Prevailing Wisdom
The prevailing wisdom about online community is that it’s not only possible, it’s happening in our world today. The prevailing wisdom about technology is that it’s largely neutral; content and usage are the determinants of technology’s positive or negative effect. As it happens, author and pastor Shane Hipps is comfortable rejecting the prevailing wisdom.
About virtual communities online, Hipps is convinced they’re “one but not the other”—virtual but not community. He doesn’t buy the idea of techno-neutrality either, citing scholar Marshall McLuhan’s well-known refrain, “The medium is the message.”
But most of us don’t believe that. We believe the medium is the medium and the message is the message. As Hipps explained to me, we think the medium of television is neutral because it just delivers content. That content, the message, is either good (i.e., a televangelist) or bad (i.e., pornography).
While that reasoning appears sound, Hipps cites research that demonstrates television’s affect on our brains. He writes, “We sit hypnotized by the program—the content—which has gripped our attention, unaware of the ways in which the television, regardless of its content, is repatterning the neural pathways in our brain and reducing our capacity for abstract thought.” Gulp. Hipps continues, “The screen itself is part of the message.”
So while Christians have spent ages evaluating and responding to content—embracing the good, boycotting or burning the bad—it’s time to cast a discerning eye toward the conduits of content. Content is only half the conversation, and it’s imperative that the Church strive to understand the effects of the myriad of content delivery systems available to us, particularly in the rapidly-evolving category of electronic media. While our impulse is to charge headfirst into the Electronic Age, prepared to do anything and everything possible to digitize the gospel in hopes of reaching both churched and unchurched, Hipps’s message is that we should slow down and attempt to get a handle on the effects and implications of our new tools and toys.
Consumer Anthropology
Hipps first became familiar with technology’s ability to shape the human mind as a consumer anthropologist for an advertising firm. “I was trained to find ways to inhabit your imagination, hijack it if possible, and then brand your brain with whatever logo the company wanted,” he says. “And then our job was to feed you opinions you thought were your own.” With a laugh, he adds, “Which I thought was really generous of us.”
While plying his craft in the business world, Hipps came across McLuhan’s Understanding Media and had what he describes as a “Damascus experience.” As he processed McLuhan’s ideas, Hipps began to see his profession and our culture at large in a different light and perhaps through an entirely different lens. Something had to change.
“I ended up leaving advertising because I had this dawning awareness that there was a very real inconsistency between my deepest convictions and what I was doing for a living.” Now unemployed, he enrolled in seminary to “figure out what was next.”
In seminary, Hipps realized the relevancy of Understanding Media for 21st-century culture and the modern church, despite the fact that the book was published in 1964. Hipps says he “became enamored with the possibility of helping the Church understand the way that McLuhan viewed the world.” In his view, such an understanding could greatly increase the efficacy of the Church’s mission in the world. From that intention came his first book, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture (written with church leaders in mind) and his new book, Flickering Pixels, which adapts much of Hidden Power’s subject matter for a broader audience.
Eyes Wide Open
As we seek to better understand technology and its influence, Hipps contends we can better understand ourselves. “One of McLuhan’s primary observations was that every technology or medium is an extension of our humanity—it extends or amplifies some aspect of ourselves.” He continues, “By understanding our technology, we gain a better and more full understanding of humanity. If we don’t see the connection between humanity and technology, we won’t ever make the connections necessary to understand how we’re being shaped and formed.”
Such an understanding also requires us to approach matters with both eyes open lest we become the “one-eyed prophets” Hipps discusses in Flickering Pixels. When we can only see the positive outcomes of technology, it’s because we’ve got one eye opened and the other closed. When we can only see the negative outcomes, it’s not because we’re more discerning, it’s because we only have the other eye opened. While Hipps’s resistance to ideas such as online Christian community and video venue churches may make him sound like a neo-Luddite to some, that’s hardly the case. He’s simply advocating that we attempt to see technology clearly.
“We need both eyes open if we are going to perceive the multitude of subtle forces that shape our lives,” he writes. “Technology both gives and takes away, and each new medium introduced into our lives must be evaluated.” One-eyed prophets, though generally well-intentioned, are unable by definition to discern what new media will give and take away because they can only see one or the other. That may make for entertaining split-screen debates, but their leadership isn’t good enough when it comes to navigating the people of God through the 21st-century wilderness.
Lights
Consider the subtitle for Hipps’s book: How Technology Shapes Your Faith—is that really the case? Hipps believes so. What about the environments we create for our worship services? Think about the example Hipps shared with me.
“If your church, as a structure, is built in the round, and all of the lights are always on in your worship service, you will create an experience of community in a way that you could never create if the lights were down and everyone was facing forward. That medium itself creates a more communal Christianity, whether you want it to or not—it just does.”
He explains: “The reason is that with the lights up and everyone in the round, there’s nowhere you can hide. There is no front and back, and you can always be seen. It is a natural bias against an anonymous worshiper, whereas in other settings, if the lights are all down and everybody is facing forward, it actually encourages anonymity when you walk in.” Hipps is quick to add that his analysis doesn’t include “a value statement on whether that’s good or bad.” His goal is to communicate that “if you don’t understand [the effect of the environment], then you fail to understand what kind of Christians you’re creating.”
Inward/Outward
At Trinity Mennonite Church in Glendale, AZ, where Hipps serves as Lead Pastor, he applies his understanding of technology to his approaches to conflict resolution, interior lighting, and teaching. In his words, his view of technology “affects nearly everything” he does as a pastor.
For example, Hipps has a firm policy that he won’t attempt to work through conflict via email despite many people’s tendency to use the medium for confrontational means. “I will always respond with a phone call or a meeting in person,” he says. “I’ll never do it in a letter and I won’t do it in an email because I fundamentally understand that the medium itself breeds confusion rather than clarity. It simply strips all the ingredients out of the process that are required for healthy conflict resolution.”
Before you label an email policy as inconsequential, re-read those last few sentences. Hipps hasn’t dismissed email as an evil medium and abandoned its use. Rather, he has sought out the strengths (efficient communication of information) and weaknesses (inefficient communication of tone, feelings, etc.) of the medium and made a determination about how he will or won’t use the medium in his role as a pastor.
Going back to the lighting example, Hipps and his team understand the strengths and weaknesses of bright and dark environments and make their determinations accordingly. “The way we make use of lighting is very intentional. There are times when we want to make use of darker lighting so people are drawn inward, and there are plenty of times when we want to draw people outward.” In both examples, the desired outcome—healthy conflict resolution and drawing people inward/outward—determines what technology Hipps uses, as well as how and when he uses it.
When teaching, Hipps is just as meticulous about his decisions to use or not to use imagery. “The reason for that is that I understand one fundamental truth about the power of images: Images will always win. Whatever I’m saying, if there’s an image on the screen, it will always win. It will always be more powerful. It will always hijack the imagination of the audience over what I say, and sometimes I do that very deliberately.” In short, if Hipps wants his audience to imagine their own individual visualizations of the point he’s making, he doesn’t provide an image for them to latch onto. If he wants them all to visualize the same image, he will provide that image. If he wants to subvert the visualizations he thinks his audience will imagine, he’ll provide an image that is radically different in order to create a disruption and an impression. (The example he gave me was showing an image of a black or Arab Jesus to an audience of white people. Disruptive, indeed.) He qualifies all of this by saying, “[The use of images] is extremely powerful, so I make use of [them] carefully.” Obviously, it’s recommended that you do likewise.
Gestures
This year may prove to be the year of the Internet campus and the multi-site explosion. If that is to be the case, