Media, Journalism, and Communication E-Book

Read Mercer Schuchardt

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 189

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In an age of accelerating information and increasing technology, media matters more now than ever. In this book, Read Mercer Schuchardt helps us navigate the digital age from a distinctly Christian perspective, offering guidance for becoming wise users of media rather than simply being used by media. Highlighting the importance of studying and understanding communication arts and how they are changing, this book will help you think creatively about using media effectively for the sake of the gospel, the church, and the world. Part of the Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition series. 

Leseprobe

MEDIA, JOURNALISM, AND COMMUNICATION

A STUDENT’S GUIDE

Read Mercer Schuchardt

Media, Journalism, and Communication: A Student’s Guide

Copyright © 2018 by Read Mercer Schuchardt

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Jon McGrath, Simplicated Studio

First printing 2018

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from The New American Standard Bible®. Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture references marked NLV are from The New Life Bible, copyright © 1969 by Christian Literature International.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3514-7 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3517-8 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3515-4 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3516-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Schuchardt, Read Mercer, author.

Title: Media, journalism, and communication: a student’s guide / Read Mercer Schuchardt.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, [2018] | Series: Reclaiming the Christian intellectual tradition | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017031568 (print) | LCCN 2017046808 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433535154 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433535161 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433535178 (epub) | ISBN 9781433535147 (tp) | ISBN 9781433535178 (ePub) | ISBN 9781433535161 (Mobipocket)

Subjects: LCSH: Communication—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Mass media—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Communication—Study and teaching (Higher) | Mass media—Study and teaching (Higher) | Learning and scholarship—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Education, Higher—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: LCC P94 (ebook) | LCC P94 .S38 2018 (print) | DDC 302.23071/1–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031568

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

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To my students

CONTENTS

Cover PageTitle PageCopyrightDedicationSeries PrefaceIntroduction: On Pedagogical Elegance1   Why Media Matters More Now Than Ever Before2   Social Media in the Age of Global Information Warfare3   Christian Identity as the Antidote to Digital Identity4   You Are Being Lied To. What Is the Nature of the Lie?Questions for ReflectionGlossaryResources for Further StudyGeneral IndexScripture IndexBack Cover

SERIES PREFACE

RECLAIMING THE CHRISTIAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

The Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition series is designed to provide an overview of the distinctive way the church has read the Bible, formulated doctrine, provided education, and engaged the culture. The contributors to this series all agree that personal faith and genuine Christian piety are essential for the life of Christ followers and for the church. These contributors also believe that helping others recognize the importance of serious thinking about God, Scripture, and the world needs a renewed emphasis at this time in order that the truth claims of the Christian faith can be passed along from one generation to the next. The study guides in this series will enable believers to see afresh how the Christian faith shapes how we live, how we think, how we write books, how we govern society, and how we relate to one another in our churches and social structures. The richness of the Christian intellectual tradition provides guidance for the complex challenges that believers face in this world.

This series is particularly designed for Christian students and others associated with college and university campuses, including faculty, staff, trustees, and other various constituents. The contributors to the series will explore how the Bible has been interpreted in the history of the church, as well as how theology has been formulated. They will ask: How does the Christian faith influence our understanding of culture, literature, philosophy, government, beauty, art, or work? How does the Christian intellectual tradition help us understand truth? How does the Christian intellectual tradition shape our approach to education? We believe that this series is not only timely but that it meets an important need, because the secular culture in which we now find ourselves is, at best, indifferent to the Christian faith, and the Christian world—at least in its more popular forms—tends to be confused about the beliefs, heritage, and tradition associated with the Christian faith.

At the heart of this work is the challenge to prepare a generation of Christians to think Christianly, to engage the academy and the culture, and to serve church and society. We believe that both the breadth and the depth of the Christian intellectual tradition need to be reclaimed, revitalized, renewed, and revived for us to carry this work forward. These study guides will seek to provide a framework to help introduce students to the great tradition of Christian thinking, seeking to highlight its importance for understanding the world, its significance for serving both church and society, and its application for Christian thinking and learning. The series is a starting point for exploring important ideas and issues such as truth, meaning, beauty, and justice.

