Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree have edited a fantastic book called New Media, 1740-1915. The book futures ten well written essays that each deal with what most of us would refer to as old media. However, the old media was new media at one point and time and the essays are aimed at understanding various forms of media “in terms that allow us to understand what it meant for them to be new.” (xi) The editors deem this a culturally important task to investigate how the new media was received in its own cultural and historical context. According to Pingree and Gitelman when a new media is introduced, “There is a moment, before the material means and the conceptual modes of new media have become fixed, when such media are not yet accepted as natural, when their own meanings are in flux. At such a moment, we might say that new media briefly acknowledge and question the mythic character and the ritualized conventions of existing media, while they are themselves defined within a perceptual and semiotic economy that they then help to transform.” (xii) The essays explore how such new media acquires “particular meanings, powers, and characteristics.” (xii) When new media first emerge they “pass through a phase of identity crisis, a crisis precipitated at least by the uncertain status of the given medium in relation to established, known media and their functions. In other words, when new media emerge in a society, their place is at first ill defined, and their ultimate meanings or functions are shaped over time by that society’s existing habits of media use (which, of course, derive from experience with other, established media), by shared desires for new uses, and by the slow process of adaptation between the two. The ‘crisis’ of a new medium will be resolved when the perceptions of the medium, as well as its practical uses, are somehow adapted to existing categories of public understanding about what that medium does for whom and why.” (xii)
Among the collection of essays is Diane Zimmerman Umble’s essay, Sinful Network or Divine Service: Competing Meanings of the Telephone in Amish Country. In her essay she explains how the new phone lines and phones that became available had a contested meaning among the Amish and Mennonites in Lancaster County Pennsylvania. The availability of the phone threatened the heart of the social fabric of the Amish community – the home. She writes, “The telephone was perceived as a threat because it entered the home at the heart of Amish faith and life, in essence, sacred space. The telephone stood as both a symbolic and a physical connection to the outside world, and it opened the home to outside influence and intrusion.” (152) On the one hand the phone provided a way for farmers to conduct business and was available in emergency situations. On the other hand phone lines threatened the practice of separation from the world. The author describes how the various religious communities responded differently to the telephone issue. The essay illustrates the crisis that this new medium brought about. It took the various communities time to sort out and resolve the crisis. The various communities responded differently to the new medium. Some rejected the use of the telephone, while others allowed it.
When I was reading these essays, I could not help but wonder what new media’s meaning is being negotiated in today’s church. It seems that most media is accepted uncritically. However, here are a couple of things new media issues that I have thought about before:
First, I have to think of people using their iPhones or android based phones as bibles instead of using the book version. What are the implications of using the phone as a bible versus using a book as a Bible? Do we lose a sense of the larger biblical story by using our phones as bibles? I am not sure about what the implications of this are. What do you think?
Second, in my experience people use the internet as authoritative when it comes to researching issues and interpretations concerning scripture. I had one of my student leaders rely heavily on something that she found on the internet for a devotional. The problem with what she found was that it was gnostic and was outside of a Christian orthodox interpretation of the scripture. There seems to be a need for guidelines on how to sort out the good sources from the bad ones online. I have encountered several times that people have referred to something that they found online which was from a theological perspective a bunch of baloney.
What other examples do you have? What technology have we adopted uncritically?
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