The New Media Frontier (Foreword by Hugh Hewitt) E-Book

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 405

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

A Pew Study reports that only 2% of America's twelve million bloggers claim "religion, spirituality or faith" as their main topic. This leaves a great mission field in cyberspace, say contributors to The New Media Frontier, because the latest forms of communication present so many opportunities to promote the cause of Christ in other topics and fields. Before blindly jumping in, however, Christians need to weigh the possibilities against the consequences, and then proceed with the practical discernment and grace this book provides. With a foreword by national radio host Hugh Hewitt-who has been at the forefront of the new media movement among Christians-editors Roger Overton and John Mark Reynolds (along with an impressive list of other new media experts) survey the current landscape and explore specific areas in which God's people can creatively expand their reach to a lost world. By stressing the urgency for Christian involvement, unearthing the dangers, and advising readers on how to use this media with different audiences, this book equips believers to advance, demonstrate, and utilize the Christian worldview in this exciting realm.

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“This wonderful book explains how a new technology of communication is revolutionizing our culture, and how Christians can and must use the new media properly to spread the good news.”

—PHILLIP E. JOHNSON, Professor Emeritus of Law, University of California, Berkeley; author, Darwin on Trial

“The New Media Frontier is a much needed book that looks at the historical, philosophical, and biblical why’s behind the rising communication forms of blogging, vlogging, and podcasting. These are powerful opinion expressions and tools that can be used for good, bad, and ugly purposes. So we’d better be prayerfully and intelligently thinking about the words we type or say. All persons with a computer, whether living in a major city or in an unpopulated rural area, now all have the same instant ability and potential to build, encourage, challenge, or tear down others to an unlimited audience on the Internet. You will not look at blogging, vlogging, or podcasting the same way again after reading this book.”

—DAN KIMBALL, author, They Like Jesus but Not the Church

“The New Media Frontier provides us with expert insight into the new media revolution transforming our lives and today’s culture and how it can be used as an effective communication tool for advancing the love and truth of God’s Kingdom.”

—ANDREW JACKSON, author, Mormonism Explained: What Latter-day Saints Teach and Practice

“Can’t tell a URL from an MP3? Here’s a place to start.”

— MARVIN OLASKY, Provost, Editor in Chief, World magazine

The New Media Frontier

Copyright © 2008 by John Mark Reynolds and Roger Overton

Published by Crossway Books a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 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: Chris Tobias

Cover illustration: iStock

First printing, 2008

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version®. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-0211-8ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2214-7PDF ISBN 978-1-4335-0486-6Mobipocket ISBN 978-1-4335-0469-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The new media frontier : blogging, vlogging, and podcasting for

Christ / John Mark Reynolds and Roger Overton, editors.

p. cm.

Based on the 1st annual GodBlogCon held in Oct. 2005 at Biola University.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4335-0211-8 (tpb)

1. Mass media in religion—United States. 2. Mass media—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Reynolds, John Mark, 1963– . II. Overton,

Roger, 1982– . III. GodBlogCon (1st : 2005 : Biola University)

BV652.97.U6N49 2008

261.5'2—dc22 2008004193

To HUGH HEWITTour inspiration for exploring the frontier.

Contents

Foreword

Hugh Hewitt

Introduction

Roger Overton

PART ONE THE LANDSCAPE OF NEW MEDIA

1 The New Media: First ThoughtsJohn Mark Reynolds

2 The Future of New MediaJohn Mark Reynolds

3 Three Cautions among the Cheers: The Dangers of Uncritically Embracing New MediaMatthew Lee Anderson

4 Beginner’s Toolbox: BloggingJoe Carter

5Beginner’s Toolbox: New Media—Podcasting, Video Podcasting, and MoreTerence Armentano and Matthew Eppinette

PART TWO ENGAGING NEW MEDIA

6 Theological BloggingDavid Wayne

7 Blog as Microwave CommunityTod Bolsinger

8 Pastors and the New MediaMark D. Roberts

9 Navigating the Evolving World of Youth Ministry in the Facebook-MySpace GenerationRhett Smith

10 Evangelism and Apologetics in the New MediaRoger Overton

11 Professors with a New Public: Academics and New MediaFred Sanders

12 Virtual Classrooms, Real LearningJason D. Baker

13 Politics and JournalismScott Ott

14 Blogging and BioethicsJoe Carter and Matthew Eppinette

15 Social Justice, Social Relief, and New MediaStephen Shields

About the Contributors

Glossary

FOREWORD

IT IS THE BEST OF TIMES. It is the worst of times. Some even believe it is the end of times.

I don’t know about the latter, but I am certain about the former two observations.

These years wherein the full reach of instant and global communication was unleashed on the world, along with access to anyone with an Internet connection, will be studied for centuries, provided we retain the civilization that allows such study and the power generation to provide it.

