renewed drive within humankind for a kind of scientific ecumenism, or scientific dogmatism, depending on one’s point of view. Nothing was more important for the rise of scientific communities across geographic space than the printing press. This technology became part of the human quest for a unified approach to mathematics, natural investigation and scholarship in general.

Gutenberg’s investors had no clue about what would eventually happen with the technology they capitalized. On the one hand, science has grown in stature and cross-cultural impact even through the ages of electronic and now digital media. On the other hand, various religious groups have used the Good Book and their own commentaries and other writings to foster alternative views of truth. In fact, some of the most print-based religious groups are the fundamentalists, who often view the scriptures reverently, much the way that some scientists view their textbooks and professional journals. Somewhere in between, or across, these sides of the print divide, science has created an amazing consensus of thought that permeates even modern religious cultures.

Perhaps the internet is doing all of the above and more: encouraging and unifying small religious and other movements; further facilitating scientific unification across geographic proximity, if not also creating new scientific theories and concepts; fostering the rise of new forms of spiritual irrationalism such as those discussed in Wendy Kaminer’s wild book, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials; focusing the public even more on particular public personas in news, sports and everything else; creating new classes of investors who are willing to publish online just about anything, regardless of whether or not they agree with it; germinating new technological ideas that are luring capitalists who hold unreasonable expectations of financial bonanzas. The truth is that all kinds of ironic, contradictory and even seemingly regressive things are happening in the Internet world, and we have barely a clue how to interpret it all. We, too, have our Gutenbergs and Luthers and all of the additional characters that make the current times so interesting and challenging. And thank God for contrarians like Albert Borgman (Holding On to Reality) and Stephen Talbott (The Future Does Not Compute), who are helping to highlight the folly of our ways in a digital world.

If God is behind all of this, God surely has a sense of humor. If we are in charge of our own destinies, we are truly “lost in the cosmos,” to steal a title from Walker Percy’s marvelous work, subtitled The Last Self-Help Book. But one thing is certain: our utopianism about all of the benefits of the Internet is misguided. We are all in for serendipitous developments and historical reversals that will show us just how important our political, economic, governmental and religious institutions are in shaping the future. I doubt that technology itself will ever deliver more than the level of responsibility that we bring to our modems, our speakers’ platforms and our online and printed publications. Science and technology change, but human nature is remarkably consistent, confusing and confounding.

This article appeared in The Christian Century, January 31, 2001, pp. 16-21. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org.

I recently co-wrote a book primarily for college students and college graduates on the topic of writing resumes and cover letters: How to Write Powerful College Student Resumes & Cover Letters. It’s receiving terrific reviews, for which my colleague, Bethany J. Kim, and I are very grateful. The book’s accompanying website includes excerpts and an opportunity for people to ask questions about writing resumes and cover letters.

Here I would like to explore why this website, dedicated to the topic of “Communicating Faithfully,” would address the subject of resumes. I think faith and resumes are intimately connected.

The idea of writing a “faithful” resume initially seems rather odd. But the historic meaning of “faithful” as “true to others” is an important consideration in writing resumes and cover letters. So is the concept of being faithful to one’s self—or true to one’s self.

I work closely with current college students and graduates. I see how concerned they are about “looking good” on their resumes. I witness first-hand the difficulty of getting interviews let alone meaningful full-time employment in tough economic times. I empathize with my current and former students to the point of taking on some of their career anxiety. I yearn for them to find work, and to discover that good work, well done, can be deeply satisfying.

Beyond the poor job market, there is another, often-overlooked reason why college students and graduates are so anxious when it comes to writing resumes. They are inheriting a cultural climate that emphasizes image-making over truth. Why else would a student add something to a resume primarily because it will “look good”—even if the entry doesn’t reflect any significant work or life experience on the part of the writer? Students today feel the burden of having to prove their value to a potential employer. They understandably try to manipulate the “data” to project a positive image of themselves.

This is not all bad. Resumes should be an opportunity for the writer to persuade by emphasizing  personal “positives.” I would even hope that college students learn to communicate effectively as part of their formal education. Sure, students should be faithful in the sense of being truthful in what they say in resumes, cover letters, and interviews. But truth can be expressed more or less persuasively. When it comes to resumes, truth is necessary but insufficient. Persuasively expressed truth is essential.

The problem today, as I see it, is that students are not as fully truthful as they could be for their own benefit in the marketplace. The “truth” is that current and former college students are experienced persons. Yes, their experience is primarily life experience, not academic or work experience. But a student is a person, and a person is more than a bundle of job-specific skills and academic accomplishments. Students are human beings who have learned primarily by experience, and hopefully by reflection on such life experience. Such learning can and should enhance the persuasiveness of a resume.

As I point out in the book, employers, too, are looking at the whole person, not just at an applicant’s job-specific skills. For instance, they know that the traits of the people we work with are just as important as the immediate professional skills that our colleagues possess. We all enjoy working with people whose experiences have given them a wealth of knowledge of and engaging stories about everyday life. We appreciate colleagues who bring life-acquired, positive virtues to their works—virtues like truthfulness, patience, gratitude, and peacefulness. We dislike laboring with manipulators and deceivers who care more about themselves and their own careers than anything or anyone else.

The best resume writers—the truly effective resume writers—address what I call the “Big Three”: skills, knowledge, and traits. And they do so not by worrying excessively about “what looks good” on a resume but by aiming to represent their whole selves in all three categories. The result is a resume that is a picture of the personal potential of a possible employee as a human being. This is why even activities such as travel, non-academic cross-cultural experience, hobbies, and volunteering can be so important to include on resumes and cover letters. Such entries round out the skills, knowledge, and traits of the writer.