We trust that the series will help introduce readers to the apostles, church fathers, Reformers, philosophers, theologians, historians, and a wide variety of other significant thinkers. In addition to well-known leaders such as Clement, Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards, readers will be pointed to William Wilberforce, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, Johann Sebastian Bach, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, George Washington Carver, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Michael Polanyi, Henry Luke Orombi, and many others. In doing so, we hope to introduce those who throughout history have demonstrated that it is indeed possible to be serious about the life of the mind while simultaneously being deeply committed Christians.

These efforts to strengthen serious Christian thinking and scholarship will not be limited to the study of theology, scriptural interpretation, or philosophy, even though these areas provide the framework for understanding the Christian faith for all other areas of exploration. In order for us to reclaim and advance the Christian intellectual tradition, we must have some understanding of the tradition itself. The volumes in this series seek to explore this tradition and its application for our twenty-first-century world. Each volume contains a glossary, study questions, and a list of resources for further study, which we trust will provide helpful guidance for our readers.

I am deeply grateful to the series editorial committee: Timothy George, John Woodbridge, Michael Wilkins, Niel Nielson, Philip Ryken, and Hunter Baker. Each of these colleagues joins me in thanking our various contributors for their fine work. We all express our appreciation to Justin Taylor, Jill Carter, Allan Fisher, Lane Dennis, and the Crossway team for their enthusiastic support for the project. We offer the project with the hope that students will be helped, faculty and Christian leaders will be encouraged, institutions will be strengthened, churches will be built up, and, ultimately, that God will be glorified.

Soli Deo Gloria

David S. Dockery

Series Editor

INTRODUCTION: ON PEDAGOGICAL ELEGANCE

Today’s student needs to have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything in order to be able to do anything.

Marshall McLuhan

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28 (NIV)

Media—Plural of medium, that which goes between. Any man-made object, tool, or process. Media are comprised of technologies, which are specific technical means for achieving specific technical ends.

Communication—The art of making many one. A form of rhetoric from a sender that attempts to persuade the receiver of a given relationship between the symbol and the symbolized.

Journalism—The daily news, so called because the time needed for production of the physical newspaper was one day, making today’s newspaper yesterday’s news. In digital culture, this is the newsfeed, updated by the minute and often initially reported before the event itself is over.

Look in your college viewbook or website, and somewhere you’ll find one of the ultimate goals of your institution: to turn you into a lifelong learner. Your school says this, like most schools do, because it is indeed a noble and worthy aspiration. The only problem is that your school, like most schools these days, has no real idea how to achieve it.

But the ancient world did have a program. Around five hundred years before Christ, and fifty years before Malachi wrote his last prophetic words, the ancient Greeks devised a system that would guarantee the student, regardless of grade-point average, to become a lifelong learner. They understood that in order to teach the student the maximum number of individual-to-particular relations using the fewest number of subject areas, they would have to create a system that was cumulative, integrative, and irreducibly complex. In what later evolved into today’s modern university, their system stood for centuries as the one best way to impart the knowledge of unity in all the diversity of the world around them.

This system, of course, was the original liberal arts. The liberal arts (Latin: artes liberales) were those subjects worthy and essential for a free person to know in order to participate in civic life, such as debating in public, defending yourself in court, serving on a jury, and doing your military service. Liberal arts didn’t just mean free; it also meant the opposite of the servile arts (Latin: artes vulgares). If you were free, you studied these particular subjects to understand the entire cosmos and increase your wonder at the beauty, goodness, and intricacy of the created world. If you were not free, then you were a slave, and you studied the servile arts in order to better serve your masters. The world was divided into the power relationship of master or slave, and if you wanted to maintain your freedom, it behooved you to study well. And being “free” to study well presumed that you had the free time necessary to pursue the life of the mind precisely because you had slaves (or servants) to do the cooking, cleaning, and household and agricultural chores necessary to keep things running. The life of the mind was a much more expensive proposition back before robotic vacuum cleaners.

The seven liberal arts were made up of the trivium and the quadrivium. In many ways this was a perfect separation of form and content, or we might say it constituted a complete curriculum satisfying the needs of both the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

The trivium consisted of the three language-based studies: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. You can think of these at the simplest level: letters, words, sentences. They were, to be sure, much more than this. But you attend grammar school to learn your basics, you attend middle school to think clearly and logically, and you attend high school and college in order to master the art of persuasion, or rhetoric. You can’t move on to the next level until you graduate from the previous one.

But the trivium was anything but trivial. It was cumulative, integrative, and irreducibly complex. It was also, if you look closely, an attempt to get learners to focus on the good, the true, and the beautiful: Grammar was the key to good sentences. Logic was the key to finding the truth of a situation. Rhetoric was the key to making beautiful speeches, and by extension, beautiful things (from Parthenons to democratic systems to political citizens). You couldn’t do the next thing until you had mastered the previous thing. And you couldn’t do the last thing if you forgot the first things. (This is why you are encouraged to “spell-check” your papers before turning them in.) But the key thing to notice is that, being language-based, the trivium was historically contingent, and therefore the subject of study would depend entirely upon where and when you happened to be born. To study the trivium in ancient Greece was not the same as studying the trivium in nineteenth-century Germany, which is not the same as studying it today in post-postmodern America: Know w’am sayin’?

But if language taught you the idiom and metaphor of your culture, and how to communicate in formal and informal settings, then you still needed the quadrivium to fill in the blanks, or the “what” of things. For this you would study the four subjects of math, geometry, music, and astronomy. To today’s student with fifty or more majors to choose from, this old list of four typically looks like a random collection of “things the ancients thought worthy” but not much more. In truth, these four subjects, in this particular order, were the true genius of the system. The quadrivium, you see, is comprised entirely of number-based subjects of study. God, in his wisdom, made one world, and it is comprehensible to us to the degree that it is manifested in the universal and unwavering language of objectivity, or numbers. As such, the quadrivium represented a plan of study that was profoundly intelligent:

Math—the study of number

Geometry—the study of number in space

Music—the study of number in time

Astronomy—the study of number in motion (in space and time)

This project, like the trivium, was cumulative, integrative, and irreducibly complex. But it was also something more: it took the student from inside his head to placing his head into the cosmos itself. Math is the study of pure abstractions, which are merely concepts in one’s head. In reality, there is no such thing as a “number,” only the concept of number. So these calculations, performed in your head, can be performed using objects in the real world, but by and large to understand it, you need to be able to perform these calculations instantly, wordlessly, and accurately. Then, when the student studies geometry, he is suddenly able to leave the acoustic realm of concept and enter the visual realm of percept. In a point, a line, a surface, or a volume you suddenly “see” numbers in a way you never could before when they remained pure concept.

The word geometry actually meant “the measure of the earth,” which will come up again later in the study of the planets, or “spheres” as the ancients called them. And for the ancients, this study of geometry was intimately connected with the growth of biological life itself. It could be called a point, a line, a surface, or a volume, or it could be called what was observed in nature’s growth cycle: a seed, a stem, a leaf, or a fruit. The perceptual observation of nature confirmed the objective truth of geometry: clearly there was a pattern here that was intended by the Designer.

And then the student picked up his violin. Or lyre. Or harp. Or drums. And while musical instruments vary from culture to culture, and one would not play the same instrument in ancient Rome as in modern Japan, the fundamental thing is the same everywhere: organizing noises by keeping them in time. Music is “the study of number in time” because without the backbone of a consistent tempo, there simply is no music. In 1662, Thomas Fuller wrote that “music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.”1 Even an experimental musician like John Cage is demonstrating this when he goes against convention and makes musical exceptions that prove the rule. You may attend the concert, but you wouldn’t put that stuff on your iPod. Why? Because you can’t dance to it; it has no rhythm. But music is also much more than just the study of number in time. Music is how a student would incorporate the truth of numbers into his very body; it is where he first learned to re-incarnate the concept as percept. And in harmony with other musicians, it was an allegory of how he would learn to be part of the body politic.

For example, the conductor stops the music if just one player is off beat. And then you start again. And then when everybody gets it, the music soars and you feel yourself a member of something in which the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. You intuitively recognize that you need the other people in society in order to make this beautiful music. And they need you. In biblical terms, this is what is meant by everyone being a different part of the body, but all of them being important (1 Cor. 12:12–27).