And among church historians, the pioneers of Christian missional effort in the virtual world will receive quite a lot of attention for all that they did right, all that they did wrong, and all that they failed to see coming. Many of the pioneers of that effort are here in these pages. As we approach the 500th anniversary of Luther’s nailing of his theses to the Wittenberg castle door, we are reminded of the immense numbers of years since then and his undeniable impact on the people of God, no matter what one’s Christian denomination is. Luther was among the first to launch the enormous change brought about by a technology jump—the printing press—and just like Luther and those who followed him on both sides of the Reformation disputes, this first generation of Christian bloggers and virtual missionaries are laying down precedents and carving paths through dense woods. We have to hope they are the right ones.

Even as Christian new media launch, we have to see the virtual world for what it is—a deeply degraded place, even a dangerous one.

At this writing the world of commercial pornography is under assault, its sales and thus its profits plummeting, but this is no cause to cheer wholeheartedly. The revenues are plummeting because a slew of new free porn sites are exploding on the virtual scene, offering thousands of hours of the hardest-core porn for free, adopting the model of YouTube and flooding the Web every few weeks with what certainly must be more (and more distinctively bizarre) porn than the entire world had ever produced in its collective history prior to 1900, and perhaps even later.

An academic elite on edge over minute changes in global temperature is wholly indifferent to this tidal wave of porn. Global porning gets zero headlines even as global warming triggers conference after conference, film after film, award after award.

What if, as Christians suspect, porn scars the soul and disfigures the mind? What if, as experts in the field say, it can addict a young teenage boy in a very, very short time?

Then the years since the arrival of the Internet will have been the triumph of that particular evil, and the modest success of Christian blogging should not obscure that awful fact.

I have a friend who remarked to me long ago that Satan arranged for the demise of the Berlin Wall because he was doing better on our side. Would you be surprised to see the Web celebrated by Screwtape if Lewis were still writing today?

Then there is that small problem of the global jihadist virtual network, a universe of web sites peddling hate and intolerance, with many even encouraging the worst forms of extremism—the suicide murder of innocents. “The Terror Web,” as Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright calls it, is empowering the worst of the Islamist extremists behind the 9/11 attacks and hundreds of other outrages.

The new media also comprise a force for polarization in Western politics, for crude and vulgar political speech, and for anonymous cruelty and quick-tempered vitriol.

And, yes, the doctrinal disputes that have long riven the body of Christ have moved online, adding velocity and ferocity to a half-century of clashes over the meaning of Christ’s message and life.

In other words, the virtual world is a distorted mirror of the real world, which is itself a distorted and deeply broken version of the original model.

And it is exactly where Christ calls his best and brightest to be—among the pornographers and their victims, alongside the jihadists and their targets, side by side with the casualties of the new incivility in politics and theology.

This book brings together the thoughtful observations of the first wave of Christian new media activists and contributors, and they are an astonishingly talented group. As a Christian, I am grateful for their labors. As a broadcast journalist, I am humbled by their deep talent with communication skills. As a believer in the Western ideal, I hope for their success.

“How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin once contemptuously asked.

“What chances have the Christians on the new media terrain?” postmodern skeptics might well pose as a successive question.

Be sure to revisit that question after you have read this volume.

Hugh Hewitt

INTRODUCTIONN

WHAT HAS BEEN IS WHAT WILL BE, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

This may seem like an odd quote with which to begin a book on new media. Certainly I could have chosen something more inspiring, like the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20) or “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” (Romans 10:15). While the contributors to this book do hope to inspire, we hope to inspire in the right way, and to do so we must start by understanding that the new media are not all that new.

New media are nothing more than means of communication, which we’ve been doing for a very long time. All that is new is the form and availability of communication. Instead of writing to a local paper hoping to get an opinion published, many people have turned to publishing their thoughts on the Internet (primarily on blogs). Internet technology has enhanced textual communication by allowing anyone to publish their opinions. Likewise, YouTube is online television, podcasting is online radio, and Facebook and MySpace are online networks of mailing lists, but they are all democratized. With the click of a few buttons, each of us may add our voice to the media.

In the world of the Internet anyone with access can produce and publish information that is viewable by millions of people around the globe. Today we have direct access to eyewitnesses of news events worldwide, the speculations of scholars, and daily mood updates of old friends from high school (at least, we think that’s how we know them). But not only do we have access to such things, we can also respond to this information and repackage it in our own distinctive ways.

Certainly this democratized technology has its benefits. Most obvi- ously, we can note that any one person can preach the gospel throughout the world via the new media. We can more easily stay in touch with relatives and people within our own church communities. We can receive updates more regularly from missionaries who are in need of our spiritual and financial support. The opportunities to use new media to advance and demonstrate the Kingdom of God are significant, and we’ll discuss many of them in this book.

