Roundtable Discussion on Media

Roundtable Discussion on Media

30 April 2013

T. David Gordon

(The questions supplied to us are in all capital letters; my abbreviated replies are in regular font)

Dr. Gordon:

In order to shield from the harmful effects of television, some parents omit it from their home. Is this an extreme view and would a college student benefit from doing this?

First, a behavior should probably not be considered “extreme” if it was the practice of the entire human race from Adam until the mid-20th century. The overwhelming majority of the entire human race (including probably over 2/3 of those living in the developing world today) lived without television, so there is no reason to think it would be “extreme” to do what nearly everyone has done.

Second, however, the essence of media ecology is captured in the title of one of Marshall McLuhan’s more important works, Understanding Media. To make intelligent decisions about any medium, we must understand it; what it does for us and what it does to us. If it does enough good for us and to us to warrant a certain amount of our time and attention, we should devote that amount of time to it (and no more).

Third, about the only way to know the effect of any medium is to cut it out for six months to a year and see. I have watched television several times (probably less than ten) since the Super Bowl, so I do not prohibit watching it per se. But for me, once every month or six weeks is plenty. I find other leisure practices to be more rewarding, so I ordinarily do something else.

Fourth, is it wise/helpful/good for children to learn to be passive regarding leisure, or active? Should they learn to amuse/entertain themselves, or should they sit passively before electronic or digital devices such as DVRs, TV, etc.?

So, if parents can find a way of limiting the amount of television (we were permitted to watch only one program daily, and the four of us had to agree about that) watched in the home, other humane practices can flourish. Unrestricted television-watching makes people passive, and retards social, linguistic, and intellectual development, and a loving parent would not wish to so retard a child.

Could you summarize the main argument behind Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns?

The main argument (in the book, not behind it) is that electronic music (unlike live music) can be broadcast (or otherwise mass-produced); and therefore someone else (the broadcaster, with his commercial concerns) has surrounded us with unsolicited music, which music, though unsolicited, shapes our neurology and sensibilities, and our expectations of what music sounds like; to the point that anything else just leaves us cold. So the entire tradition of edifying and God-honoring hymnody now sounds foreign to us, and we are liturgically separated from all of the Greek, Latin, German, and English worshippers who antedated us. The guitar, for example, is an instrument whose acoustic properties suit it best to accompany a soloist or a small ensemble; it plainly does not accompany well a large group (fifty or more) of singers. Yet, in a culture surrounded by guitar music, many people just cannot “connect,” emotionally, to anything else, so churches attempt to accompany hymns with an instrument that, for instance, simply could not accompany “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (or many other excellent hymns).

Dr. Drake:

What is the effect of a person listening to their iPod all day long?

Is there any redemptive value in today's pop music or in many of the musical genres of today?

Both:

What has the media done to contemporary Christianity?

Orality is a medium, and the printing press or handwriting is a medium. Presumably, then, the question refers to electronic or digital media(?). Those media, in sufficient exposure, diminish our attention span, our social skills, our linguistic ability, and our intelligence (otherwise, they are fine).

Whenever an act of violence occurs, people blame contemporary video games. While we cannot directly link this, is there some sort of correlation?

I have no idea if there is any correlation or causation between video games and violence; it is sufficient for me to know that they profoundly injure one’s executive attention, and this is reason enough to avoid them insofar as it is humanly possible. The “violence” is done to the self’s neurology, even if not to anyone else.

The use of technology in churches today. What change is happening and what is your take on it? Is it beneficial?

