Social media killing off quiet reflection?

It's possible that I'm about to disagree with Justin Welby -though mostly it's a disagreement with the Torygraph's headline (Social media killing off quiet reflection, says Justin Welby ) and soundbite reporting a recent speech of his.

 “Instant reaction has replaced reflective comment.

“That is a reality that you deal with in politics and it demands a new reality of ways in which we accept one another, love each other, pray for each other.

“The best answer to a complex issue … is not always given in 140 characters.



Basically, it looks to me like the Torygraph headline writer is seeking to build and feed something of a moral panic about twitter by co-opting 'the church' into a 'modern life /social media is rubbish (things were better in the old days)' trope.  The effect of that kind of contextualising is to psychologically elide Justin's caveat phrase 'not always given in ...'



My response to this kind of trope is to recall that we human beings have always (I suspect ever since we have been able to have conversations) struggled with immediate reactions, over-simplification on the one hand and on the other hand trying to encourage more considered and generous responses. From one point of view, Twitter is just a further medium for this age-old bifurcation of response. Now, admittedly, the brevity does make it easy to offend -but then in many an animated conversation we are reacting quickly and offense is easily given and taken (and sometimes apologies and explanations are given -which can happen in tweeted exchanges too). Nor are printed media proof against cavalier dismissals and gross oversimplifications. What Twitter can do positively is to give the possibility of an extended dialogue of short interventions in which people could, over time, explore more thoroughly some issue. I've been part of many a conversation verbally and even on newsgroups (remember them?) where instant brief reactions have given way to longer discussions -sometimes thoughtful and sometimes intemperate: both of which can happen on Twitter.



it is true that 140 characters make nuance difficult (in one tweet at least), but we should observe what actually happens when twitter is used for discussions or arguments involving more depth and breadth of topic: people give hyperlinks to blog posts, articles etc and briefly state why they think it is important/helpful etc. Tweets then come to act as a kind of newspaper headline drawing attention to the content they head up.



So we should be wary of essentialising Twitter as if it is only 140 characters and that we have only come up with one usage for it. It is, in fact, part of an evolving media ecology. Part of the evolution is in the way it references, contains and is contained by other media. Another part of the ongoing development is of the social dance of developing mores and conventions: what counts as polite and rude and so forth.



At base we have human beings trying to communicate for a variety of reasons with a range of imagined and actual audiences. Human beings who are very adept in the aggregate at making communication work well enough within the constraints of bandwidth, signal noise and contextual meanings. One tweet does not a conversation end; we should not judge the medium by static standards but rather take it in as a dynamic of human communication and observe how people actually overcome the constraints -such as the brevity of 140 characters in the face of the desire to communicate a whole lot more.



in fact, what I think is most important about that bit of +Justin's speech is the call for generosity -charity- of interpretation given that widespread messaging is possible. In effect, is this not a call for us to see past the possible elisions and misunderstandings of short messages and to engage with open-heartedness with the possibility that there is a whole hinterland of understanding and perspective by human beings who are, in many ways, very like ourselves. Can we not exercise generosity by asking for further information and seeing through the exchange to an end in greater mutual understanding? That too is possible via Twitter.



Is this not the age-old challenge of communication?

Christians tweeters happier than atheists but less analytical?

This piece of research Christians tweet more happily, less analytically than atheists is in line with a broader body of data emerging around the issue of happiness, the guts of it is:

A computer analysis of nearly 2 million text messages (tweets) on the online social network Twitter found that Christians use more positive words, fewer negative words and engage in less analytical thinking than atheists. Christians also were more likely than atheists to tweet about their social relationships, the researchers found.

 So the corpus is reasonably big. The weak spot would be whether the words chosen are sufficiently contextualised to give a fairly stable indicator of what is being looked for -irony, sarcasm and unusual grammar could all have an effect, and this article doesn't let us peek at that fine-grained analysis. That said, the fact that this lines up with wider findings probably means that its a fairly safe bet. It lines up in that 'religious' people tend to have better social connections and more positive attitudes towards life than those who didn't score highly as 'religious'.