If we were simply to leave it at that, though, we would be uncritical stewards of this new technology. It is far too easy to embrace the intended benefits of new technology without noticing the unintended consequences. One such consequence is that frequent readers of blogs become accustomed to brief, cursory thoughts and lose their appetite for longer, deeper commentaries. We might expect, then, that in the long run people will generally have a lower tolerance for complex lines of argument and will only give ear to pithy sound bites.

Through social networks like Facebook and MySpace we can easily keep in touch with hundreds of friends and family members. But such platforms make it easier to neglect spending time with people face-to-face. We are exchanging live human interaction for artificial Internet relationships. While the new media merely give us a new way of doing something we’ve done before, they establish both new opportunities and new consequences.

What are Christians to make of these changes in media? Should we dive in immediately and use every sort of media to the fullest extent for the sake of the gospel? Or should we wait and see what the consequences of new media might be before considering our participatios inherently tied to the past, it will be helpful for us to reflect on a similar situation in church history to help formulate answers for today.

Perhaps the most notable advances in textual communication were those by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-1400s. When the name Gutenberg comes up, most people tend to think of the printing press, a device that enabled pressmen to print up to 250 sheets per hour. Using his skills as a goldsmith, Gutenberg also developed the first hand molds used for creating the movable type needed in large quantities for the printing press. Additionally, he has been attributed with producing an oil-based ink more suitable for the press.

The most obvious benefits (from a Christian perspective) of these inventions took form shortly after a Roman Catholic monk, Martin Luther, nailed an academic complaint to a church door in 1517. Since his article was written in Latin, only scholars would have been able to read and respond to the document. But a new era of textual communication had emerged, and due to the work of an unknown translator and a printing press, copies of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses could be found throughout Europe within a month.

Textual information had once only been the domain of scholars and was also time-consuming and costly to produce. However, the advent of the printing press meant that the same information was now available to anyone who could read (a demographic that was growing dramatically), and more quickly and cheaply than ever before. Once Luther translated the Bible into German, common people could judge for themselves whether Luther’s criticisms of the Church were accurate.

A longer list of benefits provided by Gutenberg’s printing press could be provided, but it’s important also to reflect on some of the unintended consequences. Many of the consequences were beneficial. Features such as page numbers and indexes began to be added to books since texts were becoming standardized. Gutenberg’s movable type led to the creation of various fonts, and when thinner fonts were developed, that meant that books could be printed on fewer pages, again saving time and cost.

However, the ability to widely distribute ideas meant that harmful ideas could spread as quickly as helpful ones. Many people credit Martin Luther with many great writings that challenged Roman Catholic authority with sound doctrine. But not all of his contributions were praiseworthy. One of his books was titled On the Jews and their Lies, a book that encouraged hatred and violence against Jewish people. Just as the printing press helped spread knowledge of the Bible to popular society, so too did it help spread anti-Semitism across Germany.1

As it was during the time of the Reformation, the democratization of information through technology will bring about both good and harm. Such lessons from the past are available for our instruction, and we would be unwise to ignore them as they can help guide us today.

Hugh Hewitt drew the connection well: “What is really going on is an information reformation similar in consequence to the Reformation that split Christianity in the sixteenth century. The key to that Reformation was the wide dissemination of Scripture among an increasingly literate laity. Today we do not have a canon, but we do have an appetite for information, the arrival of a new technology of distribution, and a million willing content providers.#8221;2

If we are going to seek God’s glory during the dawn of this new technology, we cannot use it uncritically. God’s people must be astute observers, seeking to keep in mind not only the benefits of our new abilities to communicate, but also what consequences we might not intend to bring about by their use. Yet in our critical stance, we cannot stand aside to wait and see what happens. If Christians are not on the forefront of this new technology to advance God’s Kingdom, some other kingdom will be advanced through it. We must go forward thoughtfully, seeking to use whatever new technology is developed for God’s glory.

It is to this end that we seek to inspire you in the right way. We’d like to offer some direction for how Christians can use the new media with discernment and grace. Part One of the book will further explain new media in general. Dr. John Mark Reynolds begins with a chapter examining the history of human communication in order to provide a fresh perspective on what new media really means. In the second chapter John Mark looks to the future of new media and stresses the urgency for Christian involvement before the opportunities vanish.

Matthew Anderson contributes our third chapter by looking at what dangers new media pose for those who uncritically dive into it. His chapter advocates the careful use of wisdom in consuming and creating digital content. With the foundation laid by these first three chapters, the next two chapters spell out exactly how consumers can become creators in the new media. Joe Carter explains how to blog in Chapter 4, and in Chapter 5 Matthew Eppinette and Terence Armentano explain how to podcast and vlog.

