trends
By Gerard Kelly
“The Word became flesh, said St. John, and the church has turned the flesh back into words.” _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ __ (Tom Wright, The Crown and the Fire)
In 1993, advertising executive Jim Carroll was involved in testing reactions to youth-oriented magazines amongst a select group of young people. He threw about 20 examples on the floor and asked them to pick out any they might be interested in. Having allowed them to browse for a few minutes, he quizzed one woman as to the basis for selecting a particular title. She flicked through and pointed out that it had a good feel; she remarked on the interesting type, the unconventional camera angles, the creative art direction. She really seemed to have bought into the magazine. Until something else on the page caught her eye, and she said, “Oh no. Actually I wouldn’t buy it. It’s all about Indie music and I don’t like that kind of stuff.” As Carroll later explained, “This young consumer had gone a long way down the road to reaching a verdict on the title before she even considered the nature of its verbal content.”
At the heart of this incident is an encounter with the generation Douglas Rushkoff has called screenagers – those raised so exclusively on visual advertising, TV, movies, the Internet, and video games, that the place of words in their lives has changed. Beginning in Generation X and gaining ground in Generation Y, or the Millennials, the shifting status of text is a key factor in the wave of social change currently transforming western culture. Whatever else the emerging generations will be, they will be post-literate. The Church, with its emphasis on text-as-truth, propositional teaching and word-only sermons, has hardly begun to explore this new ground. But explore it we must – it is the landscape into which we are moving. If we are living on the last page of literacy, what waits for us beyond the end of the book?
The Gutenberg Galaxy
The literate age began in 1438, when Johannes Gutenberg created ‘movable type’ printing to mass-produce Bibles. “By 1500,” Michio Kaku writes, “Europe was flooded with more than nine million books, stimulating the intellectual ferment which paved the way for the renaissance.” Printing opened the door to the Reformation, the Age of Science, popular education, and ultimately the industrial revolution, taking us into what Marshall McCluhan called “the Gutenberg Galaxy.”
Print technology, Canadian theologian David Lochhead writes, was “the catalyst that allowed the emerging mechanistic, linear, individualistic tendencies of the modern period to become the integrated, dominant pattern of our time.” Like the skeletal framework of some huge pachyderm, literacy and the authority of text lie deep beneath the surface of our culture as the structure that holds us together. Lochhead is one of the many commentators to claim that this print age is now ending. The electronic era is something new – a culture dominated not by the printed word but by multi-media, interactive, free-flowing information. The communications revolution, which began with telephone and radio, gathered momentum with television and found a running mate in satellite and cable capabilities, will hit break-neck pace when cyber meets fiber on the information superhighway. We are leaving the Gutenberg Galaxy at warp speed. Can we even begin to imagine what new corner of the universe we will arrive in?
Spot the Difference
Post-literacy is not forcing the book out of our culture (book sales are hitting record levels, not least thanks to on-line ordering via the Internet) but it is displacing printed text as the dominant means of communication and final arbiter of authority. This is not the result of any one technological change, but of several, including:
- The shift from word to image, transmitted by photography, TV, video and the computer screen and now empowered by digital technology’s image-manipulation capacity and bit-stream delivery. – The transition from text to hypertext brought by the computer’s capacity to both write and read in non-linear forms. – The power of digital technology to combine word, image and sound as multi-media information – The inter-connectedness and interactivity of Cyberspace – The relative ease with which a PC, CD-Rom drive, and modem puts all this into the hands of the individual
These changes will combine to give birth to a new age of post-literate communications, marked out by:
1. Capacity and scope Post-literate technology offers access to an unprecedented store of information, and to unimagined communications opportunities – as far beyond print as the Atlantic is beyond a garden pond. What place will traditional faith-commitments have in this new ocean?
2. Speed and Transience “Print was designed to convey fact – solid, stable fact,” David Lochhead has written, “Print could hold a proposition, freeze it so that it could be studied, dissected, verified. The electronic media were designed to convey news, information that moved so quickly that by the time it could be confirmed or denied, it was no longer news.” How might the rising generations, skilled in dealing with information which is fluid and transient, deal with questions of universal or long-term meaning?
3. Multiplicity and Diversity Neville Brody, the art director behind the revolutionary Face magazine, explains, “The way we absorb information changes: with digital technology and interactive cable our behaviour is totally different from the past in the way we read text and images, the way we experience visual language.” According to U.S. sociologist George Barna, young people are fast becoming “mosaic thinkers,” able to “integrate disparate information into new perspectives on reality.” Presented with a range of simultaneous sources – image, text, voice, sound, movement – they will take threads from each and weave them into meanings, often in patterns that don’t exist in any one of the source “tracks”. They are able “to put information together in new patterns, often arriving at unusual, novel, or surprising conclusions.” How can the transmission of Christian truth adapt to this multi-media, high-image, low-text environment?
4. Interaction and Response In print the power to set meanings belongs only to the sender. Electronic and image-based communications, by contrast, invite the receiver to share in the creation of the message. Mike Large of Real World studios, gives an excellent definition of interactive communication in describing Peter Gabriel’s project Eve, explaining that Gabriel “has always wanted his audience to experience his work from the inside, rather than being passive observers or listeners. The disc will enable the users to transform and create their own versions of the images and music as they explore the world that has been created.” As young people grow increasingly accustomed to this invitation, will they become resistant to messages in which they have no such co-creative role?
As these four characteristics shape the post-literate environment, they will have wide-ranging impact on the culture literacy has spawned. They will de-mystify the authority of text; change the ways in which we read and write; define a new, less authoritarian social role for the book; re-shape entirely the way we educate our children and ourselves. Post-literacy is set to revolutionize communication and learning, in the greatest change in the technology of human interaction since the invention of the alphabet.
So Long Scriptura?
One immediate and powerful impact of this shift will be on the way we view and handle the Bible. The necessity of printing Bibles was mother to Gutenberg’s invention, and the Bible has remained the most-reproduced and best-selling book for 561 years. It is the book of all books. How will screenagers, newly exiled from the Gutenberg Galaxy, treat this ‘Book of God’ that has been so much a part of print culture? Does the end of the age of print signal the end of the Bible’s authority? These are real and pertinent questions, which mark the boundaries of a debate raging amongst the Church’s own younger generations.
Scholarship and Pragmatism
Within this debate there are two distinct questions which need to be dealt with in different ways. The first is theological; “How will the shift to post-literacy change what we believe about the Bible?” It is to this question that systematic theologians are turning – and their task is extraordinarily complex and delicate. The second question, though, is more practical and invites us all to join the debate: “how will the shift to post-literacy change the way we engage with the Bible?” If screenagers struggle with text, will this stop them from accessing truth? In relating a faith deep in tradition and history to the post-literate generations, we will need to re-discover the power of God’s word beyond and apart from the power of text.
The following four suggestions offer places we might start – doorways into the exploration of faith for post-literate young people:
- recovering the power of story. The Bible is, Mike Riddell says, “the repository of stories… from generations of people who have tried to follow God. It is also the bearer of ‘the story of all stories:’ the life and teaching of Jesus. The Bible keeps alive for us ‘the dangerous memory of Jesus’.” By retaining ambiguity, flexibility and nuance, story delivers us from at least some of the ‘cognitive captivity’ of text – and at the same time resonates with the newfound agility and interaction of hypertext. Significantly, story – embodied in character, plot and pace – is fast becoming the common thread running through the media of our age. Video games are weak on text but strong on story; advertising sells the product by telling the story; TV, film and video are built on narrative above all else; even journalists “tell the story” where they used to “print the facts.” In a silent revolution, narrative is replacing print as the unifying element of our culture. Are we so fixed on the need to communicate the text of the Bible that we have lost our capacity to communicate its story?
- recovering the vocabulary of image and symbol. In John Drane’s now famous encounter with the teenagers of Dunblane, sixteen candles were images of hope; a knife laid down was a symbol of repentance. A culture starved of image and symbol – robbed of the sensual in the realm of faith – is rediscovering their power. David Bosch explains: “Metaphor, symbol, ritual, sign and myth, long maligned by those interested only in ‘exact’ expressions of rationality, are today being rehabilitated; they not only touch the mind and its conceptions, and evoke action with a purpose, but compel the heart.” From the physical presence of objects, through the symbolic enactment of aspects of faith to the evident power of video and film, screenagers have a vocabulary of worship that takes in far more than words. The mammoth multi-media performances of bands like U2 have proved an inspiration to a wave of “alternative” worshippers, who agree with record-producer T Bone Burnett’s assessment: “A U2 concert is what church should be.” Banked TV sets, video and slide projection, computer graphics and graffiti walls are overtaking the pulpit as the places in which ideas about God are explored. For pioneers in this field, the act of leading worship is expressed through the creation of a worship environment – a three-dimensional, multi-sensory sacred space. In temples made neither of stone nor of words but of sound and vision, screenagers navigate the many signals of a print-lite world and weave truth from its many threads. Are we ready to help young people to communicate with God and each other not in words but in images, pictures and symbols?
- recovering the language of community Leslie Newbiggin reminds us that the church “lives in the midst of history as a sign, instrument and foretaste of the reign of God.” Is there a language of community that can speak to young people resistant to the language of text? “Truth is not a product, to be processed and packaged and dispensed,” says Mike Riddell. “It is an encounter which takes place when people share their stories in a place of safety and dignity.” In a world of dysfunctional relationships, screenagers will be drawn to these “places of safety and dignity, where a glimpse of true community speaks more than volumes of static prose.” David Hillborn sees this as nothing less than God’s own method of communicating: “Just as the divine Word was embodied in Jesus, so godly words are meant to be embodied – within relationships and communities of faith.” Are we seeking to build young people into communities that speak in a broken world – or asking them to assent to disembodied truth?
- recovering the silence of contemplation Canadian theologian Ronald Rolheiser talks of “the eclipse of contemplation” in literate culture. “Today we, the children of Western Culture, struggle with practical atheism,” he says. “Our churches are slowly emptying and, more and more, the sense of God is slipping from our ordinary lives.” The answer, he claims, is not connected to more words, nor to a better grasp of textual truth. “The road back to a lively faith,” he writes, “is not a question of finding the right answers, but of living in a certain way, contemplatively. The existence of God, like the air we breathe, need not be proven. It is more a question of developing good lungs to meet it.”
Contemplation taps into two sources of the richness of God – the power of silence to move us beyond words and the power of ordinary experience to enlighten us. In both, it is possible to hear God speak without text. This is the God who is, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “the ‘beyond’ in the midst of our life.” Are we ready to explore a non-verbal spirituality in which a generation disillusioned with text and jaded with too many words, might find fresh faith?
Post-literacy presents the church with both challenge and opportunity. The challenge: to extricate our faith from an over-dependence on text – without killing the patient in the process. The opportunity: to re-access, re-examine, re-imagine and re-explore “the story” in new forms. Are we preparing our young to be pioneers in a world beyond words – or equipping them for a print age that for them no longer exists? Old text or new context – the choice is ours.
Gerard Kelly chairs the Youth and Rage programs at Spring Harvest, and is a Director of Cafe.net, promoting effective mission for the Christian future of Europe.
