ARTICLES
Q TALKS
DISCOVER Q
EVENTS
All Q Events
Q Nashville 2014
Q Session | Innovate
Q Cast
RESOURCES
Books
Studies
Bible
Church Leaders
Speaking
PARTICIPATE
Praxis Accelerator
Host Conversations
Church
Business
Education
Social Sector
Arts + Entertainment
Science + Tech
Government
Media
Cities
Gospel
Restorers
Tweet
8
Science + Tech
Our Nomadic Existence: How Electronic Culture Shapes Community
by
Shane Hipps
I remember flinching for the dashboard as if that was going to help. The car was careening toward a snake-like elbow in the track. I glanced at the driver expecting him to slam on the brakes and save us from catastrophe. He looked almost bored; I think he may have even yawned. The car glided smoothly in and out of the turn as if it had prepared its whole life for that moment. As he accelerated out of the curve, the driver apologized for not going faster. Apparently, if you’re not wearing a helmet — and I wasn’t — drivers are only allowed to take the track at 70 percent speed. This was part of my “research” for the new account I had been assigned — Porsche Cars North America. At the time, I was working for an ad agency. The people at Porsche had taken us to a racetrack to develop an appreciation for their product. Apart from nearly soiling my drawers, it worked.
My role as an account planner in advertising was to serve as a kind of consumer anthropologist. Basically, I was to keep my finger on the pulse of what consumers influenced and what they were influenced by. There were no rules for this task, no formal training, no manual — just raw intuition, ingenuity, and a dose of insanity. As a result, I got to explore all kinds of strange things.
Much of what I did involved getting consumers from our target demographic to tell me things that they didn’t want me to know about intimate parts of their lives. My task was to unearth what we called “The Leverageable Insight.” Or put another way,
the thing we could best exploit.
Basically, the deeper we probed into people’s lives, the better. When you tap into the most intense or emotionally poignant experiences, you discover the trigger for all consumer impulses. The next task was for the creative team to find a way to associate that deep spiritual or emotional experience with our brand. If we were successful, the consumer soul would imprint to our brand the way a newborn babe imprints to a mother while nursing. In a very real sense, I spent seventy hours a week promoting a kind of counterfeit gospel. I wasn’t offering cheap grace mind you. Ours was an expensive gospel — somewhere between $80,000 and $120,000 depending on what level of salvation you could afford.
It was through a series of events and realizations that I came to terms with the fact that what I was really offering was antithetical to my most deeply held beliefs as a Christian. I was in the engine room of consumer culture — arguably the greatest threat to the gospel the world has ever known. It was a dangerous cocktail of this realization plus the experience of God’s call in my life that led me to leave my lucrative and enjoyable career in advertising to attend seminary and eventually accept my calling as a pastor. That shift felt like spiritual whiplash, but it was also like coming home.
DUSTING OFF MCLUHAN
In my pursuit of greater expertise while I was working in advertising, I inadvertently unearthed a thinker who had been considered irrelevant for decades. He was an obscure literary professor who applied his skills to the study of media and communication in contemporary culture. In unexpected fashion he exploded onto the scene and garnered national media attention. It seems he could predict the future and anticipate changes before they happened. In 1967 he decorated the cover of
Newsweek
and
Life
in the same week (Barbra Streisand was the only other person to do so).
1
Newsweek
said his “theory of communication offers nothing less than an explanation of all human culture, past, present, and future.”
2
The
New York Herald Tribune
declared that he was “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.”
3
His name was Marshall McLuhan. And chances are he’s the most important thinker you’ve
never heard of.
McLuhan died in 1980 at the low point of his popularity. Oddly enough, the thing that made him so popular was the very thing that made him drift into obscurity. Shunned by academia as unconventional and increasingly opaque to the masses, he was relegated to the attic of pop culture history where his ideas began collecting dust. I stumbled into that attic in the late 90s, dusted off a book and began reading. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales suddenly fell from my eyes. I had an awakening. Suddenly, I saw two things very clearly: the glaring immorality of my profession and the profound implications of McLuhan’s thinking for people of faith.
He was able to see things about the nature of communication that no one else could see. Although frequently overlooked, few things are more important to a faith like ours. Remember,
Christianity is fundamentally rooted in a communication event.
The entire basis of our religion is predicated on God revealing himself to humanity — communicating
to
and
with
us. His self-revelation, or message, was delivered in a myriad of media including angels, burning bushes, stone tablets, and even a donkey. God is in the communication business. So in a sense, any serious study of communication is a study of God.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
Evangelicals seem to be aware of this relationship between communication and the gospel. You’ve probably heard the saying, “The methods change, but the message stays the same.” There it is — the rallying cry of the evangelical church. It is the North Star that guides the most forward-looking leaders of the church. It serves both as a shield defending against the flaming arrows of those who cry “heresy” and as a catalyst for creativity and innovation in ministry. As long as you don’t change the message, anything goes for the methods of communicating it.
This view is based on a simple metaphor of media. Media and methods are merely “tools” or “vehicles.” They serve as neutral conduits, or pipelines, useful for dispensing the gospel. It’s like the plumbing in a house that carries water from the water heater to the faucet. We don’t think much about the pipes until one springs a leak.
However, this metaphor is a major problem. It prevents us from seeing the truth. The truth, as McLuhan famously observed, is that in fact the
medium is the message.