Part Two of the book looks to specific areas in which Christians can utilize new media more thoroughly and specifically. These areas include theology (David Wayne), community (Tod Bolsinger), pastoral ministry (Mark D. Roberts), youth ministry (Rhett Smith), evangelism and apologetics (Roger Overton), academics (Fred Sanders), education (Jason D. Baker), politics (Scott Ott), bioethics (Joe Carter and Matthew Eppinette), and social justice (Stephen Shields).

While these brief explorations of each topic will in no way say everything that could or should be said, we do hope they can help start a process of critical assessment so that when Christians use new media they will do so in a manner consistent with the character and quality of Christ.

This book has its roots in a conference that took place October 2005 at Biola University. That conference was the first annual GodBlogCon, hosted by the Torrey Honors Institute and administrated by Matthew Anderson (MereOrthodoxy.com). The subsequent annual conferences were just as important to the progress of this project, and they were administrated by Dustin Steeve (RightHouse.blogspot.com). These two men are on the front lines of new media ministry, and they have earned our deepest respect and gratitude. We are in debt to the many wonderful people at Crossway who helped this project come to print, including: Justin Taylor, Allan Fisher, Jill Carter, and Ted Griffin. We would also like to thank Joe Carter (EvangelicalOutpost.com) for his help in preparing the Glossary.

Roger Overton

1There is some debate among historians as to just how much influence Luther had on anti-Semitism throughout German history since the Reformation. For more on this, see Johannes Wallmann, “The Reception of Luther’s Writings on the Jews from the Reformation to the End of the 19th Century,” Lutheran Quarterly (Spring 1987).

2Hugh Hewitt, Blog (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005), xvii.

PART ONE

THE LANDSCAPE OF NEW MEDIA

1: THE NEW MEDIA: FIRST THOUGHTS

John Mark Reynolds

www.ScriptoriumDaily.com

WHAT IS THE NEW MEDIA REVOLUTION?IS IT JUST HYPE?

The world of communication is changing quickly. Nobody disputes that. When I started graduate school in the late eighties, I was still using a Commodore 64 with 32K of usable memory. While my students point out that this simply means I am old, it also demonstrates that just twenty-five years ago education was very different from what it is today.

Not much e-mail existed back in the late eighties. By the early nineties e-mail had produced the friendship that would lead to my founding the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.

Not much information was easily available online. I taught an early introduction to philosophy on Q-Link, which used the massive installed base of Commodore computers to form an early network. A good class might include as many as ten or eleven students. This network (but sadly not the class!) evolved into America Online (AOL). Online philosophy is now extensive, and the dialogue is vast.

Not much Greek text was available in my field of ancient philosophy outside of expensive books. Now I use Perseus to research text every week for free.1

Of course, the changes due to new media are not limited to philosophy, a field hardly at the cutting edge of technology. Some of these changes are not earth-shattering but still make life more pleasant. My computer just informed me of the weather forecast for tomorrow through a pop-up window, and the days of waiting in agony for Packer scores is over.

There are two reactions to this kind of change. The first is to dismiss it as unimportant, and the second is to proclaim that it is the beginning of a new age. The dismissive attitude always sounds wiser, while the optimist sounds as if he is trying to sell something.

The problem for the new media pessimist is that he is probably complaining about the new media from his Internet-based journal or on a television show that will be aired on the Net within minutes of his appearance. If he is giving a lecture on the unimportance of the new media revolution, clips from his talk can (and often will) be posted while he is speaking.

Information is so easy to get that anyone under forty is frustrated when it takes more than a few minutes to discover even a relatively obscure fact. When my wife claimed Gwyneth Paltrow was less than forty years of age, I could confirm the claim after the movie using my cell phone and the Internet. That is trivial, but it was not so trivial when I could easily compare local banks’ home appraisals while talking to them on the phone.

This change in the availability of information and the ease of communication is real. In fact, it is so pervasive and has so quickly replaced the world that came before it that it is easy to forget how massive a change it is. The information and communication revolution is changing everything, from how one lives daily life to how one writes an airport novel.

Don’t believe me? Watch reruns of detective shows from before the eighties (pre-cellular phones), and notice how many plot points would be ruined if the detective or victim had access to a cell phone.

Imagine a world where a few reporters can kill a story that does not fit their definition of news and where it is relatively easy for “stars” and personalities to massage their image.

Now recall that Dan Rather could report a story in 2004 about President Bush, but citizens of the new media, many with expertise that CBS did not have, were able to expose the documents that were the basis of the Rather report as almost certain forgeries.

Get used to citizens with video cameras so cheap and small that opposition candidates can afford to shadow their opponents with devices to catch them in a career-ending gaffe like the infamous “macaca” incident that helped end George Allen’s political career.