Of course, the 'less analytical' thing is intriguing and deserve more investigation. I suspect that there are fairly culturally-relative drivers in this case in that my hypothesis that this might actually be different in societies where atheism is more mainstream (China?) because felt-minorities need to make more intellectual effort to justify their dissenting position. Also I think that the religious cultures of Christianity in the west tends to be somewhat anti-intellectual and semi-consciously emotive (actually a contrast to the Evangelicalism of my youth which may well have shown up more evaluative and analytical language had there been tweeting then). So, as the article points out, 'the authors caution that the results are correlational and "this does not mean atheists are unhappy overall or doomed to be miserable. If religion improves happiness indirectly through other factors, those benefits could also be found outside religious groups." '
of course, the obverse needs to be noted that analytical thinking could also be found outside of atheist groups, it may for various reasons simply not show up in tweets. I'm proposing that there are cultural reasons for this, including that the use of tweets for pro-sociality would prime, in an affective sub-culture, less use of analytical language. I also suspect that Christian intellectuals are less likely to be using twitter.

So, while these are intriguing results, more contextual analysis may be needed of an anthropological and socio-linguistic sort.

Consider it possible you may be mistaken -about sexuality

I've been trying to see whether a discussion can take place via Twitter. By 'discussion' I'm thinking not just a bit of merry banter reaffirming each others' cameraderie over the great goal you've just seen, but rather trying to engage across some very different opinions in a topic that raises heat but often little light. I think I'm coming to the conclusion that this isn't a good way to conduct such dialogues -at least not as the exclusive medium.

 To be fair I embarked on this without thinking it through; to be frank I was a bit annoyed at some responses to Steve Chalke's coming out as a pro-gay Evangelical. Not least because despite his being fairly careful to argue 'evangelically' there were detracting comments which mostly didn't really engage with whether he might have a point, but rather went about bolstering the boundaries of a supposed orthodoxy based on misrepresentations, often, of his orthodoxy.

The phrase going through my mind in all of this is some words of Oliver Cromwell to the Kirk's general assembly in 1650

you have censured others, and established yourselves "upon the Word of God." Is it therefore infallibly agreeable to the Word of God, all that you I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.

Another thing going round my head is the thought that it's all very well having an infallible Bible, but unless you have infallible interpretation, it may not do you any good. The problem for a lot of the responses I've seen is an implicit assumption that our interpretation is straightforwardly right. I'm shocked to be reminded how much everyday readers of the Bible are unaware of their own hermeneutical biases and what a lot of questionable assumptions are smuggled into their (our) handling of Scripture. Many of us need constantly to be reminded of how our own cultural starting points lead us astray. Anyway, as with so many things in Christian living, learning humility is no bad thing, and it seems to me that Cromwell was counselling interpretive humility and charity. I'd say that interpretive charity (to name  further virtue) involves considering not only that we might be wrong but that others may well have good intentions, helpful insights and a genuine relationship with God (which does, I know, go counter to the evangelical typical propensity for salvific suspicion).

Anyway, perhaps some examples of attempted dialogue with some comments may help. I've removed names and aliases to take too much personal 'ad hominem' stuff out of it; I want to focus on the arguments, rhetorical strategies and my responses to them, rather than people.

So here's one snippet of exchange (which did have interweavings from other interlocutors which I've left out at this point.

Tweet: Is 2 Timothy 4:3 a description of the heretical Steve Chalke

me: No

 Tweet: 2 Timothy 4:3 seems a fair description of the heretical Steve Chalke

me: Only if you've already decided SteveChalke is wrong. What if 2T4.3 means homophobes find teachers to suit prejudice?

Tweet: to answer your rather odd question, that would be in contention with the whole body of scripture. Steve Chalke is out of line

Me: out o line re received understanding -which could be wrong: how are received u'standings supposed to be questioned? cf slavery.

Tweet: God's word is immutable. You cannot conflate slavery with sexual perversion. And in any case scripture never affirms either.

Me: Scripture affirms slavery and Xns defended it Biblically. Conflatn only at level of Xns reviewing understand'g of Bible's messg

Commentary: Of course, to describe SC as someone who is false teacher giving an audience what they want to hear (to confirm their ungodly living) presupposes that he is wrong. The irritating thing about this is the way that it seems to evade dealing with the issues raised in terms that Evangelicals are supposed to be strong on -arguing from (and about) scripture. This is apparently replaced instead with a simple dismissal without any attempt to engage SC's arguments on their own merits. It looks like it has been met with, well, prejudice: 'SC has articulated a view that doesn't agree with mine/ours: he must be a false teacher'. Actually, there's a tad more by implication: 'SC is only doing this to curry favour with (presumably) liberal secularists and the gay lobby.' ("He loves them more than us")

What my remark about homophobes is getting at is that the possibility of suiting itching ears cuts both ways. It could, in principle, apply to teachers who preach to people who are against faithful homophile relationships and find in scripture a way to scratch that anti-gay itch and shy away from any exegesis or reflection that might question that. It's quite clear that there are enormous pressures to continue to pander to the itching ears of the anti-gay crowd -if you don't, you'll get 'cast out' like they're attempting to do to SC "if you don't continue to produce interpretations that impossibilise gay relationships, we'll oust you from our club -don't bother us with the facts". I suspect my interlocutor hasn't really taken account of how hard it might be to feel constrained to take a position that earns the opprobrium of the constituency that has been ones home and sourced ones co-workers for so long: it is more likely that SC would find he would naturally want to produce an interpretation that doesn't upset his constituency: Evangelicals.