My co-author and I jumped into the already-loaded resume-book market because none of the other books took this kind of holistic perspective. There are some fine resume-writing books for a general audience of experienced workers, but not specifically for college students and recent graduates who typically lack much paid professional experience. Yet most students do have impressive life experience that reflects the kinds of skills, knowledge, and traits that can transferred to all kinds of careers.

To be true to ourselves and others we all need to consider what we have learned from life, not just what we’ve learned on the job. In the end, such self-reflection can lead us toward the sort of examined life the ancient Greeks considered essential. Writing a resume or a cover letter is an opportunity for getting to know ourselves better, and representing ourselves to others more faithfully. It’s also a recipe for success that is deeper than image.

For more information about the book, please visit the book website.

(Note: This essay is my foreword to a terrific book on media criticism: Robert H. Woods, Jr., and Paul D. Patton, Prophetically Incorrect: A Christian Introduction to Media Criticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2010).  

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) had a knack for irritating the state church. He claimed an unusual gift: namely, perceiving the lengths of the noses of Christendom’s Pinocchio-like prelates. When their noses grew, Kierkegaard reported it publicly in books and articles. In Kierkegaard’s view, church leaders were self-righteously playing God rather than humbly following God. As he once put it, “Christendom plays the game of taking God by the nose: God is love, meaning that he loves me—Amen!”1 By “Christendom,” Kierkegaard meant the established, bureaucratic, self-serving institution that had become increasingly irrelevant to the real spiritual vitality of everyday citizens. Christendom was a godless church, more like a country club than a place for submit- ting to the one true God. “Christendom,” wrote Kierkegaard, “is a society of people who call themselves Christians because they occupy themselves obtaining information about those who a long time ago submitted themselves to Christ’s examination—spiritlessly forgetting that they themselves are up for for examination.”

Beginning with the story of Adam and Even in the book of Genesis, the biblical drama shows that human beings have always been liars. We like to fib. To exaggerate. To misrepresent. To pretend that we know more than we really do. For instance, self-serving deception is a common malady in the modern advertising business. Deceit runs throughout contemporary political discourse of the Right and Left. Like politicos, we appreciate opportunities to enhance our own ethos so that others will look at us more kindly or respectfully—even if all we get is fifteen minutes of media fame. In short, we humans dwell east of Eden, in ever-evolving but rarely progressing cultures that are based on one or another pack of lies about God, ourselves, others, and the creation. As Augustine discovered, our collective, self-serving, socially shaped lies foul up our personal desires. We desire the wrong things—or the right things in the wrong ways. We love things the way we should love only God, and we pretend to love God while treating God as another thing to control. We become tragic characters in our own puny, picayune dramas. Which came first—real life or reality TV? What difference does it make to us? After a while, we can hardly distinguish between our adventures and our misadventures. We imitate the oddities that we have created in the media. Imagine Adam and Eve watching their fall unfolding on TV and enjoying the drama. This would have been the first reality TV series (as long as God was not there to narrate).

Into this mess steps a prophet, himself or herself fallen but simultaneously carrying a God-given ounce of dangerous, culture- upsetting, society-challenging wisdom. This prophet’s wisdom runs deeper than data or information. The wisdom could be only one word: Stop! Outlandish! Unjust! Folly! The Decalogue itself is essentially ten word-phrases that might please a modern Ger- man linguist. Here’s a slippery translation of one command: “No- idols-or-you’re-dead-meat.” I can imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger mouthing this line in a movie. The problem is that the word idol would not work. It is not commercial enough for prime time. Especially in a literal translation: “No-nothings-or-you’re-dead- meat.” An idol is, literally speaking, a nothing. The insightful prophet perceives the connection between no-nothings and the know-nothings who worship them. Didn’t Jesus say something like “I’ll be Bach”? A reporter could answer that question properly without parroting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line in the movie The Terminator, “I’ll be back.”

The Hebrew and Christian traditions offer a prophetic means for human beings to find their way amid the miasma of mediated mendacity. This way requires humans to do something outrageous, even foolish by many of today’s standards: to be faithful (or to be true to the One who is the truth). This kind of faithfulness is based on assumptions at odds with Christendom. First, we truthseekers assume that there is a living, personal God of the universe. There is a God who knows, who sees through the lies that we hold dear. Second, we assume that God has and will continue to speak to us through wise, God-fearing mediators. Third, we give witness to particular people and other means by which God speaks the truth in our midst; instead of merely listening to God as individuals, we listen as communities of prophetic discourse in which we can hold each other accountable. We affirm prophetic critics’ gifts to identify and speak the truth, but we also question them as to whether they are speaking truthfully. We might not like everything they say. We will not always appreciate words of wisdom that hit too close to home, challenging our misplaced desires and reminding us that we cannot control our own fate. The prophetic way is inherently communal, testing the words of truth through ongoing proclamation, discussion, and sacrificial living.

Obviously I have ducked several of the most difficult questions related to the specific times, places, and means that God uses to speak prophetically (or, to put it less tribally, the ways that God appropriates human beings’ language for God’s own purposes). When Augustine claims that “all truth is God’s truth,” he reminds us that there is always gold as well as dross in any culture; truthtelling cannot be limited to any one social group. Does God “speak” through an individual person’s conscience? Do some people hear the literal voice of God? Neither my foreword nor this book claims to solve these problems. Indeed, such difficulties are probably necessary for faith. To borrow another quote from Kierkegaard, “Christianity has been abolished somewhat as follows: life is made easier.”3

My own view is that God can appropriate anything for the purpose of speaking to humans. Here I am borrowing from Nicholas Wolterstorff’s fine book Divine Discourse, which uses speech act theory to support the thesis that God speaks. 4 As Wolterstorff argues, God does not just reveal truth or inspire people to speak the truth. God asserts things, commands things, promises things, and so forth. God accomplishes such speech acts, first, through prophets who proclaim the source of their speech: “Thus says the Lord.” Prophets are deputized to speak in the name of God—just as an ambassador might (or should!) speak in the name of the head of state that he or she serves.

This essay is the foreword to this book.

Moreover, God speaks not just through such deputized prophets but, second, by appropriating others’ truthful messages. These truthtellers need not be prophets in the sense of being directly called by God to declare the Lord’s word. For example, God appropriates King David’s speech in the psalms. David never says, “Thus says the Lord,” as if he were a prophet who heard the words directly from God. Nor was he merely inspired by God to write psalms. Nor was he simply revealing more about God by writing the psalms. God appropriated David’s language in order to speak the truth. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures certainly include both prophets and apostles deputized by God to speak in the name of God, but the same Scriptures include other human discourse, like the psalms and epistles, which God appropriated in order to say what God wanted to say.

Now Robert H. Woods and Paul D. Patton are playing the role of deputized prophets by appropriating others’ words—words spoken by God, rabbis, scholars, and cultural critics, among others—for the sake of truthtelling about the purpose and nature of prophetic media criticism. Their purpose is to speak truthfully about the state of contemporary media criticism by offering a renewed vision of the critic as prophet. Their own guides include the insightful Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72), who descended from European rabbis and whose family was decimated by the Nazis. He escaped Poland before the Nazis could send him to the death camps, but the emotional scars remained: “If I should go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated.”5 In effect, Heschel and the other sources of wisdom in this book are Kierkegaardian gadflies in the midst of today’s Christendom. While monitoring their own noses, they are busily yanking the planks out of each other’s eyes and using the wood to build a bridge between the prophets of old and the media critics of today. Moreover, they are building a bridge over which we too can journey back and forth, appropriating words that help them and us to understand our plight in societies dominated by consumerism. Heschel’s daughter recalls of her father, “Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s own tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness—or evil— into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child, and they must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”6

One problem (or is it an opportunity?) that Professors Woods and Patton necessarily face is avoiding the existing shibboleths that religious and nonreligious groups simplistically equate with God’s truth. The language of “prophecy,” “the prophetic,” and “prophetic voice” have been co-opted by disparate groups acting like psychological, theological, and ideological thought police. This is particularly true for media criticism, which is highly predict- able given the theo-moral background of the critics. For instance, mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic media criticism has been co-opted by what we might call “secular elite culture.” Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the words of the Times (almost any Times) or National Public Radio, on the one hand, and the words of the mainline critics on the other. Meanwhile, much evangelical media criticism has been co-opted by “inspirational” popular culture. There is a fine line between evangelical media criticism and evangelical celebrity culture; the celebs are the de-facto, trusted critics. Why? Partly because their predictable, tribe-affirming criticism sells well. Who can argue with the marketplace, the great adjudicator of Christian truth? If you want to operate a successful “ministry,” you have to find a leader whose words confirm what the tribe wants to believe is true. Christendom, both on the Right and the Left, increasingly resembles gaggles of gawkers with their own penchants for self-styled, self-induced “Christian correctness.” Like all fallen human beings, Christians tend to seek media content that confirms what they already believe or wish to believe. This is far more than what psychologists call selective perception; it is a form of self-delusion.

This book’s splendid title, Prophetically Incorrect, captures the authors’ shibboleth-questioning perspective. The playful title captures a kind of extra-tribal or cross-tribal vision that refuses to bow down to the commonplaces de jour. TV celeb Bill Maher claims to be “politically incorrect” but is far more politically predictable. When his program was on Comedy Central, it was less predictable (and less profitable) than it became on ABC. He serves on the board of a humble organization called The Reason Project (religiously dedicated to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society). Maher once referred to religion as a “neurological disorder”—similar to the phrase “psychological disorder” that conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage, on the other end of the thought police divide, uses to describe liberalism. Fans of Maher or Savage love to see evil people’s oxen get gored. Again, we all do, as long as we are not among the evil people.

A second problem the authors face is the self-deceptive nature of propaganda in mass-mediated societies. Most citizens, whether they are religious or not, naively assume that propaganda is simply the easily identifiable lies and deceptions promulgated by a few really bad people (like a Hitler). This simplistic, good-bad notion of propaganda is actually part of the propaganda by which we all live. Augustine in the fourth century battled against Manichaeism, which held a dualistic worldview in which the flesh was evil and the spirit was good—period. Today the villains are said to be members of one or another social group: fundamentalists, liberals, feminazis, neocons, and so forth. The specific labels come and go as new dualisms emerge from media discourse. This self- deceiving criticism lacks prophetic discernment. Like toddlers, we stuff square or triangle blocks into their respective holes on the top of a plastic can—round is good and goes here, whereas square is bad and goes here. We self-servingly employ favorite moralistic categories to simplify the complex, confusing, and often incongruous aspects of culture.

Along the way, we completely miss some deeply biblical categories. For instance, some critics’ concerns about immoral media content focuses on obscenity and profanity but ignores racism and sexism. Others focus on materialism but ignore gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity. In short, we critics tend to carve up the world into classifications that reflect our desire for self-righteousness more than they do our faithful quest to become selflessly wise. We propagandize ourselves. The media join in, telling us what we already believe or what we want to believe—regardless of whether or not such belief is ultimately true. The media do not cause us to believe one thing or another; that idea is itself too simplistic, more like scapegoating than critical analysis. Media and culture are synergistically dependent on one another; both the media and our lives are complicated mixes of good and bad motives and misordered desires, many of them institutionalized in bestseller lists, fan and critic awards, audience ratings, and YouTube rankings.

Prophetic wisdom invariably prods people to ask themselves what it is that they truly want—and why. Often it uses satire and parody, frequently in the form of questions. God begins the fun with a whopper directed at the newly fallen couple in the garden of Eden: “Where are you?” The question was ontological and ethical rather than merely geographical. When I was growing up in Chicago we used to ask one another, “What’s shakin’? What’s going on? What’s happening?” Most of the time our friendly greetings were not meant to be interrogations. But when we knew that some- thing significant was happening, we were quick to follow up with more questions. “Was Jim suspended from school for drinking in PE again?” We did not want him to get booted out. But we did desire to drink in PE without getting caught. Surely we needed a higher vision based on a deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of life. We did not respect school officials, some of whom might not have completely deserved such respect. But who merited our respect? How should we have fulfilled our mimetic desires? In a spoof interview in the Christian humor magazine The Wittenburg Door, Superman complains, “I used to be this untouchable, all-powerful being. I always did the right thing. I never struggled with the decision. Now people want someone more down to earth, easier to relate to. So I have this relationship with Lois I can’t figure out. And I make little moral misjudgments, like sleeping with Lois, leaving my elderly mother alone for five years while I go search for Krypton, things like that. I’m just an ordinary guy with the powers of a god. That’s what people want from Jesus nowadays, too. Not an all- powerful, all-knowing, all righteous God. They want an affable, easy-going guy who just happens to have superpowers and uses them for good. “7

We could have used those superpowers to get off the hook in high school. Imagine the opportunities!

There is something delightful about self-deprecating prophetic wisdom when it reveals our foibles with gentle love and open curiosity about our plight in this good but fallen world. As the authors of this volume indicate, prophets sometimes have to call down the roof, overturn the tables, and “call ’em as they see ’em.” Still, the more subtle, inquisitive style of prophetic critique has its place. For one thing, we are curious creatures—even curious about what troubles us and why we continue on our wayward paths individually and collectively.

Perhaps partly because of what Augustine called original sin, we are born with what J. Richard Middleton calls a “desire to learn, a passion to explore, to stretch the boundaries of the known, to go new places, to discover new insights, to ask probing questions that maybe we hadn’t asked before.” According to Middleton, this curiosity is a “natural part of life. It’s a developmental task God has put before us, and it’s a blessing God has gifted us with—to be playful as kittens in our curiosity.”8 We need to learn measured styles of prophetic criticism that bring others into the conversation rather than drive them away from the discourse. This partly means not taking ourselves so seriously that we fail to take others seriously enough. Perhaps the underlying basis for all prophetic criticism must be humble gratitude. Gratitude to God, first, and to other faithful critics, second, melts away our self-righteousness. The fact is that we cannot save ourselves even by knowing the prophetic truth; salvation is beyond our rhetorical, ethical, and hermeneutical abilities. The kingdom of God and all of its prophetic insights are gifts worthy of accepting before we get overly exercised about anything that appears to be wrong with media and culture. “Everything changes,” writes Evan Drake Howard, “when we realize that the only rewards that matter can’t be earned. This is how prophets and righteous persons and children live—not out of shoulds but out of thanks.”9 Much Jewish humor—from Seinfeld to Stiller—simultaneously pokes fun at human beings’ nuttiness while gently reminding audiences that things could be worse. We ought to be thankful for the fact that our situation is not even more desperate, that we can still smile and laugh rather than merely hate. Speaking at the Oslo Conference on “The Anatomy of Hate” in 1990, the former Czech Republic President Václav Havel said, “The man who hates does not smile, he merely smirks; he is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule; he can’t be genuinely ironic because he can’t be ironic about himself. Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically.”10 Kenneth R. Chase insightfully says that Christian discourse “emerges out of a double humility: the humility that comes from acknowledging the inexhaustibility of God’s abundant grace, and the humility that arrives from a posture of silence before the Almighty.”11

In Brian Friel’s play Translations, Irish bureaucrats are remap- ping the country and changing the long-standing place names that carried the histories of the local people and their common experiences of the land and its related cultures. The bureaucrats’ outlandish aim is to create for the entire country a simple, understandable, six-inch map largely devoid of any of the cultural memory of specific places. In the name of progress, they are destroying what one character calls “a rich language . . . full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception— a syntax opulent with tomorrows.”12 Just as playwright Friel serves as a kind of prophet, revealing culture-robbing folly and warning about its implications, the contemporary media critic can help us to identify what we lose and gain in the mediatization of practically every aspect of modern life. Without such audacious critics, we can become “imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . . . fact.”13 The perennial task of the prophet is understanding the contours of the present in the light of God’s wisdom. The critic thereby mediates our understanding of the media world by proclaiming and warning, satirizing and tracking the ongoing remapping of God’s world. The Christian critic always does so self-reflexively as part of a community of Christian discourse, aware that he or she might indeed be part of the problem. As Kierkegaard wrote, “There is something frightful in the fact that the most dangerous thing of all, playing at Christianity, is never included in the list of heresies and schisms.”14 May this book help all of us to attend to the sizes of our own noses as we monitor the noses in the media.

1 Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, ed. Charles, E. Moore (Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1999), 227.

2  Kierkegaard, 226.

3  Kierkegaard, 227.

4 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

5 Susannah Heschel, “Abraham Joshua Heschel,” accessed at <http://home.versatel.nl/heschel/Susannah.htm> on January 23, 2009.

6 Ibid.

7 Matthew Mikalatos,. “’Interview’: Superman.” The Wittenburg Door 37, no. 211(May/June 2007): 36-37.

8 J. Richard Middleton, “Curiosity Killed the Cat (Or, the Outrageous Hope of Reformational Scholarship and Practice).” Perspectives 32, no. 4 (December 1998): i-iv.

9 Evan Drake Howard, “Reflections on the Lexionary.” Christian Century, June 17, 2008, 21.

10 Václav Havel, The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice: Speeches and Writings, 1990-1996 (New York: Fromm International, 1998), 57.