So far, the ancient liberal arts program has taught the student how to communicate in his mother tongue, how to think concretely and abstractly, how to correlate concept with percept through geometry, how to incorporate these concepts and percepts into his body with music, how to be a part of a whole with other musicians, and now he is ready for the final study: astronomy.

Astronomy is the study of number in motion. And this motion takes place in space and time because the planets are actually in space and their movements can be measured in time—in fact, how long they take to move is the very essence of what defines time as we know it. The length of one year is 365 days, but that is just the amount of time it takes for the planets to revolve around each other, from our point of view. To understand how they worked was to peer into the very mind of the maker and see how the designer (gods and goddesses to the ancients, God to the monotheists) designed the entire system. Astronomy was also called “the music of the spheres.” By this the ancients meant that the way the planets were arranged in mathematical order revealed the grand mastery, or musicianship, of the designer.

It is also worth noting that the seven liberal arts coincided with the seven ancient planets, the seven musical notes, the seven muses, and numerous other groups of seven. In AD 27, the Romans built the Pantheon, the temple for “all the gods” (by which they meant seven): from the ancient world up through the Middle Ages, the symbolic value of these correspondences was inseparable from the high degree of psychological reassurance the average citizen had in knowing that the world made sense. And these seven studies were all precedent to the ultimate study—theology—in which the student could approximate an understanding of the very mind of God by taking the first seven studies seriously.

In some sense, we might even say that the quadrivium constituted the objective truth of reality, one reason why theology was called “the queen of the sciences” up through the medieval period. God, if he were to be taken seriously, must have spoken objectively, clearly, and universally in his creation: he must therefore have “spoken” in the objective language of numbers and math. So by studying the four number-based studies of the quadrivium, you would be more and more qualified to perceive how it all fit together. It was only later in the seventeenth century and beyond that theology was demoted to one of the lower-paid levels of the humanities, where it ultimately became a subset of rhetorical interpretation.

The quadrivium, being number based, was therefore relatively ahistorical and noncontingent upon cultural factors such as the time and place of birth in history. So while studying the trivium in ancient Greece would be very different from studying the trivium in medieval England, the study of math and geometry would be largely the same. While musical instrumentation and styles changed throughout history, the student was still, always and everywhere, studying how to keep the beat, to keep number in time, using his body (fingers and/or mouth) on either a stringed or wind instrument of some sort, unless he was the drummer, in which case he used all of his body and was the very backbone of the band.

Whether you currently value these seven subject areas or not, you should nevertheless be able to see the nature and pedagogical elegance of the ancient program. How can we transmit to the young a sense of unity in the great diversity that we find in the cosmos? How can we give them a golden thread that will hold it all together in their understanding? And how can we do this using the smallest number of subject areas so as to minimally burden their young and developing minds? And finally, how can we do this in such a way that it produces that most desirable of effects, the creation of lifelong learners?

The answer to all these questions was the cumulative, integrative, progressive, and irreducibly complex nature of the seven liberal arts, and for around twenty centuries, it did truly fulfill the meaning of the term elegance: maximal structural integrity using minimal material means. The ancients’ pedagogical elegance was just this because it gave the student the highest understanding of everything using the smallest number of anything; it gave them the greatest number of universals using the least number of particulars. The reason it produced the effect of becoming a lifelong learner was that it taught the secret of the universe: that nothing is outside the scope of the interconnectedness of all things. And if nothing was irrelevant, then nothing was boring. If you had a liberal arts education, then by studying just seven subjects you were now suddenly interested in all of them. You went to graduate school. You became a student of life. You didn’t care about grades, you cared about knowledge. And along the way, you became useful to society rather than being another glazed-over Internet zombie, or what comedian Louis C. K. calls a “noncontributing zero.”

In fact, there was only one problem with the ancient liberal arts system, and it was that it reduced the world to the master-slave dialectic alluded to earlier. For reasons beyond an individual’s control, one was either among the in-crowd or the out-crowd, among the few or the many, free or slave. And it was into this Greco-Roman world that a new teacher, a Jewish rabbi from Palestine, came and showed an even more elegant way.