Screens change how we read scripture

I considered putting a question mark at the end of the title of this post. It's substantially the title of the CT article I'm about to comment on. However, I don't want to question the proposition of the title. I do want to question an implication and a supposed remedy of the article.

The suggested remedy seems to be to encourage Christian readers to return to using paper Bibles. The implication of the article is that Christians have always read the written word on paper and so we should return to that. I'm more interested in the matter of returning to supposedly ancient practice and so would then go on to question the reading on paper issue.

What concerned me was the unnoticed and materially poor consumer of God's word before rag-paper and moveable type kicked in to make a bible in every home or hand a possibility. You see, the remedy mentioned above elides most Christian interaction with the bible before then. I think we need to properly reckon with the preliterate experience before assessing the effects of the digital revolution. But before I say more about that, let me interject another concern.

There's a concern I have about the research that this is all based on. Basically, I'm unsure how much stock we should place in it at the moment. We are in a process of cultural reception and there are a number of variables that we don't yet know how to assess, so are we testing the right things, the right people and in any case what will things look like in 20 or 30 years (assuming that civilisation still supports such things) when/if people have evolved strategies of reading around screen use? I'm not sure how far this is an issue for digiborigines and how far for non-native digital tech-users. Which kinds of users have we been testing and how does a long background in different ways of reading affect the particular experimental packages of the studies? I'm not doubting that effects have been found, I'm just not sure whether other factors have been properly controlled for and whether what we are seeing are, in a sense, transitional effects of cultural change on particular groups as they adjust. It's not just about cognitive processing as the article seems to imply, it's also about cultural reception. We should also bring to the table the actual reading practices of recent and contemporary Christians with access to printed bibles. I think that the writer may be comparing the actual digital experience with an idealised analogue experience; not comparing like with like in significant parameters. I worry that this is a kind of sophisticated, low-key, moral panic.

So what about the longer-historical point? It's not new, but the writer of the referenced article hasn't weighed it heavily enough, I think. I was, frankly, a bit surprised that it wasn't considered more when the mention of icons was made. There, we were told, many icons have figures with open books and their fingers rest on open pages pointing to particular scriptures. (I found intriguing the link with Thomas with the resurrected Christ, btw, but that's another matter). That should have been the cue, in my opinion, to consider the reception of scripture within those kinds of cultural milieus (indeed, why icons and not written texts?), but instead the writer switches in short order to the post-Caxton era situations.

So, what I think we need to recall in this is the experience of an ordinary non-literate or barely-literate Christian in late antiquity or early medieval Mediterranean society or similar societies beyond and after. 'Similar', I mean, in the sense of the technologies relating to reading and their cultural embedding. In such societies, books and scrolls are expensive both in the materials they are made of and in the time that it takes to produce them. Partly as a result literacy levels are low. Most Christians and Jews would experience Scripture as oral/aural, not as something legible; ie not as something that they read themselves. They wouldn't be able to afford to have written copies of scriptures in their own possession. So, for them, interacting with scripture involved hearing someone else reading it, probably at a local house where they would meet for worship and fellowship. That might be once a week, perhaps more often in some situations. It probably wouldn't involve access to the whole of what we think of as the Bible but only whatever books their community had managed to save for and collect. In such a situation, what you do is hear passages read -probably a whole book at a time. You might also request to hear some parts again and you would commit to memory some passages. There would be likely some discussion, question and answer which would help recall as well as living out the message.

That's in many respects very different to how we experience scriptures nowadays. We read passages on our own, silently. We might journal about them. On our own. We rarely hear the words spoken except in church and even there often in paragraph-sized chunks but with a pew bible to hand if we want to check things out. And if we are honest, so many contemporary western Christians read small, decontextualised, chunks with a 'devotional' gloss which often does not really expound the passage or put it in context but rather reinforces popular spiritual tropes giving the impression of biblical engagement without it actually happening. So, I wonder whether some of what the digital research is picking up is in fact mirroring that and therefore it's not the digital reading that's the problem but a cultural habitus reinforced by certain bible reading artefacts which is also reflected in popular Christian culture. To be clear, Every Day with Jesus has long offered paper-readers decontextualised devotional nuggets and I think that what may be being tested is this way of using scripture transferred to screen. But it may not be inherent to screen reading.