11 Kenneth R. Chase, “Christian Discourse in a Nietzschean Age: Mapping a Theological Location for Persuasion,” Paper presented at the Religious Communication Association annual convention, New York, NY, November 12, 1998.

12 Brian Friel, Translations: A Play (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1981), 50.

13 Friel, 51.

14 Kierkegaard, 227.

A conversation between the publisher of Worship Leader magazine, Chuck Fromm, and  Professor Quentin Schultze about the state of “Worship 2.0.”

Fromm: What does a fully networked church look like?

Schultze: Human beings are inherently multimedia creatures. So “networking” takes many forms across all media, including in-person, print, electronic, and digital media. A full network employs all of the fitting or appropriate means of communication for the purposes of congregational life, from worship to education and fellowship. The notion of “fitting” use of technology in this networking is crucially important. To be fully networked is not just to be busy, but to be fittingly involved with one another. We constantly have to be asking ourselves not if we are networked per se, but if we are networked appropriately, in tune with the purposes of the church.

Fromm: Do you anticipate Web technology taking over every aspect of a church’s operating platform? If not, what operational aspects will avoid the change?

Schultze: Web technology will not “take over” any aspects of church operations but will instead be integrated into operations in different ways and to various extents by each congregation. There will not be a one-size-fits-all approach, although some software and hardware companies will tout this. We’ll see major differences among churches and denominations depending on everything from location (e.g., urban, rural suburban) to congregational life, demographics, and theological and ecclesiastical traditions. The most promising Web 2.0 developments will be organic, not organizational.

Fromm: How is the movement from mass media to massively participatory media reflected in the creation of Christian worship?

Schultze: Participation varies enormously among people. Some like to participate only as consumers, not producers. Still, a sizable percentage of people who participate in worship also like contributing to the ways that worship is planned, executed, evaluated, and renewed. Worship is going in all kinds of directions with tremendous creativity and vibrancy as well as silliness and misguided practices. The question behind the technological explosion is how to educate the “masses” about the history and purposes of worship so they have enough context to participate wisely in worship and in worship renewal-beyond being just consumers.

Fromm: What new spiritual practices are emerging from the networked churches? What traditional practices are being renewed or transformed? What are the new rules and the old rules for spiritual practices?

Schultze: Churches can be networked within and without (intra and inter). The intra-networking is beginning to take off among the so-called emerging churches, creating ongoing communications about activities and events. New software is also gaining ground in the larger, community churches for the sharing of gifts, talents, and other resources for the sake of the common good rather than just the sake of the individual member. Some worship planning is also occurring. On the inter-church front, multimedia products, particularly sermon recordings, are being distributed, primarily via congregational leaders with platforms beyond their local churches.

Fromm: To what extent do you see the networked congregation having an impact on traditional audiences, church hierarchies and authority structures?

Schultze:
a) Governance
Church governance is already becoming quite a mess as the new social networks create groundswells of innovation, dialogue, and novel practices. Somehow church leadership is going to have to learn how to listen to the existing conversations both online and within congregations in order to discern what to do to foster new but wise leadership.

b) Pastoral/Biblical Interpretation
Issues of pastoral interpretation of Scripture and interpretation of the meaning of “church” are popping up throughout contemporary churches. This is being spurred by books and websites that are asking tough questions, especially about faddish and narrowly literalistic interpretations. One way to understand the new developments in interpretation is that they represent a kind of Augustinian (4^th-century) revival of doctrinal interpretation on many levels at once. It’s becoming increasingly clear to younger members in renewal-oriented churches that Scripture, creation, and culture are all texts that need to be “read” through the lenses of basic Christian belief and doctrine. As a result, much preaching is regaining its extemporaneous style, personal engagement, cultural criticism, spiritual heart, authentic sensibilities, and deep hermeneutical thrust that combine affective and logical insights. In a way, preaching is becoming more like theological conversation or a doctrinally informed “chat.”

Wise preachers are listening more closely to their congregations, through many media outlets, to determine how their proclamation and conversations are being interpreted and received. Preachers are wondering if their congregations really “get” the basics of the faith-even if their members grew up in Christian churches. I believe that this is essentially why someone like Rob Bell, pastor of Mars Hill church here in West Michigan, is so popular; he is gifted at discerning ancient truth and communicating it in inspiring and relevant ways (in a very low-tech environment, by the way). Bell’s high-tech ventures (such as the Nooma DVD series) are extensions of his basic, highly doctrinal preaching (that some would call a “teaching” rather than a sermon). This is not simply audience adaptation but often a movement toward a kind of dialogical approach to preaching in which preacher and congregations keep the preaching-nurtured conversations going all week and all year long.

c) Worship
It appears that social networking is becoming the primary means for those interested in worship renewal to discourse about the subject, share ideas, ask questions, pass along resources, and report on their own experiences. These developing networks are linked to conferences and “published” resources as well. I see this is a sub-community of church members across Christian traditions who are interested in the same issues. Unfortunately, there are also highly faddish trends driven by overly technological views of worship as “audience effect.” So these networks of discourse need some wise voices as organic leadership to avoid going in unbiblical directions that are uninformed by both Scripture and tradition. Perhaps the greatest concern, in my view, is the lack of recognition in populist worship renewal that all worship is “liturgical” (the work of the people). There are not liturgical and non-liturgical forms of worship. The question should be, “What is faithful liturgy?”

d) Leadership/Gender Issues
Technological social movements invariably attract more males than females. This has a subtle but profound impact on the ways that technologies are perceived and employed. While social networking undercuts some traditional ecclesiastical authority, it also re-energizes a kind of paternalistic view of worship as a male-driven, instrumental, effects-oriented, controlling practice. This is partly why in-person discourse is so important; it provides greater “bandwidth” for multimedia, multisensory interaction and is more respectful of gender differences (whether they are social or genetic differences).

Fromm: What will be the roll of private and/or non-profit “producers of the sacred” in the networked community movement?