The point is that the 2 Tim passage is too much a wax-nose in a case like this. Both sides can accuse the other of pandering to the itching ears. If someone is going to make that accusation, they need to be prepared to engage in the dialogue properly and not just, so to say, throw bricks over the wall.

Okay, another bit of the interleaving dialogue, a different tweeter.

I'm assuming you're not familiar with the bible?@**** is right, looks more like eisegises than exegesis 

Me: I sus I'm more familiar wi Bible than u. Eisegesis = part o what #SteveChalke is q'ning. Engage with issues not psn 

 And then another snippet raising a similar issue:

You're clearly liberal I've no desire to debate with one who holds their own ideals above scripture

Me: Y're wrong: not liberal; interested in what scripture actually says vs received opinion. My ideals formed by scripture first.    

This is quite a disturbing rhetorical move. But first a quick vent of my outrage: 'not familiar with the Bible'? -I'm constantly finding that fellow evangelicals are lamentably ignorant both of contents and hermeneutical strategies. So if my reply sounds a little 'haughty' it was perhaps more in the vein (I hope) of Paul's 'boasting' which was strategically deployed in order to defend important insights and not to give his opponents' arguments a free-pass. The point is I'm well-acquainted with scripture and well-used to handling it in theological debate and in fact I've spent a lot of time, thought, effort and argument in relating my ideas to scripture and in trying to understand scripture whole and letting it speak into cultural (even church-cultural) norming. "As to evangelical 'righteousness', faultless ...".

Okay, I'll admit it: I've taught theology at secondary school and Higher Education level as well as from the pulpit -though I know that for my interlocutors this may count for little. I know this because I'm an evangelical and have shared the formation in suspicion towards those suspected of unsoundness (and if you follow up that link, I can affirm the things that the author classes as not being liberal theologically): it's a catch 22 situation; you can never prove your bona fides as long as you ever question any received interpretations or doctrines -even if you do so on biblical grounds.

Anyway, back to 'disturbing': it's just that typical Evangelical ploy (I know: to my shame, I've used it myself in the past, when I was keen to demonstrate my Soundness) that when someone says something outside of what we're used to, we tend to assume they must be liberals or ignorant of scripture. Problem is: sometimes scripture is actually more challenging than we're prepared to hear: it's 'liberal' sometimes. Sometimes scripture even seems 'ignorant' of itself...

So, moving on. There was another theme that emerged in conversation.

Me: out o line re received understanding -which could be wrong: how are received u'standings supposed to be questioned? cf slavery.

Response: God's word is immutable. You cannot conflate slavery with sexual perversion. And in any case scripture never affirms either.

Another respondant: God tolerated slavery as He tolerates divorce, but he speaks clearly against perverted same sex sex.

Me: Scripture affirms slavery and Xns defended it Biblically. Conflatn only at level of Xns reviewing understand'g of Bible's messg

Me: point is: Xns convincedly defended slavery from Bible -took #SteveChalke -alikes to reconsider. mutatis mutandi.

The point about slavery seemed to be confusing -I thought that it was clear that this was about a change of how the Bible was read and used in relation to a social-ethical issue. But I don't think people got that at all. I think this reveals one of the difficulties of doing this via Twitter: a helpful point can't be just 140 characters sometimes.

The point I was /am trying to make is basically that when the slave trade and the institution of slavery was challenged in Britain and beyond in the 1700's (and a bit before too) it was challenged by Christians (evangelicals prominent among them) on Christian theological grounds. But their argument was not straight forwardly Scriptural in the sense that there is no clear text to support their position. On the contrary much of the Bible is slavery-friendly in terms of specific texts. The NT has many passages where either slavery is unquestioned and some where it is merely limited but by being the subject of instructions on how to be a good slave or a good slave-master, is accepted even affirmed after a fashion. Thus there were many Christians -Evangelicals among them- who argued that slavery is acceptable (provided it is humanely done).  The Hebrew Bible similarly makes provision for slavery and even, in a sense, recommends it (providing for people to sell themselves and even to extend a period of servitude).