All of which makes me wonder whether the suggested remedy is right. If earlier Christians 'fed' on God's word by aural means and oral exploration, is it so concerning that contemporary Christians may be retrieving some characteristics of pre-pan-literate culture? Does not the history encourage us to think that the new technologies may open up new opportunities (and re-open up old ones) as well as new dangers in bible-encounter? In spirituality? I'm concerned that the apparent remedy is about doubling down on what we have just been doing and not engaging with the new situation. This reminds me of the 600 year old laments about the printing press changing the way people read, think and write, implicitly calling people to eschew the mass printed book and retain the habits of listening and memorising.

Surely our task should be to understand well what is happening and to begin to craft spiritual habits that work with and through the emerging screen cultures? -Not simply resisting and damning them? The question of the article's title remains, "How will we process the Bible differently?" -and we need to discover the opportunities as well as name a few concerns.

I do think also we should not let the idea that reading the Bible should always be "deep reading" become too fixed in view. To be sure sometimes it should. But what I think the history of Christian interaction with the Bible tells us is that often the kind of deep reading seemingly in mind in the article has not been the main strategy. Rather, reflective reading, Christological reading, communal reading, prayerful reading has been predominant but I'm not sure that these add up to or compose the deep reading in view in the article. And I'm not sure that any of the research or interpretations of it make those sorts of reading less possible or intrinsically harder. In fact, I wonder whether they may be helped by screen presentation of texts.

The article tells us,

that the habit of superficial comprehension developed in digital reading transfers to all reading such that “the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards ‘non-linear’ reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page" 

I think we should consider things behind and around that. I think I want to see more longitudinal studies on that assertion. I think I would want to see that correlated with the difficulties of many readers of conventional paper-based texts not least various forms of dyslexia. I would also note that many speed-reading courses attempt to wrestle with and train the phenomena mentioned in that quote. Would it be too much to ask for us to go back to Walter Ong's seminal book 'Orality and Literacy' before we try to discuss this more?

The article also reinforces the assertion that,

the physical layout of the biblical text is important for comprehension, memory, and “correct interpretation.”

That is my experience, but then I should remind us that this is not something necessarily to panic about. Recall, again, the experience of most Christians for over a thousand years. They would not have built a visual memory of the text or relied on printed text for comprehension or correct interpretation. Let's learn from them some tricks for the post-paper culture we may be heading into.

Screens Are Changing the Way We Read Scripture | CT Pastors | Christianity Today: As digital reading habits rewire our brains, how will we process the Bible differently?

Amos Yong and the Powers

Very interestingly, Amos Yong pretty much makes the case for seeing the Powers in an emergentist way as I have been advocating. See particularly p.207 where he advoactes two "levels of spiritual realities" (corresponding to what I say in Demolishing Strongholds) and of the corporate level (the other being personal) he says: "corporate spirit-beings constituted initially by corporate realites, but irreducible to them and capable of surving the dissolution of such realities, at least for a period of time."
That latter clause corresponds to what he says about personal spirit-beings, and I can understand why he might want to say that, though I'm wondering how convinced I am by it in relation to corporate spirit-beings. Is there particular reason to want to attribute this to them?

Clearly I will need to check this book out further -shame it's not on Kindle or other e-book format as yet.

The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal ... - Amos Yong - Google Books

Reviewing A New Evangelical Manifesto [1]

Recently a different voice has been emerging in the USA:
 The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good (NEP) exists to advance human well-being as an expression of our love for Jesus Christ, which is itself a grateful response to his love for us and for a good but suffering world. The result of their recent deliberations is the book A New Evangelical Manifesto.

I'm aiming to review it as I read it. It consists of a series of articles collected together. I'll aim to write something about each over the next month or so.

The first article is by Brian McLaren and is very much a mise-en-scene of Religion, Christianity and particularly Evangelicalism in the USA today. He reminds readers that the stats indicate that the numerical health of Evangelicalism is probably more down to transfer growth, fleeter cultural adjustment and lower overheads but that it seems that this has only bought Evangelicalism about 30-40 years before the decline that afflicts mainline churches starts to settle in.

He points out that the cultural shift we've been experiencing in the West poses new questions that make the old questions traditionally fought over by Christians rather irrelevant. The driver here is new situations faced everyday: no longer are other faiths an abstract set of propositions and a theological stance, rather they are a set of practices of- and reactions to- and conversations with real people. He reminds us that the costs of running a church have gone up such that smaller churches are sliding into unviability and in turn this affects and is intensified by age-demographics. And of course, there are predictable responses to this: blaming several ways, despair, denial, guilt-tripping ... so far, so familiar.