Hugh Hewitt, professor, lawyer, and talk radio star, wrote a book in 2006 whose title sums up the case for the optimists: Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World.

Hewitt focused on the web log (or blog for short), a kind of online journal that anyone can set up for free. He was right to do so since the rise of the blog meant that any person could set up his own opinion journal with theoretic access to millions. Of course, most blogs are not worth reading, but many provide up-to-the-second eyewitness testimony about the conduct of war, Christian apologetics, and informed pastoral reflections. In the 2008 presidential elections, both parties, but especially the Democrats, found themselves forced to deal with the power of the “net roots.”

Of course, the new media are not limited to printed text. Ask the music industry, which is still trying to come to terms with the digital revolution. In the Torrey class of 2008, few if any students had purchased any music anyplace other than from their computers.

My students spend more time on YouTube than with the dying “major” networks. Consumers can easily become producers in this environment. One of my former students, Josh Sikora, creates high-demand content for YouTube from his modest apartment that can compete online with George Lucas.

The revolution is here, and it is real, but what does it mean? What will the implications be for Christendom2 and for the church?

Philosophers like to ask big questions.

We also like to make sense of changes and suggest what these changes mean. At this stage of the development of new media, all thinking must be a sort of playful philosophizing because the change is so new and so little hard research has been done. But it is my belief that while technology changes, the essence of men does not. The past can be of some help in speculating about what the future may hold, and even speculation might help start the discussion that this topic needs within Christendom.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY NEW MEDIA?

You can know something without defining it.3I know that my old vinyl Amy Grant album is not part of the new media revolution but that my Badly Drawn Boy download for my iPod is. My new Madden 2008 Wii game is new media, but the Sorry board game we just played is not.

Definitions can help us think about a thing with more precision. “The new media revolution” is a catchphrase, perhaps a dated one, but it is the best available. It covers a wide range of activities from my ten-year-old playing Runescape to my sixteen-year-old listening to Fred Sanders’s lecture on the Trinity online.

Let me propose a definition of new media that will capture video games, downloaded music, and TiVo.

New media: any material presented to a person in a digital format that can be cheaply and easily accessed, distributed, stored in a variety of ways, manipulated, and consumed by an average person.

New media are digital.

New media are cheap.

New media are easy to access.

New media are almost too easily distributed and are easy to store.

New media can be transformed by the “consumer.” In fact, the new media allow any consumer to quickly become a producer.

It will someday be possible for consumers to easily manipulate their favorite “shows.” Imagine the ability (if you dare) to create new episodes of long-dead TVLand staples such as Green Acres or Star Trek. There will be no reason for a virtual William Shatner to ever stop “playing” Captain Kirk as fans manipulate his image and voice to produce new episodes of Star Trek featuring his character.

These are trivial (and even somewhat frightening!) examples, but the same power will allow the creation of new drama, music, and art forms that cannot even be imagined today. Most of it will be of poor quality (of course, most of the old media was of poor quality too), but nearly universal opportunity to produce will lead to greater chances for greatness.

This much we know. The old media produced My Mother the Car and gave a variety show to Sonny and Cher. Broader access seems unlikely to do much worse in entertainment.

For the serious-minded the new media revolution is a paradise. Cut from the need to produce a mass audience, it is now possible to “publish” as much as one wants on Shakespeare or even Sheldon Vanauken. My piano-playing fifteen-year-old daughter downloads reams of sheet music every week that would have been unavailable to her before the new media revolution. The sounds coming from her analog piano are made richer by the digital revolution.

The ability to “transform” new media content has come with a radical lowering of costs in producing high-quality materials compared to the past.

When I went to high school, the school sent home dittos made on ancient mimeograph machines. These dittos were painstakingly produced by secretaries creating stencils on manual or primitive electric typewriters. The stencils were placed on drums of ink that whirled out copies that were often smudged and hard to read. But since the stencils were hard to make and the job was a daily one, a certain amount of errors were tolerated. This is no longer the case. The reports from my children’s school are stunningly professional compared to the old dittos.

New media are radically democratic, at least for now.

THE LONG TENSION BETWEEN LIVE AND PRESERVED PERFORMANCES

The new media are very important to Western culture because they promise to correct an imbalance between “live” and “preserved” performance. Early in human history almost all performance was live. A performance is live if you experience it while it is being produced, and in ancient times that was the way most people experienced music, storytelling, and education. If you wanted to hear music, you needed a musician. If you wanted to hear a good lecture on a topic, then you needed an expert present to give it.

The “old media” revolution changed this situation. With the rise of writing, painting, and other means of storing “performance” for later consumption, people were able (in some manner) to experience performances without being at the original performance. You did not need a rhapsode to recite the Iliad once Homer’s work was written down in order to hear the poem. If you could read, then Homer could travel with you everywhere, as one copy of The Iliad did with Alexander the Great.

