Reflection on Flickering Pixels

Flickering Pixels, by Shane Hipps, is our assigned textbook for this course. I've read about half of it now (chapters 1-8). Hipps is an advertising and marketing guy who apparently had a change of heart and moved away from his lucrative career in search of a more faithful way of living. (A good pastor friend of mine has a strikingly similar story, actually.) For today's class, our professor asked us to find three interesting statements from the book and comment on them. There is certainly a lot of food for thought, but I will try to pull out just three passages and reflect on them below.

One of the first statements Hipps makes is that "Christianity is fundamentally a communication event. The religion is predicated on God revealing [God's] self to humanity... Any serious study of God is a study of communication, and any effort to understand God is shaped by our understanding - or misunderstanding - of the media and technology we use to communicate" (p 13). While this might be a case of seeing in God whatever happens to be most interesting to the individual, I think Hipps' claim is worth considering. The story of God's relationship with humanity - from the people of Israel to the early Christians and down through to our own time - is filled with examples of how God communicates with us and how we seek to communicate (or sometimes avoid communication) with God. God walks in the garden, appears to Moses in the burning bush, speaks through the prophets, and becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ. How does God communicate with us today? And how do our own culture and society affect how we see God? These are questions I can barely begin to answer, but they certainly seem important. Do I expect God to communicate in certain ways because of when and where and how I was raised? Probably so. Does God subvert my expectations? Absolutely. I'm willing to continue with Hipps in order to understand how my own experience of communication influences my understanding of God.

In discussing media, broadly defined, Hipps claims that "the various media through which we acquire information are not neutral. Instead, they have the power to shape us, regardless of content, and we cannot evaluate them based solely on their content. McLuhan challenges the notion that if a medium dispenses violence or sex, it is bad, but if it dispenses Christian content, it is good" (p 26). Since we usually focus so much on content, I find it difficult to pull back from the content and look at the medium itself (for the record, I have never been able to do those "Magic Eye" puzzles). However, I was thinking about the example of television as a medium. It strikes me that the "Christian" television stations have more in common with the rest of secular TV than they have with communal worship in a church or private prayer and meditation. In other words, I can see how the medium is more of a uniting factor than content. Considering language itself as a medium, I am convinced that I actually think differently - experience the world differently - than someone whose native language was ancient Hebrew. Hebrew doesn't have verb tenses the way English does. In particular, they have no present tense. Wouldn't that language, then, lend itself to thinking about the span of past and future more than one present moment? Wouldn't the people of that language think of God differently than I do? The English language is a medium through which I take in information. It is not neutral in itself.

One of the modern innovations that has profoundly affected the world around us is the accessibility of images. The invention and development of the camera, video, and more recently Photoshop and YouTube mean that our society is flooded with images. Hipps says, "Image culture dramatically shapes the way we think. It also determines what we think about. Images are not well-suited to articulate arguments, categories, or abstractions. They are far better suited for presenting impressions and experiences" (p 77). Since we are surrounded by images, we are less able to follow long, abstract chains of reasoning (perhaps that's why I could never understand Aristotle), and more able to grasp wholistic experiences. This has implications for our preaching, as Hipps points out. We are not in an age of four-hour long sermons full of long, complicated arguments. However, we are in an age that is better able to experience the stories of Jesus and perhaps to apply them to our own lives. As a preacher, I wonder how much we should embrace this aspect of culture and how much we should fight against it. I would like to think that a balance is both necessary and possible; we need rational arguments and theology as well as intuition and experience.