Again, a printed Bible or hymnal is a technology; anything that is made is a technology, because the Greek word τέκνον (technon) comes from the verb τίκτω (tikto), and means “something that is made.” God has disclosed Himself through several means: through the created order, through Holy Scripture, through His Incarnate Son, through apostolic proclamation, and through the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Further, He expressly prohibited the making of “any” likeness of “any”thing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, or in the waters beneath the earth, to be used in a religious manner. He has chosen both the message and the media by which we know Him. If we wish to know Him, we must submit both to the content of His revelation and to the form in which He has put it. Some of the 20th century technologies may have helped the church (the microphone helps older people who are hard of hearing, but Brantly Millegan has recently suggested that the microphone harms the liturgy: “Of Mics and Men: An Argument Against Microphones in the Liturgy,” <http://secondnaturejournal.com/of-mics-and-men-2/); others have manifestly injured it, e.g. printing or displaying the lyrics without the musical score, displaying part of a hymn at a time on some screen, or amplifying a so-called “praise team” to the point that it competes acoustically with the assembled congregation.

To what extent does removing one's self from social media and interacting with the media does it affect your witness? How should Christians engage the utilization of media?

Conversation is a social medium; and I have not removed myself from speaking with other humans. A handwritten letter is a social medium, and I write them with some frequency (Thomas Jefferson wrote 20,000). So the proper question is which media are more likely to permit us to have significant, humane communications with other humans. None of the digital social media foster true human society (Cf. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

(I should also say that the “evangelistic imperative” in the United States is over; everyone in our culture is already reached, so there is little need to sense any urgency to “reach” those who are allegedly unreached. Many people who know perfectly well that Christianity teaches that Christ died for our sins have simply chosen not to believe that message; but they are not “unreached,” they are “unbelievers.” Like the rich young man who went away sorrowful, they have heard the call to discipleship and rejected it. The Christian faith in our culture today is analogous to the Public Library. Anyone who wishes to read a book knows where to go to find one; but many people do not wish to read one. Similarly, anyone interested in religion or Christianity knows perfectly well where to go to learn more, because our churches are just as public as the library. The entire Evangelical tradition, then, needs to chill.)

While we are inundated with information everywhere we go, how can we better process the information the media throws at us?

Electronic and digital media can be broadcast. The average American is exposed to between three thousand and five thousand advertisements daily, according to the New York Times; that is obviously too many to process; we cannot give our concentrated attention to that many things daily. If we choose to do so, we can refuse to give our attention to many of these. We can turn off pop-up ads on the Internet, we can turn off our web-browser or email when doing something else, we can turn off the television; and of course we shouldn’t even have Twitter.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0].

Information has become incoherent, how has the information age effected our ability to use information in analysis?

Analysists suggest that when we are awash in information, it all becomes irrelevant; we become cynics about information and do not trust it or act in terms of it.

Pertinent Bibliography

Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone under Thirty). Tarcher Press, 2008.

Beaudoin, Tom. “Liturgy in Media Culture.” America 24 September 2001. Vol. 185:8, pp. 13-17.

Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America. 1962.

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, vol. 302, number 1 (July/August, 2008), pp. 56-63.

------. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).

Edmundson, Mark. “Dwelling in Possibilities: Our students’ spectacular hunger for life makes them radically vulnerable.” Chronicle of Higher Education online http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i27/27b00701.htm

Gallagher, Winifred. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Gordon, T. David. Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers (Philippsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009).

------. Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Re-Wrote the Hymnal (Philippsburg, NJ: P&R, 2010).

------. “The Praise Team Not Quite Biblical,” forthcoming in Second Nature Journal: An Online Journal for Critical Thinking About Technology and New Media in Light of the Christian Tradition. http://secondnaturejournal.com/

Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and The Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, 2009.

Jackson, Maggie, and Bill McKibben. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Prometheus Books, 2008.

Kirn, Walter, “The Autumn of the Multitaskers,” The Atlantic, November, 2007, available at <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking>.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media : The Extensions of man. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1994.

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York : Vintage Books, 1993.

Rosen, Christine, “The Myth of Multitasking,” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society (Spring, 2008), at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-myth-of-multitasking

Shlain, Tiffany. “Tech’s Best Feature: The Off Switch,” (Harvard Business Review Online, March 1, 2013).

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

Trow, George W. S. Within the Context of No Context (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997).

Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper, 2007.

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