It’s a cryptic little aphorism that stands in direct contradiction to the evangelical rallying cry. He meant that the forms of our media, regardless of their content, have the power to shape our minds and our messages. In other words,
you can’t change the methods without changing the message.
So in this view, the content of any medium is really the magician’s sleight-of-hand to distract us from the trick being played on our minds. We sit and gawk at the banality of a show like American Idol, appalled by the hideous vocal offering of the latest contestant. All the while we remain totally unaware that the flickering mosaic of pixels slips the watch from our wrists and re-patterns neural pathways in our brains. In reality, media are much more than neutral purveyors of information. They have the power to shape us, regardless of content, and thus cannot be evaluated solely on their usage.
1
2
3
4
5
Next
Tweet
Comments
Eric Brown
"You can't change the methods without changing the message." So true...
Joe
There are 2 aspects here: 1) worldly/flesh; and 2) spirit/Trinitarian.
On the deep, spiritual level, the truth is the word, the medium is the Trinity, with the Holy Spirit being "the medium." The truth/word never changes, but the meaning and depth of understanding changes as we mature spiritually (towards the Divine connection). If Christians really understand and live this, the worldly media/medium won't have a deep lasting effect, and the "programming" effect of advertising is minimal as we focus on God. We then look at the world around us in a MUCH different way. The worldly methods and message will change, but the truth never does - it's nice to know in a crazy world there is that one Constant!!
L.L. Barkat
"When you tap into the most intense or emotionally poignant experiences, you discover the trigger for all consumer impulses. "
Just that. So fascinating.
When we act as consumers, then, what are we doing? Is it perhaps a form of spiritual experience, as we perhaps try to tap into, or alter, our own psyches through action?
Edward van Vliet
of course, this year edmonton, aberta (canada) is celebrating his centenary so there's been a lot of mcluhanery going on here. An interesting collection of essays exploring his throught and its connection to his own theological positioning can be found at gingko press (which publishes a number of books about mcluhan - love the carson collaboration, the book of probes) or here:
http://www.amazon.com/Medium-Light-Reflections-Religion/dp/1606089927/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318874261&sr=1-1
Curtis
There's a potent irony to each of us who are posting replies here because we "connected" with this excellent article.
Today is the very last day of my 3 month sabbatical - my first in 22 years of ministry. One month was spent in the DR Congo; a week in the intensely crowded streets of Kinshasa and the rest in rural villages. So for that time I was the fish who was plucked out of my technological fish tank and experienced something very different. Although I believed myself to be reasonably well connected to people here in Portland OR, the intensity of constant connection in the Congo was at first exhausting. In Kinshasa, a city of almost 12 million people, everyone is so amazingly linked. You walk amidst endless crowds on jammed streets, or ride in mini-vans with more than 20 people stacked on wooden benches. And people talk! Boy do they talk. On those mini-van busses, conversations among strangers are unceasing. "Where are you going? What are you doing today? Where did you get that? Do you know how to get to...?" You buy your daily bread, your vegetables, and change your money right on the street from people you see everyday. People ask about every detail of life, regularly. You either interact and rely on people, or you don't survive. Literally.
In the villages it was much different - the crowds are missing - but the connections are much the same. With anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand people in a village, you are known and your family is know. It's likely that families have stayed in the same village for generations, and the stories of families are known as well. I've been reading about African culture and came across this from John Mbitit, a Kenyan theologian: He writes this about African culture:
"Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: 'I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.' This is a cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man"
I read these words before my trip and they were interesting. After visiting, though, they took on new depth.
Since I've returned to the states and my techno-centric life, a heavy loneliness has swept over me. I am so deeply disconnected and I'm very much looking forward to going back to my church (tomorrow!). I'm not overly giddy about getting back to work (shh, don't tell), but I miss people so much. The time in Africa taught me how we have gotten so accustomed to living in relationally impoverished patterns, that we don't even feel the loss.
Mike
There are a lot of great thoughts here, but I most enjoyed the introduction. I have often felt that the religion of our time is Consumerism.
In the past, religion has always answered the question of how to get god or the gods to give us what we want. Now there's no need for that answer. To get what we want, we just reach out and swipe or we click here. No wonder the question of God's existence has changed to God's significance.
Michael H
"“The methods change, but the message stays the same.” There it is — the rallying cry of the evangelical church..."
Aha, the Evangelical Thing. Been there, done that, read Bible, came home to the Catholic Church, sigh of relief.
However, Christianity is not medium versus message, it's the communication of both a message and simultaneously the Thing it refers to. The Presence of God says "I am present". Most of The West has subtly changed this "message" and hence the methods have changed.
Brad Waller
Praise God! Marshall McLuhan is being rediscovered, but in a more up-to-date and Christian context. Shane Hipps' excellent article does great service toward protecting and maintaining "authentic" Christian community.
Comments are now closed
ALSO BY SHANE HIPPS
The Spirituality of the Cell Phone
Science + Tech
Electronic Culture and Spirituality
Science + Tech
ALSO IN SCIENCE + TECH
The Subjects of Our Study and Our Witness
by John Stott
Exploring the Galaxies
by Louie Giglio and Jennifer Wiseman
The Soul of Apple
by Kevin Kelly