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.

[flv width="300" height="169"]http://www.schultze.us/baseball flash.flv[/flv]

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.

“ Our existing models of communication are less an analysis than a contribution to the chaos of modern culture, and in important ways we are paying the penalty for the long abuse of fundamental, communicative processes in the service of politics, trade, and therapy.”1

This is a wonderful book that I reread at least annually.  Carey was one of the most insightful observers of human communication during the second half of the 20th century.  Read his New York Times obituary.  If you are interested in communication and media, you must read this book.

1 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 34.

I recorded this audio interview with Barbara Trepagnier, author of the book Silent Racism, on October 9, 2008, in Grand Rapids, MI. Duration: 13 min 01 sec

Barbara Trepanier

Dr. Trepagnier suggests that “silent racism”—racism by people who are simplistically labeled as “not racist”—fosters institutional racism.  She believes that heightened race awareness is more important in changing racial inequality than judging whether individuals are racist or not.  According to Trepagnier, the categories of racist/not racist are outdated and should be replaced with a continuum that more accurately portrays racial reality.  Read about her book at Amazon.

“I do believe that it is precisely rootedness which gives you ease in multilingual expression or participation in dancing intercourse with very different cultures.  Only when one’s roots are cut or denied or considered as something secondary does the search for the so-called identity, for some kind of inner fitting of the individual upon itself, become an important fantasy.”1

How ironic—that we need to be rooted in one culture in order to conversing with other cultures!  Today, don’t we assume the opposite, namely, that we have to give up our own cultural roots in order to connect with those form other cultures?  Illich adds that we humans need soil to survive the desert.

This book is a fascinating series of conversations with one of the most unique thinkers of the 20th century.  I reread it regularly.

1 David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1992), 197.

By Quentin J. Schultze

I have written over a dozen nonfiction books and am working on a few more.  I also lead workshops on writing faith-related nonfiction books for publication.  Earlier I posted tips 1-5.  Here are five more of the tips that I cover in my workshops.  I hope you find them helpful.

#6 Serve a Particular Audience
Who is your reader?  Imagine your audience even before you write the first chapter.  Picture readers in your mind as you write.  Consider what they are thinking as you write specifically for them.  The best prose is written by someone in particular for others in particular.  (Contrast that with the uninteresting prose in most academic textbooks, which are written by no one in particular for everyone in general; textbooks are increasingly the product of marketers, not writers.)  After all, you’re not writing just for yourself.   If you are, why write a book?  Just keep a journal.  You’ll be much happier, without the stress of trying to get your manuscript published.  Most of my writing is essentially journal material that will never be published.  I write in order to clarify and express my own thoughts to myself and to serve my students.  When I write for publication, however, I imagine the readers.  You can journal to express yourself.   Write books in order to serve a particular audience.

#7 Use Humor Carefully
“You had to be there.”  That’s our excuse when our half-baked attempts at humor fall flat.   Humor is one of the most difficult things to write well.  Satire is probably the most difficult of all. It’s easy to arrogantly offend rather than winsomely illuminate.  Never assume that what’s funny to you will be comical to others.  Always try out your stories to see if others truly find them humorous.

#8 Read Proven Writers
We tend to read what we enjoy and to write like the authors that we read.  Make sure you’re reading the kind of quality prose that you would like to write.  I devour many contemporary books, but I savor classical nonfiction books that have stood the test of time; I read and re-read them.  The latter help me to think and imagine like a proven writer; they flex my literary muscles.  They feed by literary spirit.  They inspire me to write wisely and well.   I also need to make sure that I’m reading “up” so I don’t write “down” to readers.   It’s so much easier to tickle readers’ ears than to touch their hearts and open their minds.  If you write as a Christian, you simply must read authors such as C.S. Lewis and Søren Kierkegaard.  If you’d like a book beyond scripture to feed the writer in you, buy a copy of Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard.  If you didn’t buy that book, do it now on Amazon for about $14 (see latest price at the bottom of this page).  No kidding.  As Kierkegaard puts it, “Life very much depends upon being alert to catch one’s cue.”  Or try this quote from the book, “The true Christian is one who becomes a sacrifice in order to call attention to the truth that Christ is the only true sacrifice.”

#9 Clarify Your Real Purpose
Why are you writing?  There are many fine reasons—including to inform, persuade, and delight readers.  Perhaps the many worthwhile purposes actually boil down to one: to serve others.  That’s why I get a bit concerned when a writer makes statements like these: “I just want to express my opinion.”  “I’ve got to tell my story.”  “God is calling me to write this book.”  Writing is a type of service that requires a lot of effort to do well.  Many people feel called to write a book for publication.  But who’s the caller?  What’s the caller’s message?  We don’t always hear correctly.  We fool ourselves.  So listen again.  Question whether or not you’re merely pleasing yourself or you’re really serving others.  As I see it, a calling is a moral obligation to serve others.  I wrote a book about that.

#10 Write with the End in Mind
One of the biggest problems especially for new writers is that they don’t know what they’re  writing until after they’ve written it—and even then they’re often not so sure.  They write in order to determine what to say.  That’s not all bad.  The process of writing always requires research and exploration, retrospection and introspection.  But you need to know in advance of drafting the actual manuscript what it is that you are aiming to say.  Otherwise you’ll write in circles,  revising to the point of exhaustion, like a cat maniacally chasing its tail until it eventually has to give up (and then the cat pretends like nothing happened).  I made this mistake once and ended up dumping my entire book manuscript in the trash and starting over from scratch.  As you conduct your research, make notes, and create possible manuscript outlines, be sure to discern your conclusion.  Then begin writing the manuscript.  Next, revise your manuscript to make sure that you’ve said what you set out to say.  Finally, revise the manuscript again, especially for style, so you say it well.  Then every draft will become a less-frustrating opportunity to clarify what you have already said but could have said more lucidly, convincingly, or artfully.

Thanks for reading.  I hope these suggestions serve you well.  You might want to read tips 1-5 if you found these helpful.

— Quentin Schultze

P.S.  Now buy that Kierkegaard book I mentioned above!  You’ll be a better writer if you read it.  You’ll be a better person, too, but that’s another story yet to be written.