Media, Journalism, and Communication

A Student's Guide

Read Mercer Schuchardt, David S. Dockery

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781433535178
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Kunst & Geisteswissenschaften unterrichten

In an age of accelerating information and increasing technology, media matters more now than ever.

In this book, Read Mercer Schuchardt helps us navigate the digital age from a distinctly Christian perspective, offering guidance for becoming wise users of media rather than simply being used by media. Highlighting the importance of studying and understanding communication arts and how they are changing, this book will help you think creatively about using media effectively for the sake of the gospel, the church, and the world.

Part of theReclaiming the Christian Intellectual Traditionseries.

1

WHY MEDIA MATTERS MORE NOW THAN EVER BEFORE

In the first place, we should clarify and define the basic terms under discussion. The word media is plural of the word medium, and that word simply means “that which goes between”—which is why the word is used to describe everything from how you like your steak cooked to your t-shirt size to a spiritual guide who contacts the dead. But the irony is that we use the word media in its singular form almost all the time, and almost always unconsciously.

Right now in America there are 1,780 commercial television stations,¹ 15,503 broadcast radio stations,² 1,331 newspapers,³ 2,000,000 billboards,⁴ and 5,821 movie theaters.⁵ Worldwide there are over 7 billion cell phone subscriptions (comprising 4.77 million mobile phone users,⁶ many of whom have more than one phone) and 1,276,011,353 million websites,⁷ and this information became obsolete between the time these sentences were written and the time this book went to print because by the time you read this, there will be more of all the above (except for hardcopy print newspapers, which are dying like flies). But why do we say “the media” instead of “the medium” when discussing any or all of it? I think the answer, or at least part of the answer, lies in the facts that: (1) we don’t know the source of our information, and (2) we experience media as a singular thing.

It’s like the news—which used to be something that you went to, picked up, turned on, read, watched, or listened to actively in order to be informed. Today, however, news has become the thing that happens when someone runs up to you and says, “OMG, did you hear . . . ?” In its effect, which is to say, in our psychological perception, the media is just something that is and something that happens. And because it happens all the time—continuously, indiscreetly, and without interruption—we experience it as a singular entity. The question, “Says who?” never comes to our mind or our lips, and we simply do the search engine query, find the hit, and click the link. If we see, read, or hear the story on the media, then it must be true. This of course is the opposite of the truth, and it is often a lie, but the ways in which the media lies to us is something we’ll discuss in detail later.

The second term we have to define is communication. The official definition usually contains historical information about the message, sender, receiver, channel, feedback, and noise. The signal-to-noise ratio should be just right in order for good communication to occur. And in the days of the telegraph, that was certainly true. Today, under our perpetual high definition conditions, the digital camera can present us with higher resolution than traditional 35mm cameras ever could. Most often we are presented with such high signal strength that it becomes its own form of noise, such as the way the new super high-definition TV shows and movies annoyed you at first (until you got used to them) because they were too “lifelike” and not “cinematic” enough. People said it was like watching a documentary, or worse, a live play, in their living room. But again, we live mythically now, and all our past processes are simply taken for granted, so the best way of defining communication is in its effect, not its cause.

Communication is the art of making many one. It requires the science of the technological tools that make it possible, but it is an art because sometimes it works, like Star Wars, and sometimes it doesn’t, like Avatar—a film so successful that you can’t name any characters except for “that one blue guy.” It is ultimately an etymological definition, as it shares the same root as the words community, communal, and communion. Originally, it meant “to have something in common with someone else.”

This desire for an effect of shared experience is why it is especially important for Christians to study communication. Scripture tells us clearly that Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the future heaven on earth are all going to have this characteristic of shared common experience and perception. “Every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God” (Rom. 14:11) is another way of saying “to make many one.” The lack of visual descriptors but prevalence of acoustic descriptors about heaven, in which men and women and angels and archangels are all singing before the Lord, is another way of saying “to make many one.” Studies show that the quickest and most effective way to unify an otherwise disparate group into a cohesive unit is to get them to sing a song together. The word unify means “to make one.” The word unit means “one.”