Schultze: The only “producer” of the sacred is God. That truth has to be the starting point for faith-oriented social networking and related cultural production. So we begin with a sobering truth, namely, that Christian spirituality is not about what human beings do but about what God does. As I tell my students, we need to keep in mind that Christian spirituality is all about attending to what God has done, is doing, and has promised to do. In other words, God is already at work. Our “job” (really, our calling) is to attend to the Spirit’s movement here, and there and everywhere, often where we least expect to see God at work. We can’t move ahead faithfully in a Web 2.0 world by pretending to play God.

The interview originally appeared here.

Journalist and book author Mark Pinsky interviewed me for Orlando Magazine about the new phenomenon of online churches.  This is a fascinating topic partly because most religious traditions have emphasized the importance of in-person (or “incarnate”) community for full fellowship with other believers and, in the Hebrew and Christian traditions, for full fellowship (or communion) with God.  At a conference on worship I served as a panelist on this topic and suggested that the most difficult issue for online churches is how to perform sacraments.  — QS

A Church, iDistributed

Northland reaches out to the iPhone generation, preaching to the mobile masses.

No one would ever accuse Northland, a Church Distributed, of being behind the curve of technological innovation. Especially when it comes to trying to rope in the most elusive and sought-after demographic in organized religion: tech-savvy young adults with frenetic lives and little patience for sitting in pews.

The Longwood mega-church already is known for its high-energy services featuring Christian rock music and light shows. Northland’s $32 million sanctuary is wired with thousands of feet of fiber-optic cable, enabling it to stream its services live on the Internet as well as project services from other churches on the church’s interior walls.

Now comes the latest: an iPhone application that allows users on the go to watch both past and live services on the cell phone’s 3½-inch-wide display. Northland, with 12,000 Central Florida members and a few thousand worshipers via the Web, has posted on its blog a step-by-step guide instructing other churches how to stream their own services on the iPhone.

Much of the new outreach effort is aimed at young people —always a challenge for traditional congregations—offering what consumer consultants call a “point of entry” for new potential members.

“Our hope is to reach some of these demographics that are not now in the church,” says Nathan Clark, Northland’s 30-year-old director of digital innovation (a title not listed in many church staff directories). Clark led the team that developed the iPhone app. “It makes sense to also help people worship where they are,” he says. “It’s really imperative for us to start with the most ubiquitous technologies.”

Some within the evangelical community are skeptical of Northland’s move to connect with parishioners via iPhones. “There aren’t any purely technological solutions to any spiritual problems,” says Quentin Schultze, author of High-Tech Worship? Using Presentational Technologies Wisely. The Christian church, Schultze says, has always believed that “worship is best done by the in-person gathering of believers.’’

But Joel Hunter, Northland’s senior pastor, says the new application is a supplement, rather than a substitute, for communal worship. Hunter says his goal is to multiply small church groups in places that don’t have churches available. “The cell phone can extend beyond even the reach of the Internet. Churches will not be confined to a church building in the future.”

In the New Testament, the Book of Hebrews (10:25) warns, “Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together, as is the habit of some.” Citing this passage, Hunter says, “This will not be the end of the church but the extension of it. This is a temporary means of worship for those who can’t get to a church assembly. But it is also the delivery of worship for others who want to start a small assembly church group.”

Next up from Northland, for the more mature set: services via BlackBerry.

Michael Lotti interviewed me for this fine article about the need to apply age-old ethics to the new social contexts created by digital communications technologies.  You can find out more online about Mr. Lotti at the publisher’s (Effect Magazine, LarsonAllen) website.  Kudos to LarsonAllen for addressing ethics on behalf of society.

Ethics and the Information Age

by Michael Lotti

The information age has given us more than cell phones and emails. It has also dumped a bunch of new ethical dilemmas on us. A few thinkers eagerly look into an ever-more-electronic future as they ponder the rapid development of information technology. For them, the question is not about the right or wrong use of the Internet or a Facebook account, but how these things are paving the way for the next evolutionary step of the human species.

Luciano Floridi, a philosopher at the University of Hertfordshire in England who specializes in information theory, thinks that developments in information technology are ushering in an age where humans will develop “a new ecological approach to the whole of reality,” which will include the recognition that information systems have rights.

Arthur Saniotis, an anthropologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, looks forward to the day when there will be information technologies that “optimize human biology” and deliver “friendships with imaginative entities,” along with the ability to download a brain onto a hard drive.

If there’s an ethical imperative for such thinkers, it seems to be this: keep developing the technology so that the human species can continue to improve.

Nothing new

Besides being wildly speculative, such views make it seem as if the everyday ethical dilemmas of the information age are merely annoying speed bumps on the evolutionary highway.

For many, running into new ethical problems may be as common as answering their email messages. However, while the ethical dilemmas of the information age are very real, they pose no substantially new challenges for the people who face them.

Information technology has changed just about everything in our lives—the way we shop, educate, follow politics, and even carry on romances. We face a whole new landscape that has been radically altered by cell phones, satellites, and the Internet. But while we have new ethical problems, we don’t have new ethics. The categories we use to identify, evaluate, and solve moral dilemmas haven’t changed.

Why shouldn’t you take a call on your cell phone in the middle of an important business meeting? Because that would be unfairly taking away valuable time from your employer and co-workers. Why should businesses take significant measures to protect the electronically stored information of their customers? Because it would be a violation of trust not to do so. Why shouldn’t you text people in the middle of a family dinner or business lunch? Because that’s impolite. What’s troubling about pretending to be someone else in an online chatroom? That’s a form of lying.

Lying, impoliteness, trust, and fairness, along with concepts such as justice, self control, respect, generosity, loyalty, and many others, are part of the human fabric. Even for Plato and Aristotle and other long-dead thinkers, these terms had no discernible origin.

So when we need to answer a new ethical question, we don’t really need to invent new categories, because the familiar terms apply.

Big changes—especially big technological changes—usually outpace ethical reflection, but basic ethical sensibilities gradually catch up. The information revolution is not a revolution (or evolution) in creativity or consciousness or awareness, even if it has changed our lives an awful lot. It’s a bunch of new tools that, like the factories, telegraphs, and steam engines of the industrial revolution, can be used justly or unjustly, to spread truth or lies, or to find much-needed information or gratify the worst appetites.

The challenge of the medium

But even if Saniotis’s scenarios of “optimized human biology” are farfetched, can’t information technology actually change a person’s mind or “consciousness” for the worse? And can you tackle such a problem with familiar ethical terminology?

Quentin J. Schultze, the author of Habits of the High-Tech Heart (Eerdmans, 2002), is not against the innovations of the information age, but thinks we “should be just as concerned about the kinds of persons we are becoming as we are with being able to send messages quickly. In fact, our technologies will reflect our weaknesses as human beings if we don’t address our weaknesses up front.”

Consider the following experience a friend shared with me. He noticed that his 15-year-old daughter’s social habits changed significantly about six months after she got a cell phone and a Facebook account. She didn’t gossip, lie, cheat, or do anything that would be called unethical with her new tools. She texted people constantly and had lots of less-than-a-minute conversations on her phone, but complained about not having any close friends. As my friend put it, “She was alone in a crowded room.” Schultze would say, information technology, despite giving her dozens of new ways to communicate, actually served to amplify her normal sense of teen isolation. It hadn’t done anything to bridge the gap between communicating and connecting.

“… our technologies will reflect our weaknesses as human beings if we don’t address our weaknesses up front.” —Quentin J. Schultze

Marshall McLuhan, a professor from the University of Toronto who pioneered the field of communication studies in the 1960s and ’70s, articulated the problem this way: a medium of communication does not just deliver a message, it is the message. It shapes the person who uses it, and not always for the better. Television news is the classic example. On the surface, it communicates information about events, politics, weather, and sports. At a deeper level, it communicates a way of looking at the world—namely, that it is a bunch of unconnected events, political sound bites, weather radar, and sports scores that can be easily digested in 22 minutes, with 8 minutes of commercials designed to mold a consumer’s mind and motivate a customer. At first glance, it’s hard to say that tweets, text messages, and emails, along with the ever-present advertising on the Web, won’t alter mental habits in a similar way.

Schultze, for example, says that increased social isolation and attention disorders are predictable byproducts of the use of modern information technologies. Ron Greene, an associate professor of communications at the University of Minnesota, adds another worry: “Modern information technology intensifies fragmentation of community,” he says. “It produces an echo chamber effect as folks increasingly only communicate with those with like-minded prejudices.” Greene also thinks the easy access to information is leading students to think they are educated simply because they have accumulated a lot of data.

So can the old ethical tools possibly address these new problems? Or are these new problems at all?

For the past six decades, parents have limited their children’s time in front of the television. Why? Because they instinctively knew that kids who watch a lot of television don’t easily develop long-term concentration skills, and they, being responsible parents, wanted to do what was best for their children. And before the age of television, parents restricted time in front of the radio. And before the age of radio, books and movies were screened. Even Plato, way back in 380 BC, was critical of the stories, music, and plays that entranced so many in his day. In other words, people of every age—especially parents—have felt an ethical obligation to protect and guide children, and that meant managing the media of the day.

Information technology can disrupt or damage things that we value, like academic integrity and a workplace without unnecessary distractions, so we try to figure out how to productively combine it with those things instead of abandoning it. In other words, we’re taking a very old ethical concern—and applying it to a new situation.

And for what it’s worth, people are gradually figuring it all out. For every person checking into an Internet addiction center, there are millions who use the Web to find valuable information, send pictures to grandparents, manage finances, and connect with business contacts. Max More, an internationally acclaimed futurist who has written extensively about ethics in the information age, likens our time to Europe in the decade after the invention of the printing press. “I’m sure there were people worrying that with books so easily available, everyone would stop having conversations,” says More. “But people obviously adjusted.”

The deepest choice

Maybe it’s too simple to say that people are asking the questions that they have always asked as they navigate the ethical waters of the information age. Maybe it’s too easy to say that many things have changed—the boundaries between work and home life, the ways our private information can be misused, the sense of always needing to be plugged in. But the distinction between right and wrong has not changed.

If it’s not terribly complicated, why is there so much obvious misuse of information technology? How are we to make sense of humans, with their innate ethical sense and their notably unethical behavior? Plato writes that ethical concern about anything is rooted in two basic assumptions, so basic they can be hard to notice. The first is the conviction that, even if we don’t know all the details, there is a better and a worse way to live, a right and a wrong, actions that are good and actions that are evil. The second is the conviction that our lives ought to be shaped by what we find to be good, right, and beneficial to ourselves and our community.

Aristotle points out that these basic convictions are not automatically or continually held by people. He doubted they could arise in people who had been poorly raised and asserted that young people are too driven by passions to benefit from discussions about ethics. Likewise, Plato puts foes in his essays who shrug off ethical concepts like “justice” and “honesty” as inapplicable or even meaningless in the “real world.” Plato and Aristotle say, in other words, that people must choose to be ethical amidst the ease of being unreflective. They have to care about being good to even recognize an ethical dilemma, and lots of people don’t care (or only care in fits and spurts). So we have—as Plato and Aristotle had—a society with lots of good, bad, and thoughtless behavior thrown together.

If you do care about being good, though, the news from Plato and Aristotle is positive. Your concern for ethical behavior will certainly make you more prone to act well, and by acting well, you will, according to Aristotle in particular, “lead the life that is by nature pleasant.” You may not have all the answers to the ethical dilemmas of the information age, but you do have all the tools you need to figure them out.

