Old Story - New Media
Using New Media & Web 3 To Share Faith.
(Transcript of speech given to Churches Media Council, UK, by Mal Fletcher, June 2008. Copyright Mal Fletcher 2007-8.)
I remember when a bite was something you took out of an apple (and an Apple was something you could bite). Today, though, we have webs you can surf on, and chips you can't eat.
But the second Internet revolution, driven as it will be by vastly improved chip technologies (and post-chip technologies), optical fibre broadband, mobile internet & the so-called Web 3, will bring changes to the media marketplace that we can only imagine right now.
Of course, for we Christians, the challenge to keep fresh with our communication is no new thing. The theologian Helmut Thielke reminded us that we must constantly explore new ways to share gospel because our audience is 'constantly changing address…'
It's vital that we're heavily involved with the world of New Media because the world of tech-development increasingly sings from the Marshall McLuhan hymn-sheet: 'The Media is the Message.' The technologies we use reflect something about the God we say we represent. If our technologies are out-of-date, our message must also be outdated!
The new media allow us to:
1. Tell the Story
Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' caused a major stir, in part I think because it reminded people that Christian faith is rooted in a story - a very emotive and powerful story.
Sometimes I think even we Christians forget this. Some atheists are saying that we soon won't need God anymore, not once science achieves its Holy Grail - the so-called Theory of Everything. This one unified theory is supposed to explain everything in the entire universe.
Perhaps scientists are, however, simply trying to find a new 'story of everything' to replace the one they've already rejected. For that's exactly what Christian is: a story of Everything: an entire worldview, which explains everything in universe in light of life and work of Christ.
Christian faith makes no sense unless we constantly refer back to the central story: humanity's creation, our fall from grace, the redemptive work of Christ & his imminent return to restore everything to its original purpose.
New media allow us to put that worldview back into mix; by having people tell their stories of faith. In so doing it appeals to the tastes of our increasingly narrative-based culture.
We need:
a) Sites that promote stories of faith, including audience-generated stories: similar to YouTube, but devoted to people talking about their journeys of faith.
b) More training for people of all ages in how to use social networking sites creatively for sharing their faith in context of respectful relationships.
2. Participate in Debate and Dialogue.
Web 3 is heavily built on what the gamers call 'The Architecture of Participation'. Web and game designers build in pieces of code which allow users to reshape the online environment even as they use it.
As a preacher, I've often thought that preaching would be more effective if we allowed a little more Q&A now and then. After all, one of the greatest discoursed in the New Testament, given by Paul on Mars Hill, Athens, was given in the context of a debate. Paul took thise thinkers on at the level of their own analysis, worldview for worldview.
New media allow us to share viewpoints and encourage debate on issues not often presented in mainstream media.
We need:
a) More chat rooms, forums and moderated discussions on our websites and portals.
b) Truly interactive programming, where people are encouraged not just to respond to our programming but in some cases to shape it before or even as it goes out.
By the way, we need to find alternatives to the terms 'broadcasting' and 'narrowcasting'. These words are so 'last century'. The old walls are breaking down - that's what convergence is all about. Broadcasting is narrowing (targeting tighter demographics), while narrowcasting is broadening, as more people are linked to broadband and 3G mobile internet.
3. Reveal Our Humanity, Vulnerability & Ability to Empathise.
The biggest enemy of Christian communication in our time is not secular humanism, existentialism or Darwinianism - it is predictability.
Often, in our culture, as soon as you announce yourself a Christian, you find yourself confronted by a wall of stereotypes. Each brick in the wall represents a preconceived assumption about faith and people of faith.
Christians have no sense of humour; Christians are angry all the time; Christians take themselves too seriously - these are all bricks in that wall.
The art of communication is about removing the bricks from that wall, one at a time - disarming those preconceived ideas - before people are aware you're doing it; so that your message gets through.
One of the biggest barriers is one that says: 'Christians are out of touch with reality.' Dr Billy Graham once remarked that he'd 'seen too many Christian movies and read too many Christian novels with happy ever after endings.'
He asked: 'Why can't we just be honest with one another.' If we did, he said, our world might look at us differently, with more respect.
New media, being more audience-driven and more immediate, allow people to share their fundamental humanity. They allow us to show that our faith is a journey, not just a destination; that it is grounded in day-to-day realities and remains strong even when we are not.
Seeing how our faith enhances, rather than overrides, our humanity can come as an attractive surprise to some of our audience.
We need:
a) More live Webcasting of live media. Streaming web cameras in our studios (vs still cameras), and promotion of this in our programming.
b) Live Webcasting (or streaming Web cams) of the behind-the-scenes production process -- inviting people to see that programs are made by flesh and blood human beings, with all their strengths, flaws and frailties.
4. Engage the Future.
The most urgent question for each of us is: 'What kind of city do we want to be living in ten years from now, and what will we do now to set that in motion?' If we don't shape the future of our cities, someone else's vision of the future will reshape us.
Being salt and light in the new media world is part of our cultural mandate, to be a city on a hill; to represent, in microcosmic form, what the city could be if it lived under the values of God's Kingdom.
Shaping the future is, to a large degree, about mentoring & mobilizing the generations who will carry the future on their shoulders.
The first Net Revolution coincided with a major generational shift in Western culture - the emergence of a new generation, GenX. This generation is marked by digital thinking.
Baby boomers were the first children of postmodernism, but we were educated in a modernist way. GenX is the first generation to be taught in postmodern way. Analogue thinking has a steady stream (a wave) of related ideas, strung together, leading to a logical conclusion.
Digital thinking has a series of seemingly unrelated, pixelated ideas (or factoids) connected mosaic-fashion, leading to a big picture reality.
This eclectic way of thinking helps to explain GenX's taste for multi-tasking. They love to bring disparate facts together to make up a whole.
We need to:
a) Encourage our audience to interact with various media all at once. We must lose our fear of multi-sensory experience and stop telling people not to check out our websites until 'after the programme'!
b) Build a seamless media experience between the Net and TV or radio, making new media a core part of our strategic planning process, rather than something tacked on as an after thought.
The second Net Revolution is now coinciding with the emergence of the next generation, the Millenials. This group is marked by a hunger for collaborative action.
Grassroots movements have now gone Global, as Millennials crave a heroic role in the future. Live8, Make Poverty History and the like may have been started by boomers or GenXers, but they're being driven forward by Millennials.
(Barack Obama has raised to date $272 million from 1.7 million small donors, via Internet. Many of them are Millennials.)
This generation is using new media to express its collaborative spirit, its desire to work together to get big things done.
We need to:
a) Create & promote great civic projects which we can facilitate via new media.
b) Help the new generations to explore their own ideas for social change, via new media.
c) Use new media to create more opportunities for people of all ages to train in production and build an audience for their material.
If we don't engage the spiritual future of our nation, there are plenty of others willing to use new media to do exactly that. You'll see this if you check what's on offer at Oprah.com, with Oprah's campaign to train the world in the old-new-age ways of a book called 'A New Earth'.
This article is © Mal Fletcher, 2007-8 and is not to be reproduced in any form without express prior consent from the author. All rights reserved. Used by permission at nextwaveonline.com.
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