A less -noted consideration is perhaps less relevant or recognisable in GB than in USA: the role that the political clout of the Evangelical right has had in turning off the younger generations: the religious label has become so bound up with the political that a plague on both houses is called down. This is different between the two sides of the anglophone Atlantic: the USA has tended to see a right-wing political engagement by Evangelical churches. If anything, over the last 30 years, British evangelicalism has tended to become left-leaning -at least in social matters relating to power, wealth, poverty, war economics and so on.

something that probably does play on both sides of the Pond is the tendency for Christians to retreat into nostalgia, nativism (a kind of nostalgia for the old social settlement of white, heterosexual male dominance) and negativity. McLaren points out that these are precisely the attitudes that tend to put younger people off. And actually, not just younger people. Such people can't hear the actual Good News we are supposed to be about because the Bad News of our attitudes and disconnection shouts so loudly through our institutions, habits and misguided pet peeves.

I was interested to notice how McLaren highlights a dynamic in Evangelicals that seems also to exist among Muslims in the face of post-modernity: a desire not to be labelled by the conservatives as being liberal or in some way 'infidel' which leads to a tendency to try to position oneself in such a way as to continue to allow the conservatives to do the defining and also to fail to listen to the most important critiques of those most in touch with the cultural issues involved.

McLaren's hope is for a networking by 'new' Evangelicals with Jesus-centred people in other polities: Orthodox, Catholic, Mennonites and so forth.

I think he's right, but the difficulty will be whether this 'tendency' can manage to drag the semantic centre of 'Evangelical' towards the centre and leftwards. It is a shame that etymology is not determinative of meaning, because in this case it would very much help the cause.

Steven Martin's essay 'How the Church went wrong' follows McLaren's. This starts with a recognition of the gap between NT hopes for the Church on the realities of many people's experiences and the force of it is exemplified by the angst about whether the effort of going to church will really be repaid by the experience which many people face.

In the face of this, he proposes that following Jesus is to deliberately and habitually do what the world deems impossible. The Constantinian comrpomise is identified as being close to the root of the Church's failure to commend in word and deed such a following of Jesus. This is a familiar thesis, and the quibbles that it wasn't so much Constantine as those who came after that actually did what is criticised don't really take away from the fundamental point that the all-too-often easy acceptance of state power by churches has usually led to betrayal of gospel values. Of course, what isn't examined is what better response there might have been and how might it have played out -a great topic for some counter-factual histories. But the remaining issue in this aside is whether we can develop a useful and faithfully-Christian way of using power -and a wise eschewing of it when called for.

Martin briefly recounts the terminus ad quem of Constantinian Compromise in the form of Church apologists for Nazism: people of impeccable piety but who committed crimes against humanity and/or were apologists for them. So the problem is actually about whether piety follows Jesus or is actually a way to follow the ways of the world with a veneer of faith, religion or spirituality. And the former is 'impossible' whereas the latter is deemed realistic.

While I'm signed up for the main message of this essay: I'm niggled by some things. One is the issue of whether being a Christian really means leaving government, as mentioned above. Another is that I'm quite worried by those who are keen on the idea of radical discipleship and 'living the impossible' but who seem to be radically unempathic, judgemental and offputtingly uncompromising. Now I know that Martin isn't advocating for their responses but I'm wary and weary of those who use the trajectory of this sort of argument to ensnare the fired-up in some profoundly un-Jesus-like stuff too.

Kindle -ready for action?

I've been keeping an eye on this e-reader malarkey. As much because I spend about 7 hours a week on trains and don't want to carry more weight in books than I have to; this kind of device would seem to be a potential help in my on-train reading to weight ratio! I am also keen on the e-ink idea because back-lit screen can't do well in very well lit positions and sometimes a train seat by the window is exactly that! I'm also of an age when holding a book's weight for extended periods can give rise to concerns about carpel-tunnel problems and RSI, so a lighter device with no concerns about positioning oneself to hold pages open is a definite plus.

However, I have other concerns. Ones I think are probably shared be those involved in scholarly pursuits. I need a device that allows me to annotate the text, highlight stuff for later retrieval and in general enable me to re-cycle stuff into further articles and arguments. It seems that the Kindle would enable this to happen: : "using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes. You can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use."

What I don't know, though, is how many formats of e-books there are and how versatile the Kindle might be with regard to them, and whether there are other devices that would get a greater thumbs up ... Anyone got any suggestions or any more thoughts?
Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Wi-Fi, 6" Display, Graphite - Latest Generation: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Kindle e-reader motivates reading

I wonder whether this could offer a glimpse of the future of literacy? Kindle e-reader motivates less-enthusiastic readers: "The e-reader has features that make the text audible, increase or decrease font size and let readers make notes about the book. 'It's interesting to see the kinds of things these kids have been able to do,' Larson said. She said sometimes they make comments summarizing the plot, therefore reinforcing their understanding of the book. Other times they ponder character development, jotting down things like 'If I were him, I'd say no way!'"
In one sense some of this is what some of us have learned to do with paper books in order to study them. The thing being that we were mostly brought up to 'respect' books and not to deface them. E books invite such 'disrespect' and the interactivity encourages a more constructivist approach to the texts. Worth pondering.

Worth pondering especially when that kind of attitude is brought to the biblical texts. I would argue that in Islam's attitude to the Qur'an we see writ large or intensified the then-cultural reverence for books. An attitude with is more tenuously held in the Christian tradition: the gospels being written down were not the first reflex of the Christian communities; the stories were told first. (To be fair, the Qur'an is supposed to be recital first but was much sooner 'reduced' to writing). I envisage the gospel stories being told against a background of interrogation and rumination and then, when the form that 'tells well' and 'remembers' well is honed, fining that they get written down.

Still pondering ...

Flex-E-books soon ...

Now this looks like what I've been waiting for. I recall seeing this firm's previous discoveries reported a short few years back and it finally looks like they are about to produce the goodies. New Scientist records it here: Flexible electronic books to hit market soon - tech - 23 February 2009 - New Scientist and the nub seems to be this: "Plastic Logic says it has now perfected a way of printing polymer transistors onto a layer of bendy plastic - allowing the screens to flex and bounce. 'Screen breakage is the number one complaint with today's e-reader technology. Our display can take a lot of rough and tumble,'"
A bit later on we're told: "The company says it is now ramping up to commercial production of the screens, which will be just under A4 in size. "It'll be a much better e-reading experience at this magazine size - keeping layouts and graphics intact without converting them to small and unattractive formats," Eschbach claims.The device will have wireless internet connection and a touch screen, allowing use of a virtual keyboard for annotating text. In contrast"
That sounds more like it. I have no idea of cost, and I guess the first generation is going to be beyond my wallet, but it would seem to be what I've been waiting for: glad I haven't bought a Kindle ...

Now combine that technology with this one and you could have something very, very powerful: I can see classroom uses which might make smart board technology as we currently know it obsolete: "a device that lets you do something similar. Called sixth sense, it offers a way of displaying information on any surface - a newspaper or wall, for example - and manipulating it with hand gestures. "We wanted to find out if we could merge information into a sense that is always with us," says Maes's student Pranav Mistry.
The device, which is worn around the neck as a pendant, contains a small projector and webcam. The pendant communicates either with a laptop in a backpack or a smartphone connected to a remote server. The webcam monitors the user's hand gestures and conveys them to control software running on the laptop or server."

And for musos ...

People of the Screen

Interesting article. We do need to think about literacy (and me, in the process of onlining courses and course details ....). So it's worth looking at this article. Not least for things like the reminder that silent reading (probably like silent praying -or 'mental prayer') only really caught on in 10th century. It's here:The New Atlantis � People of the Screen. But I do feel the need to question this: "Reading on one’s own—not in a required sense, but doing it because you want to read—that skill has to be cultivated at an early age." I'm not sure how far reading should be reified like that. I like reading -except that I don't; in reality I like what reading delivers: facts; stories; news; social networking ... So how far do we really need to join in with the 'alas and alack'-ing about young people not reading books (and how true is that anyway?) Would we have the same trouble with listening to political speeches for an hour or more, or lectures that are monological? Not really. We adapt -though some bemoan.

We seem to have fetishised reading. It's not necessarily a good in itself; it's a medium and as such has ideological and psychological consequences (some of which were bemoaned with the advent of mass printing). Let's just recall: when we go on the internet a lot of what's involved is reading. It's part of our communicative repertoire; it doesn't have to be done in mega doses. I suspect that behind this is a moral panic devolving from 'high cultural' norms and hegemonic moves.

