In my persistent effort to understand technology, culture, and Christianity, I spent this winter break digging into The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture by Shane Hipps. It was a great introduction to the roles of media and the impact a medium has on the message.
Much of the basis of the book comes from Marshall McLuhan's 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The basis of the book is that "all forms of media extend or amplify some part of ourselves", that is, they are extensions of our humanity, and as such are much more than neutral purveyors of information, but shape the message through that amplification regardless of the content they convey. Hipps uses McLuhan's frameworks and insight to argue that "the forms of media and technology – regardless of their content – cause profound changes in the church and culture."
Through the course of the first part of the book, Hipps digs into the changing forms of media in our history and their impact. For example, the ideographic and phonetic alphabets helped influence the difference between Eastern (nonlinear, holistic) and Western (logical, linear) world views. Printing introduced objectivity, reason, and abstraction at the expense of tribal, mystical, and sacramental experiences. The advent of the telegraph severed the connection between location and information, and radio retrieved the shared oral tribal or corporate experience. Television and the Internet brought forth image-based communication, which reintroduced "concrete, holistic, and nonlinear approaches to the world." The changing forms of media have even changed the study of epistemology, where knowledge used to be likened to pillars and foundational building blocks and is now considered more accurately described by a web of experience, mirroring the interconnectivity of the Internet.
Hipps then analyzes the impact of the electronic culture on Christianity, noting that electronic media's propensity for imagery influences our perception of conversion, once considered under the modern view a binary event but under the post-modern view a gradual process. Electronic media has intensified right-brained, intuitive, experiential, corporate approaches to faith while weakening belief in an underlying metanarrative and diminishing the role of Paul's logic-infused epistles in favor of the Gospel parables' imagery. He also tackles fundamental elements of our faith such as community, leadership, and worship under the lens of media.
He argues that electronic culture separates us from the present place and distracts us from our present surroundings, and that virtual communities are poor reflections of authentic community:
Our virtual relationships can have a very strange effect. They provide just enough of a connection to paralyze our best efforts at unmediated community. In virtual community, our contacts involve very little real risk and demand even less of us personally. In this sense, we experience the paradox of intimate anonymity. ... There is no need to offer real vulnerability. Community that promises freedom from rejection and makes authentic emotional investment optional can be extremely appealing, remarkably efficient, and a lot more convenient.
In this way, a virtual or electronic community functions a bit like cotton candy: it goes down easy and satiates our immediate hunger, but doesn't provide much in the way of sustainable nutrition.
Authentic community involves high degrees of intimacy, permanence, and proximity; these foster shared memories as well as shared imagination. Virtual relationships weaken or undermine the fundamental pillars of church community and right relationship with one another.
Our relationships with each other naturally extends to leadership, where "emerging churches have taken a steamroller to hierarchies in favor of more collaborative and participatory models of leadership." These changing attitudes are partly the result of electronic media, which weaken the previously established barriers to information control. In some sense, egalitarian access through electronic media is helping Christians participate and lead no longer based on access to information but on personal character, spiritual vitality, gifts, and communal affirmation. Hipps warns that despite the positive effects of these changes, emerging churches may find themselves in danger without leaders with the ability to interpret and apply Scripture through left-brained analysis and synthesis.
These changes to how we view, create, and interact with community also affect how we worship, where we see post-modern churches rethinking how the forms of worship reflect the theology of narrative and community while modern churches mimic them to find similar success among the next generation. In these pursuits, Hipps claims churches walk a fine line. Creating big, splashy services results in spectacle, and as Tex Sample is quoted as saying, "Spectacle creates publics, not communities." True worship must mature past critiques of "being too focused on 'me' and not enough on God" and also recover the equally-important "us". It must challenge the notion that a relationship with Christ is first and foremost a private affair and encompass our relationships not only to God but to one another and the world. Our worship must reflect that we are more than the sum of our parts. We must call people to the center, to the corporate practice, rather than leaving them in the margins. It must move past biases naturally inherent in electronic media culture toward "efficiency, entertainment, and consumption" that result in shallow worship centering on joy and celebration and embrace our heaviest emotions, understanding the complementary relationship of lament and praise.
In all, Hipps doesn't lay out practical solutions for finding the right media, the right message, or the correct balance between the two, but rather presents a framework for asking the right questions, for opening our eyes to the impact media has on our culture and our content and attempting "to understand the things that shape us." He also reminds us of the wonderful relationship between medium and message within Christianity, noting that "the greatest medium of God's revelation to the world is Jesus Christ," where the "medium and message are perfectly united" and that "the Church is God's chosen medium for God's ongoing revelation to the world." Understanding this, as Hipps sees it, "is essential to maintaining our integrity as God's people, particularly as the church falls under the sway of our consumer culture" and seeks to navigate the changing media around us.