I love theater, and I love film. One art form is live, and the second is (mostly) preserved. Of course, theater might use some “preserved performance” (if it uses pre-recorded sound effects), and film has a live audience interacting with what is happening on the screen. Still, it is safe to say that theater is mostly live and film is mostly preserved performance.

But the example of theater and film also demonstrates the obvious truth that for some time in the West live performance has been declining relative to preserved performance. The situation from ancient times is reversed. Most of us hear almost all our music in a preserved form while hearing very little live. Many of us get most of our information from books and programs that preserve the information distribution of others.

There are advantages to both live and preserved performances. If this is so, then a loss of either would be harmful to society. It is my contention that the new media will correct the favoring of the preserved performance at the expense of the live. Old media was about preservation. The new media favor something very much like incarnation.

It is easy to forget that there are disadvantages to preserved performance. Even old technology, like this very book, has downsides for a culture or an individual. A seminal attack on preserved performance was written by the philosopher Plato who worried that philosophy in books lost something when compared to philosophy learned live in the marketplace with a teacher such as his own beloved Socrates. Plato said:

Take a man who thinks that a written discourse on any subject can only be a great amusement, that no discourse worth serious attention has ever been written in verse or prose, and that those that are recited in public without questioning and explanation, in the matter of the poets, are given only in order to produce conviction. He believes that at their very best these can only serve as reminders to those who already know.

And he also thinks that only what is said for the sake of understanding and learning, what is truly written in the soul concerning what is just, noble, and good can be clear, perfect, and worth serious attention: Such discourses he may have discovered already within himself and then its sons and brothers who may have grown naturally in other souls insofar as these are worthy; to the rest he turns his back. Such a man, Phaedrus, would be just what you and I both would pray to become.4

PLATO’S PROBLEM WITH PRESERVED PERFORMANCE

What is Plato arguing in this passage? It is very odd that a literary genius writing one of the greatest books, Phaedrus, would attack books in his book.

There is a silly opinion about Plato among artists, poets, and communicators that he didn’t like art, poetry, and communication.5Plato worried about preserved discourse but went ahead creating it. He warned about the abuse of texts while creating them. One way he guarded against the dangers of static discourse was to write in the dialogue format. By building his conversations around conversations, Plato intentionally invited the reader to challenge his opinions. He tried to invite the reader into an active conversation with himself by paradoxes and puzzles.

Something more subtle than a rejection of preserved text is at play in Phaedrus. Plato is attacking written communication to argue that something is being lost when you preserve a performance.

First, preserved performance is static. It cannot change to suit the needs of the audience.

As a member of the audience, my interaction with a theater performance can change the play. A “hot audience” makes a play better, and a “cold audience” can do the reverse. Different responses draw attention to different aspects of the play often unseen by cast and crew.

Any actor knows this is the case. I once performed in a play held during a blizzard. Almost nobody showed up, and all the energy was drained from the cast or at least from me. It was the hardest performance of my life since getting three people to laugh is basically impossible, and when they do, solitary laughter in a great space is hard to tell from mockery.

Community is formed between actor and audience in live theater, music, or any other artistic performance. The audience is part of the event.

On the other hand, if I go to a film, whatever my response, the film just keeps rolling. I might be able to impact the viewing pleasure of fellow audience members but not the performers. Recently my wife and I had the misfortune of seeing a film in a theater full of junior high students. They ruined our evening, but they did not change the film. The actors and the production were not impacted by them. This is an important difference between the community formed between actor and audience in theater and the more distant relationship between film actor and filmgoer.

The community of audience and performers in a live performance is something that should not be missed, but our culture is making it ever easier to miss it. Music, for example, is now rarely experienced live, and this cheats us out of a deep musical experience that cannot be duplicated with even a perfect sound system.

When I married my classically trained musician wife, I thought the invention of the compact disc utterly exciting. With proper investment in a sound system, we could experience a performance of any composer—say, Bach—better than that heard in all but the finest concert halls. In my ignorance, musical paradise would dawn: the disc would never wear out, and we could purchase a “perfect” performance and repeat it whenever we wanted. Someday computers would execute the score perfectly, obviating the need for human musicians entirely.

It did not take long for my wife to demonstrate my folly. There is no such thing as a perfect performance of Bach. A score is not like a set of program instructions to be executed by the mechanical musician but a guide to be interpreted by the artist. One does not have to fall into postmodernism to say that authorial intent is not all there is inside a performance.

Most importantly, any canned music misses the interaction of the audience and performers. The response of the audience is not a distraction from hearing the music but is part of the concert. While a rude audience may ruin a concert by coughing or a ringing cell phone, a lively and well-informed audience helps create a unique experience for everyone in attendance.

Plato could point to a more serious problem: the fixity of the music is unfair to the musician. The musician cannot change the tone or color of the music to make it appropriate to her audience. The musician might wish to make her music fit my mood, but she cannot if it is recorded. Her interpretation of a piece might be cheerful when my mood is morose, but the musician cannot minister to my needs because she is caught in one musical mood eternally.

Even more potentially deadly to society is the fact that once fixed it is difficult for the author or artist to monitor the distribution of a performance (including books). This problem must be separated from any issues of government censorship. Whatever the means used to prevent it, most people understand that it is bad news when some people can access certain information.

A preserved performance is passive and waiting to be misused. The author can do little to prevent such a misuse.

Live discourse can be modified for the audience. An adult can change the topic when he sees a child walking into the room. A teacher can leave out key material in a lecture if she suspects that it might be misused by a student in the class. Meanwhile, the manual sits waiting for the terrorist to find information on weapons of mass destruction, and inappropriate entertainment waits for children to find it. There is no way for a book to monitor who picks it up.

A preserved text or performance simply cannot defend itself from misinterpretation or from vandalism. A lunatic attacked Michelangelo’s stunning statue, David, in 1991 and chipped off part of a toe on the left foot. Michelangelo preserved his beautiful vision in a statue and placed it in public. With the glorious good came the opportunity for a great crime against art to be perpetrated by a madman.

Public displays of beauty allow for public profanation. The simple lunatic can become a blasphemer against art and beauty. Even worse is the simpleton who misunderstands the message of the preserved art, so powerful that it commands his attention. In this way, the beauty of the Bible can motivate horrific behavior when the simple-minded misunderstand its message. The powerful work of the artist goes out so that those who have ears to hear can blaspheme the message ignorantly and inappropriately.

BOOKS CAN BE GOOD: THE BENEFITS OF PRESERVED DISCOURSE

I am writing a book chapter about the dangers of writing a book chapter. Obviously I think the risk is worthwhile. The vast benefits of preserved discourse to society far outweigh the liabilities. This is why, despite the problems, nobody is going to quit painting, writing poetry, publishing scientific articles, or sculpting.

The very permanence of preserved discourse allows an argument or community to build knowledge over time. Science would be impossible without preserved speech. Each generation can build on the discoveries of the last. This is also true in theology and art. Old heresies need not be fought in every generation if one attends to the old, preserved arguments. Beauty from one generation can grace the lives of succeeding generations.

Preservation allows original arguments to be extended. There is no need to begin each conversation at the very beginning, though one can if it is helpful. Preservation allows the teacher or student to begin where he or she wishes to begin.

The ability to preserve ideas and art allows a community to create amazing works that are greater (potentially) than the sum of their parts. A film is not just one preserved act of creation but the accumulated contributions of many people. Any Hollywood movie must accumulate small preserved actions in order to create the greater whole. A newspaper is another example of preserved work composed of many smaller parts. The whole paper can be greater than the sum of its parts.

In fact, in the light of these terrific benefits, it is easy to forget the limitations of preserved media. Preserved discourse tempts humankind to avoid community and become isolated from other living humans. The pasty pale academic with no social skills is an obvious example of this problem. Many of my students shun concerts and live in a world defined by the space between their iPod ear buds.

THE PRINTING PRESS TIPPED THE SCALE: THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE TRIUMPH OF PRESERVED MEDIA

For most of Western history, there was a place for both preserved and live encounters with ideas. Most music was heard live, and a lecture was a cheaper way to mass distribute ideas than costly hand-copied books. Isolation necessitated cultural ignorance.

Gutenberg changed all of that. The ability to produce books cheaply tipped the scale in favor of preserved media. Each technological advance, up to the creation of the personal computer, seemed to exacerbate this imbalance.

While the “new” technology allowed for cheaper end products (books and eventually records), producing and especially distributing them were still fairly expensive. Production and distribution came to be concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people. Access to certain ideas was much easier (a good thing), but the decision of which ideas or works of art would be preserved or distributed was in the hands of a few.

When books were hand-copied, anybody could produce a book if they had the time. There were fewer books, but there was bias toward copying only the best works. The slow distribution of books allowed for regional cultures to survive and even thrive. Folk ideas could survive in such a society. A local monastery with one copy of a regional book was not flooded by “imported” books.

When books were reproduced on expensive printing presses, there was a tendency toward uniformity. People could own more books, but they tended to be the same books as everyone else in their language group. Ancient libraries would often contain eccentric tomes (even the sole copies of an entire work), but the modern educated person’s collection soon became much like his neighbor’s.