Now I think that the following quote is more 'on the money':

"print literacy has been one of the building blocks in the formation of the modern sense of self. By contrast, screen reading, a historically recent arrival, encourages a different kind of self-conception, one based on interaction and dependent on the feedback of others. It rewards participation and performance, not contemplation. It is, to borrow a characterization from sociologist David Riesman, a kind of literacy more comfortable for the “outer-directed” personality who takes his cues from others and constantly reinvents himself than for the “inner-directed” personality whose values are less flexible but also less susceptible to outside pressures. How does a culture of digitally literate, outer-directed personalities “read”?"

. In fact, I think I said -that is wrote (and is that an interesting an significant carry-over of a semantic field?)- something along those lines not so long ago.

As one of those 'outer directed' types, I can't help wondering 'why is this a bad thing?' -Oh that's right; because it potentially shifts power. Welcome to my world. And the answer to that rhetorcal (?) question ending the quote might well be 'collaboratively' -which is what happens anyway even among academics who are well-formed by the inner-directed praxes of academia: 'college' comes from the Latin for reading together, for example. And what about all those colloquies and symposia?

Which rather belies the anti-paeon ending with the quote "“Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,”"
No it isn't.
Dialoguing with it interiorly or extoriorly, learning to relate it to our own experience, values and a prioris and so forth (look at educational research, for goodness sake) is how we learn. Just because the writer of this piece has got how to do that with books down pat and has made a relative success in a print-media world doesn't mean it's right for all and ever, and in facts acts ideologically and mythically to justify her preferred ways and to maintain others in relative powerlessness.

Yes, we should be alert to the way that the newer literacies based on newer technologies alter our sensorium and our mentalities; but we need to be wary of making simple 'old=good, new=bad' judgements such as this article, in its oh-so-reasonable way ends up doing. To be sure, it does keep wandering into engaging with counter-views, but fails to critique its own sureties (for example; the 'bad' habits of screen reading seem to apply to many readers of newspapers and magazines).

At the end of the day the kind of position that the author is setting out seems limited by the apparent inability to imagine things could be different and still well. Or to be prepared to imagine that there could be positive and good effects in different ways of handling information and of thinking (as well as difficulties in the old -which we largely don't notice because we're too used to them and no longer notice our coping mechanisms). "The old is better". But then again, new wine can be viewed positively...

The Books of The Bible -a welcome break for Bible presentation?

This version takes out the two-column presentation which has become traditional in bibles and "Chapter and verse numbers are removed from the text."

My wife has been saying they should do this for years, she may have a point. Some of her reasoning is in the reasons given on the blog for this:

* the impression given by c&v is that the reader is encountering a reference manual of some sort, so it immediately misrepresents the nature of the Bible;
* c&v imposes a kind of numbing “sameness” on the biblical material, flattening it out and disguising the real variety of material;
* c&v is off-putting and confusing to new readers of the Bible;
* chapter divisions typically don’t correspond with the authors’ divisions of thought;
* chapter divisions can direct people to make sense of only a piece of a longer section as if it were complete in itself;
* chapter divisions can direct people to read two or more smaller sections as if they really belong together in a single section;
* even when chapter divisions do align with the natural breaks in the text, they are all about the same length, thus allowing only divisions of a certain size to be shown and ignoring divisions of both a larger or smaller size;
* chapter divisions encourage the reader to stop upon reaching the end of the chapter;
* verse divisions imply that the Bible is a collection of independent and free-standing statements;
* verse divisions are often placed at awkward or inappropriate places;
* verse divisions lead to “verse-jacking”, an intrusive breaking into the biblical text, typically leading to the robbery of selected words in which the original context and meaning are left behind;
* verse divisions encourage a relativistic reading of the text in which the original meaning fades back and all that matters is what the isolated words say to me, now.
In short, c&v presents a serious distortion of the biblical text.

Of course the really worrying aspect of all this is the people who talk about doing something like this as if it's changing scripture...
The Books of The Bible | Comparison:

How to read a book

Hat tip to Steve Bishop for drawing attention to this rather excellent set of notes. It pretty much covers the same ground as the relevant chapter of 'The Distance Learner' and has some good advice linked to sound findings in terms of what we know about how we learn. So worth getting a hold of. Another thing I'm stashing away to offer students in college.
ecotheology: How to read a book: "David Field has a five page pdf on 'How to read' ... it's a handout for the 'Stating the obvious' module at Oak Hill  College.  It's well worth reading! "
I agree Steve. Thanks.