Conference Prompt for Babel 2.0
Babel 2.0: Can Faith Survive Online?
Prepared by David Balzer
Associate Professor of Communications and Media, CMU
The account of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 has long been a fascination for me. It’s a story of people taking the technology of their day – bricks, stone, mortar – to “make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). God responds by confusing their language, making communication more difficult as a means of disrupting their arrogance and self-interest. For me, the question has always been, in whose name am I building and for what purposes? What follows are three prompts as we carefully consider the nature of faith and our digital commons.
Why this conversation matters
We are discerning big questions of the digital, the Divine and our day to day lives. Because it isn’t possible to name all the specifics, what we’ll end up doing together is working on our “maps.” James Carey argues, “In one mode communication models tell us what the process is; in their second mode they produce the behavior they have described…Our models of communication, consequently, create what we disingenuously pretend they merely describe.” (p. 31-32). Consider the last time you pulled up Google maps and started driving. What the model “merely” describes ends up becoming the very behaviour you undertook. How we imagine our digital commons matters because we’ll likely live into our descriptions.
Noticing our dispositions
John Ferre names three dominant dispositions that function as starting points in our lives -media as conduits, media as modes of knowing and media as social institutions. From a media as conduits perspective, “the media are neutral instruments with the power for good or evil; what matters most is who controls them and what they say…communications technologies [are] value-free gifts from God, the major issues with which they are concerned are ones of capacity and cost” (p. 84). When media are considered modes of knowing, Ferre draws on the work of Neil Postman “who argues that messages cannot be separated from the media in which they appear…’the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be’” (p. 86). Marshall McLuhan illustrated this disposition splendidly in considering microphones in Catholic mass. “…Amplifiers which are placed in the church to create sounds from all directions at once make the church architecturally obsolete” (p. 112). Media as social institutions “sees that media are indices of social values.” (Ferre, p. 88-89). This disposition clings to the conviction that human agency is a primary marker of how technology will unfold. Which disposition best names your experience? Why are you drawn to one or the other?
An invitation
I invite you to consider our day as public theology. Heidi Campbell says this “involves thinking about how our understanding of technology and media might offer a distinctive and constructive approach that can enrich wider society, especially in ways that help restrain evil and violence and promote building communities of reconciliation…This theological approach is based on two key assertions: no sacred/secular divide limits the bounds of theological engagement, and the fundamental source of our response is the gospel of Jesus Christ” (p. 116). Could it be that our work together will culminate in life-giving and transformative ways of engaging the digital commons for ourselves and our social worlds? Let it be so!
Campbell, H. A., & Garner, S. (2016). Networked Theology (Engaging Culture): Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture. Baker Academic.
Carey, J. W. (1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Unwin Hyman.
Ferre, J. P. (2003). The Media of Popular Piety. In S. Marriage & J. Mitchell (Eds.), Mediating Religion: Studies in Media, Religion, and Culture (pp. 83–92). T&T Clark.
McLuhan, M. (2010). The medium and the light: Reflections on religion (E. McLuhan & J. Szklarek, Eds.). Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of television. Penguin Books.