This left Evangelicals and other Christians with an eye to the Bible arguing a more nuanced position. Basically the kind of argument that has to be made against slavery in order to get it banned with the support of Evangelicals is that scriptural acceptance of slavery is an accommodation to the  unthinkableness of changing rapidly something that was endemic, widespread and finely-woven into the fabric of economic life. The unthinkableness was reinforced by examples in scripture and life of relatively benign slavery. Thus they argued that slavery is accepted in scripture merely 'tactically', that is: it's not as God's best but it can be accommodated as something to be put up with and mitigated where possible.

However, this is not an argument against slavery, it is for the acceptance of slavery. Something more is needed to tip over into campaigning against it. For this one has to argue that the 'camels' of scripture rather than its 'gnats' are counter-slavery; the big themes and main ideas lead towards removing slavery when the opportunity presents itself. These big themes are things like an equality of human beings before God, love of neighbour as oneself (on the whole, who wants to be a slave? So ...), the brotherhood of Christians such that in Christ there is neither 'slave nor free'. This latter theme comes up in Philemon and Paul's advice to Philemon concerning a runaway slave points quite clearly in the direction that the Christian thing to do is not to enslave fellow believers. And then not just fellow-believers: how can love of neighbour justify enslaving anyone?

The analogy I'm trying to make is that the issue of faithful, committed homophile relationships might similarly require us to recognise that the texts apparently pointing to not accepting such relationships may be cultural accommodations (or even outrightly not applicable when you check out the detail). But also the point would be that the sidelining of some texts in favour of more weighty themes is not unknown and in the case of slavery has become so unproblematic that it's hard for many contemporary Christians to conceive of Christians justifying slavery from scripture. Yet once upon a time it was 'obvious' to most Christians that slavery is fine (provided you do it nicely).

Christians can and do change our minds quite considerably about interpretations of scripture.

Now that isn't an argument in itself for accepting homophile relationships. It's an argument for being open to the possibility that this might be a 'slavery' moment and that obvious, 'natural' interpretations that we've inherited 'might be mistaken'.

I happen to think that Steve Chalke has articulated several reasons why we should look again (see my earlier posts). The task now is to weigh those reasons, not simply to cling fast to inherited reasons. They could be mistaken. It's certainly not a time to go around dismissively refusing to engage such reasons in their own terms and disrespecting people who disagree with us. Not least because the way that many Evagelicals are behaving at the moment is failing to commend them to a wider world. The world can't say 'see how these Christians love one another' because what they are seeing is 'see how these Christians slag one another off and hate people who are different through no fault of their own'. I can't see how positioning ourselves like that in the public eye can serve the gospel.
1 John 4:16 should figure more highly in our thinking and acting.

Christianity is 'broad shouldered'

Yeah, we thought so.

BBC director-general Mark Thompson has claimed Christianity is treated with far less sensitivity than other religions because it is ‘pretty broad shouldered’.

Actually it's a compliment. And it's as it should be in the sense that it's a more Christlike image. That doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the inconsistencies and call people to account: but we should do so assertively not aggressively. My fear is that many Christains when it comes to the public arena become shrill and aggressive and don't knlow how to be appropriately assertive -which involves respecting the other parties.

It's interesting to consider this:  

“I complain in the strongest possible terms”, is different from, “I complain in the strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write”. This definitely raises the stakes.’

The question is whther we should be giving that kind of privilege to that kind of implied threat. I think not. Geese and ganders probably ought to be served with the same media sauce...
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106953/Christianity-gets-sensitive-treatment-religions-admits-BBC-chief.html#ixzz1o4Qt9u7P
And a later article in the Guardian is worth a look too, picking up as it does on the implied point I make in the previous paragraph.

Christianity gets less sensitive treatment than other religions admits BBC chief | Mail Online:

McLuhan's vision still matters today?

I pose the title as a question because I do believe that McLuhan enunciated a really important insight in the soundbite "the medium is the message". The article I've linked to Why McLuhan's chilling vision still matters today | Douglas Coupland | Comment is free | The Guardian is to be commended at the level of giving a reasonable account of McLuhan's insight but I'm concerned that for some reason, the author slips back into the hand-wringing popular trope which essentially sees anything new media-wise as a dire threat to civilisation and a sign that the barbarians are at the gates.