Columnist Charley Honey of the Grand Rapids Press interviewed me about the role of news media in providing a prophetic voice for local communities. We had a discussion about this years ago and Charley thought it was timely to return to our conversation in the light of the challenges facing print newspapers and the rise of digital news operations. — qs

What is at stake if newspapers die?
By Charley Honey | The Grand Rapids Press
December 12, 2009, 4:50AM

The prophet Amos didn’t mince words when he passed along the bad news of God’s fury: “I will send fire upon the walls of Gaza that will consume her fortresses.”

I can just hear the complaints. “Amos, all you ever do is cover the bad news. How about a story when the Lord ISN’T mad?”

But that wouldn’t be news. Amos, you see, was a hard-bitten reporter, telling the people what they didn’t want to hear.

Today, the Old Testament prophet would have plenty of bad news to report — including the sad, slow death of the newspaper.

Oh, but that’s not bad news at all, you may object. Newspapers have done such a crummy job they deserve to die. Good riddance to the fact-fudging, propaganda-peddling, tree-killing American newspaper — and take your liberal bias (or capitalist agenda, whichever it is) with you!

For all the angst about the demise of news-on-a-page, a lot of people aren’t that broken up about it. They welcome the final edition of old-school journalism and the rise of online commentary, citizen journalism and interest-driven Web stories.

They also don’t expect to pay for it. To a recent Press poll asking readers if they would pay for online news, a resounding 89 percent said no, along with comments about using the paper to line their birdcage.

Even accounting for the anonymous snark factor, it was not an encouraging response for papers trying to figure out how to survive.

As a reporter who started out typing his stories 30 years ago, I regret the struggles of print journalism. But I am alarmed by what could be the decline of good journalism, on the page or online, unless someone wakes us up to its true value.

Citizens need information

Given a choice of government without newspapers or newspapers without government, Thomas Jefferson said he “would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Substitute “good journalism” for “newspapers” and you’ve got today.

Democracy can’t work well without informed citizens. Who informs them? Good journalists monitoring elected officials, investigating corruption and sitting through boring school board meetings.

In the Watergate scandal 30 years ago, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein showed how tedious, determined reporting can change the course of history. In the brave new online world, who will pay two reporters to spend months uncovering stories like that?

Amos would have made a great Washington Post reporter. He was what communications expert Quentin Schultze calls a prophetic journalist — one who “afflicts the comfortable to wake them up and move them to action.”

“You’re not gonna like it, but here’s what’s happening,” says Schultze, an author and professor of communications at Calvin College. “Critical journalism takes a moral stance on behalf of the community.”

Communities need news

But the advocate journalist also raises up what is good about communities as well as where they fall short, Schultze says: “No community can survive unless it has pride.”

This is what’s at stake in keeping skilled journalism alive — something sacred about community, democracy and the way we relate to each other.

“When a newspaper dies in America … a sense of place has failed,” writes Richard Rodriguez in Harper’s Magazine. Newspapers mirror communities back to their residents who are curious about those around them, Rodriguez argues. He fears that sense of place will die along with newspapers, leaving us with “one and a half cities … Washington D.C. and ‘American Idol.’”

And we’ll all live in trivia nation, tweeting and blogging about Tiger, Balloon Boy and the White House gate-crashers. Health care? Bor-ing!

I am not against moving my trade online. As Schultze rightly says, it’s where young readers live. I like my news crinkly with coffee; my students surf theirs on laptops.

But good reporting isn’t free like in Amos’ day. If we value news, we must find a way to make today’s prophets profitable.

This is a brief audio recording of a panel presentation I made at the National Communication Association convention in Chicago on November 13, 2009. My comments address the state of “religious” (or “religion”) scholarship on communication and, conversely, the state of communication scholarship about religion.

I also offer a “wish list” for future research about the intersection of religion and communication, including: (1) a post-post-modern paradigm (or paradigms) of communication, (2) the nature of human communication as an act of faith, (3) modes of human discourse that would better equip different religious groups to communicate civilly without either giving up their irreconcilable differences or communicating exclusively on the basis of such differences, and (4) the parabolic aspects of human storytelling as other-worldly.

Listen to Quentin Schultze on “Religious Communication Scholarship”:

This is a slightly edited (to remove local references and to reduce the length) version of  a speech I gave at the “Emerging Technologies & Media Mythologies” conference held at the Prince Conference Center at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan on October 5, 2009. I address three aspects of the relationship between faith and technology: (1) faith “for” technology, (2) faith “in” technology, and (3) faith “about” technology.

My quotes of Søren Kierkegaard’s work are from the wonderful collection of quotes titled Provocations. I highly recommend it, especially if you do not have the time to read his longer works.

My comments about St. Augustine’s work on faith and communication are primarily from his De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Teaching/Doctrine).  It is one of the most interesting books about the relationship between sacred texts and human communication.  If you want a superbly annotated version of this work, see Richard Leo Enos and Roger Thompson, et. al. editors, The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo: De Doctrina Christiana & the Search for a Distinctly Christian Rhetoric (Baylor University Press, 2008).  The book includes Sister Thérèse Sullivan’s stunning work on Augustine’s original text.

In this 24-minute video, I address the relationships among faith, technology, and communication through the eyes of the game of baseball.  Like much of human life, a baseball game is a communicative “event” that requires resources, rules, and fitting (or appropriate) use of technologies. I also address the multimedia nature of human communication. The video could also be titled, “We Are Multimedia.” It was recorded on a baseball field at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI in September of 2009.

Communicating for Life

If you are interested in the content of this video you might want to pick up a copy of my book Communicating for Life: Christian Stewardship in Community and Media. You can browse the table of contents on Amazon, where used as well as new copies are available.