The dream and goal and hope of Scripture is for all mankind to become one in Christ. To get there, we should learn to communicate better. To become one with Christ, we eat his body and drink his blood in the sacrament of communion. The book of Acts is a description of the amazing things that can happen—economic, social, political, psychological, spiritual—when this oneness occurs in a community. The word communication also shares the root meaning of communism, a failed political experiment in which the state takes the place of God as a nonvoluntary organizing and unifying force. The coercive nature of the project has proved its undoing in various countries, but the quixotic goal of unifying society under the barrel of a gun (through fear) continues to be attempted today. Through greed—which is the communist critique of a purely capitalist society—the effort is equally quixotic. But through the voluntary and free-will act of sacrificial love, which is Scripture’s method, the project has shown fruitfulness at different times and places through history.

So why does the media matter now more than ever? Well, the blunt reality is that your parents, teachers, and religious leaders have been lying to you all along. They meant well, they intended the best, but they haven’t ever told you the truth. And that’s not because they didn’t mean to, want to, or try to—they are good people, for the most part. But the lie they told you wasn’t in the content of anything they said. The lie they told you was that they were your parents, your teachers, and your religious leaders. The truth is, they weren’t. The media was, and is, and will be, until you die. Just look at the numbers:

Average hours an American child spends face to face with his parents each week: 14⁸

Average hours an American child spends face to face with his television each week: 35

Average hours an American child spends per week at school: 30

Average hours an American child spends per week with various digital screens: 77

Average hours an American believer spends in religious services per week: 3

Average hours an American believer spends in media time per week: 84

Number of hours in a week: 168

Average hours Americans spend indoors each week: 146

Average hours Americans spend outdoors each week: 12

Average hours Americans spends in a car each week: 10⁹

Average sleeping hours in 1800 (before the industrial revolution): 10

Average sleeping hours in 1850 (after industrial revolution): 9.5

Average sleeping hours in 1910 (after electricity and gas lights): 9

Average sleeping hours in 1972 (after mom went to work): 8

Average sleeping hours in 1997 (after the Internet): 7

Average sleeping hours in 2007 (after smartphones): 6.5¹⁰

This may come as slightly shocking or be completely obvious to you, but we now receive our parenting, our pedagogical instruction, and our religious wisdom far more from the media than from any other source, including parents, teachers, and religious leaders combined. Obviously the above numbers are averages, and your personal numbers may be higher or lower. It’s worth taking the time to do your own personal inventory and then try to quantify just “how much” of your parenting is received from your parents, how much of your teaching comes from your teachers, and how much of your religion comes from religious leaders.

You might also find it instructional to run your own numbers to discover whether or not media plays the role of default idolatry in your life. Without being conscious of it, it’s easy to see how the true and the living God could come out in second, third, or hundredth place in your life if you compare the numbers. Quantitatively, what the God of Scripture demands of us is pretty mild compared to what media demands from us. God simply wants one tenth of your money and one seventh of your time. The tithe and the Sabbath are two key ways of quantifying “what God wants” from you. If you consider these in the strictest and most literal sense, you find some pretty shocking results.

TITHE

The average American tithes 2.5 percent of his income. If the average individual income is $26,000 in 2016 and the average household income is $54,000, then this means the average American is giving between $650 ($12.50 per week) and $1,350 ($25.96 per week) to his church, when what God actually wants is between $2,600 and $5,400. In 2012, just five years after the iPhone was introduced, the total cost of ownership (device, service contract, surcharges, taxes, case, car charger, stereo dock, etc.) for an iPhone 5 was between $1,800 per year (for the 16GB model) and $4,800 per year (for the 64GB model). That’s a “media tithe” between $34.61 and $92.30 per week, or roughly three times what American Christians give to their churches, and between 70 and 90 percent of what God actually requires. And that, of course, is just for the smartphone, whose average lifespan is two years.

When you run the same numbers for your computer and for your wall-sized, flat-panel LCD TV, you discover that most Americans that own all three devices are spending quite a...