"what's spooking us all is the inevitable message of these new media: what will be the psychic fallout of these technologies on our inner lives?
Time seems to be going much faster than it once did. We don't remember numbers any more. Certain forms of storytelling aren't working for us as they once did. And what's happening to democracy? As with TV in the 1950s, don't be fooled by the content of texts or blogging or online shopping. Look at what these media are doing to our souls. That's what McLuhan did."

Of course, I'm concerned that I'm taking issue with Douglas Coupland! But it does seem to me, puzzlingly, that Coupland writes with an emotional veneer of the woe-to-us variety. He is right, I think, that we should ask what the psychic effect might be. It is right that we should consider that among the effects will be "fallout". What we need to remind ourselves also is that among the effects will be ways of doing things that will have positive dimensions as well as challenges. Let's remember (and I keep banging on about this) that mass-produced books and high literacy rates met with similar doom-mongering back in the day. Yes some of that doom-mongering was accurate (people don't memorise books and the way that we process and retrieve information and make arguments was affected) but it also didn't figure on the way that we are freed up to concentrate on flows of argument and to be able to question authorities. So let's not just have a wake for the things we like that will be harder or obscelesce but begin to make space for the new and helpful things that can come to birth.

McLuhan also clues us in to this: in talking about media as "extensions of man (sic)": what capabilities does it extend and how can this help us at its best, and how do we plan to minimise the down-sides?

A thank you to Eurostar

Next time you see the media having a schadenfreud-fest over someone's apparent failure of care, remember the savaging of Eurostar for some failures and sub-optimal responses to the recent failure of several trains in the Chunnel (made to sound like the whole response was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish) and then remember this letter:
"I was on the second of the Eurostar trains that broke down in the tunnel and am most grateful for the way we were looked after"
Read the whole thing here: Letters: A thank you for Eurostar's marathon rescue | Travel | The Guardian.
There's usually another side and it may be quite significant!

What the web is teaching our brains

It's nice to find an article on this topic that isn't doing the moral panic thing (hand wringing and exclaim 'modern life is going to the dogs ... or hell in a handbasket). This one actually mentions the positive enhancements that our continued interaction with the technology might be producing. What's quite interesting is that one of the downsides noted was actually said about the technology called the book (and repeated when the book became a mass-produced commodity with moveable-type printing) ie memory loss; it's a feature of delegating remembering to other media.
What the web is teaching our brains - Features, Health & Families - The Independent: "While the internet enhances our brain function in some ways – his study found it boosted decision-making and complex reasoning in older people – it can also lead to memory loss. Some research suggests there may be links between excessive computer use and conditions such as attention deficit disorder, depression and anxiety in younger people."

The article goes on to look at different skill-areas and break down their skill-sets. I'd agree about gaming and peripheral vision: I have great trouble taking in all of the info on a screen of gameplay: I just don't practice enough (and have no intentions of doing so at the moment).

How YouTube Changes the Way We Think

At last, a proper grown-up article on new media. By 'grown-up' I mean one that tries to wrestle with how new media are actually used and their actual use and abuse rather than recycling 'woe-fest' laments about how culture will go down the pan or a starry-eyed love-in telling us how we will be ushered into a new era of lusciousness. The final sentence of the article captures, for me, why it's worth looking at. Clive Thompson on How YouTube Changes the Way We Think: "We think of video as a way to communicate with others—but it's becoming a way to communicate with ourselves."

Now in French; priest academy

a few years back there was a programme on British TV about a priest in a new parish. Well the RC diocese of Besancon has come up with this and if your French is not too bad how about having a look; there are embedded videos in the site. Pr�tres academy | Vivre l'aventure au quotidien | Une initiative du service des vocation du dioc�se de Besan�on - Accueil

Fashionable charity

With charity advertising well-esconced on our tv's and in our newspapers, clearly they run the risk of falling into the celebrity paradigm

Some [charities] just aren't 'sexy'. And then there are those which are bound to raise moral outrage in some quarters whenever money finds its way to them. Bolton-based charity Befriending Refugees and Asylum Seekers (Brass) shies away from rattling tins on the streets of the Lancashire town, perhaps wary that not everyone might be sympathetic.