There was a slow rise in power of the national over the local. This had many positive benefits, as anyone who has ever grown up in an inbred community knows, but something was lost as well. The regional or local can often serve as a breeding ground for new ideas. It can also serve as a conservative redoubt against a national madness such as fascism. Only a Germany where strong regional and local ties had been severely compromised could fall prey to a lunatic idea such as National Socialism.

In Christendom the authority of the university or seminary became dominant over the experiences of the local teacher or parish priest. The Grimm brothers gathered folk tales and preserved them for the future, but the very publication of their work tended to standardize the tales. In the age of Disney, there is no use asking what the children’s tales of West Virginia are because they are the same as those of Los Angeles or New York City.

Slowly there developed an aristocracy of information and performance that began to stamp out competition. The local community theater could not compete with Hollywood. Even national filmmaking could not compete with the massive power of talent concentrated in Los Angeles making expensive films. The local paper could not easily compete with the national news service. Small regional colleges struggled to compete with giant state universities.

Homogeneity in speech and acceptable opinions resulted. Even regional accents could not survive the advent of television and movies, which tended to standardize speech patterns. Powerful media figures could marginalize or promote figures. Billy Graham could be puffed by William Hearst, developing an international ministry partially at the expense of regional ministries.

The dominance of preserved discourse eventually led to mass “orthodoxies.” It was hard for small movements to compete with the power of those who had means to dominate a region with their preferred preserved discourse. Since power tended to be concentrated at national levels, bizarre and dangerous ideologies (such as Stalinism) could thrive by monopolizing the means of distribution of preserved discourse. A region could be neighbors with utterly different ideologies with little fear of “contamination” from the other ideas.

Even in Western nations that valued liberty and multiple opinions, expense in the production and distribution of preserved dialogue limited discourse. Options were criminally few in Stalin’s Russia but, while crucially better, were still not broad by new media standards in Franklin Roosevelt’s America. Fortunately, both World War II and the Cold War marked the triumph of more liberal societies over the possibility of an entire Western World held in thrall to one cruel ideology, whether fascism or communism.

Where there was a consensus about knowledge, stunning good and little harm was done by this situation. In engineering and the sciences, the vast wealth of the twentieth century was unlocked through the standardization and regularization of scientific methods and language.

It was also easy to develop a canon of “greats” in the arts and literature that did much to raise the tone of society. Shakespeare, the Book of Common Prayer, and the King James Bible could be read universally in the English-speaking world. This helped create a common cultural and linguistic framework that unified people groups in the Anglo-sphere.

There was remarkable growth in those areas best served by “preserved discourse” (science, “high” arts), but at a cost to those areas that need some “live” discourse such as the humanities. Folk art finds it difficult to flourish when it is forced into immediate competition with the establishment.

CHRISTIANS NEED LIVE AND PRESERVED PERFORMANCE

Christians do not choose between live and preserved discourse. One is not good and the other bad. Folk religions might denigrate the religion of books, but Christians do not. Some modern hedonists might want to cocoon away from the culture, but no Christians can and be true to the Faith.

Christians are inherently part of a community of believers, the gathering of his visible body on earth. This living body of Christ cannot be preserved in stone or writing but must be experienced in his church. If some Christians are called to a hermitage, they are the exception to emphasize the rule. As Hebrews 10:24–25 commands:

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

The importance of living experience does not mean that Christians are hostile to preserved discourse. After all, Christians are also people of the Book, the Creeds, and centuries of literature, art, and music. Christians live together in a community informed by the preserved goodness, truth, and beauty of the past or other communities.

Because of this balance, Christian orthodoxy cannot survive without both the life of the Spirit and the Word. An overemphasis on texts and dogmas made possible by the rise of “old media” allowed the easy spread of “orthodox” teachings (at first a seeming advantage) but also made difficult any authentic community life within those teachings. By and large, those parts of the church based on personal experience began to suffer while “preserved” things prospered.

Even the so-called individualism of the modern church is not. Tales of conversion are published and religious experiences compared. This tempts churches and individuals to aspire to a standardized “personal” relationship with Jesus Christ. The advent of mass-marketed Christian books and other preserved media limited diversity.

Christian commitments to both “live” and “preserved” culture made it hard for the church to thrive in a culture that came to be overwhelmingly centered in “preserved” discourse. People spent far more time in front of their televisions or other forms of preserved discourse than in interacting with other humans. They did not just forsake the assembling of the brethren but nearly every other assembly.

IMPLICATIONS AS LIVE, OR ALMOST LIVE, DISCOURSE IS REVIVED

New media will rectify this old imbalance. They will empower live, or almost live, discourse. Why? New media put a premium on the reaction and creation of content and not just consumption. Due to the ease of production, they allow and even encourage conversations and not just presentations. This might seem counterintuitive since much of the media appear on screens, like much of the old media, but the ease of creating one’s own content allows for immediate reaction to anything printed on the Internet.