So perhaps it is a Christian duty to search out the less 'sexy' in order to make sure that there is a counter-balance to the modern version of those who shout loudest getting the attention [those who shout sexiest?]. It certainly should get us asking what should be our priorities for charitable giving. One of the reasons that I'm a little cautious about things like red-nose day, is that it seems to me that while they undoubtedly promote a lot of good, the habits of mind they are playing, actually reinforcing, are not those that would promote the kind of regular focus on the needs of the world that are really required in order to make a real difference. Giving as an occasional pass-time is good as far as it goes but in order to really change the world we need to find ways to encourage people to engage with the real problems, of which we are actually a part of creating in too many cases. The irony of events to fund projects in the two-thirds world with methods that are deeply rooted in the system that has gone a long way to creating the conditions that the charities are seeking to remedy ...

Anyway, the other point I wanted to make, on the back of this, was that I have been for a long time convicted that as Christians our praying is rather the same. We pray for the latest and neediest matter off the tele, or from the 'papers but what about the things that don't make it to the papers? Are our prayers and prayer priorities to be led, in effect, by the editorial biases of the BBC news or ITN news -or Rupert Murdoch's empire?

Further reflection on this is to be found here.
BBC NEWS | Magazine | Giving to a lost cause?:

Writing With Pictures: Consumer Response To Images

I have argued (briefly) elsewhere that some contemporary Christian approaches to visuals in worship are all too often failing to read visual language fairly and consistently with their own standards. So it is important that a set of experiments seem to indicate visuals are in fact read by consumers in consistent ways. "In the experiments, different renditions of the same three image types (a cat, a sunset, and an abstract painting) were consistently read by consumers as texts that communicated a complex set of attributes for a facial tissue. Just by varying the style and context of the objects pictured, the authors were able to selectively communicate particular properties that went beyond resemblance to an object or the sensory effects of formal features. 'We are questioning the tacit assumption made by Mitchell and Olson -- and many others that followed -- that images affect consumers via emotion or sensation rather than through a coded, conventional system,' the authors write."
Hmmm. One in the eye for the naysayers.
ScienceDaily: Writing With Pictures: Toward A Unifying Theory Of Consumer Response To Images:

Technology and worship: video -again!

In this Leadership Journal piece, there is a useful intro to McLuhan's approach which is really helpful.
"...four questions he believed were crucial to understanding media.
First: What does the medium enhance and extend? For instance: The wheel is an extension of the foot.
Second: What does the medium obsolesce? And 'obsolesce' doesn't mean get rid of. It means change the function of. So, for example, the automobile extends our speed of transportation, but it obsolesces the horse-drawn carriage. The horse-drawn carriage doesn't disappear; it simply changes its function. It's now used for romance and entertainment, but it is still used.
Third: What does the medium retrieve from the past? This is the conviction that nothing is new under the sun. And so every new medium retrieves some older medium. For example, security cameras retrieve the medieval city wall which simultaneously protects and imprisons its citizens.
Fourth: What does the medium reverse into? This means that every medium will always reverse into some form of its opposite when it is overused. So for example, when the automobile, which is designed to increase speed, is overextended or overused, it actually reverses into traffic jams and even fatalities."

So far, so good. However I'm not sure about the following: whether it stands up to brain science (for example the rather old and inaccurate right brain thing) and whether it isn't more reliant on a particular set of cultural practices from the late twentieth century. "The messages that are best conveyed by video or multimedia are almost exclusively emotional and entertaining. The bias of these media is that they exercise the right hemisphere of the brain, which evokes emotions, impressions, and intuitions." One of the reasons I doubt that is that it is increasingly the case in education and training that the visual is being used to extend abilities to process information rationally and to make connections. I suspect that the bias against appreciating the visual as a thinking tool and consigning it to the 'feelies' says more about entrepreneurship in the twentieth century and peoples' desires for entertainment through the dominant aspects of our sensorium. That said, because of the cultural background we inherit, we can't ignore the push towards entertainment values that such media give. However, I don't think that they are as intrinsic as the author thinks they are. And when he says; "We need to understand that we're dealing with an incredibly powerful medium that all too easily leans towards manipulation—a subtle form of coercion" I feel that it is a little unfair to do so as if what already goes on does not contain its entail of manipulation and coercion. It's just that the unfamiliarity foregrounds the matter. Let's face it; all communication is manipulation; just not all of it is with ill intent or negatively coercive. All of the criticisms that follow about the use of connotative meaning bypassing 'argument' are simply the visual equivalent of the tricks of rhetoric in the verbal and written media. It may be, in fact, that what visual media do is extend our rhetorical vocabulary.

Is Video Technology in Church Manipulative? | Out of Ur | Following God's Call in a New World | Conversations hosted by the editors of Leadership journal: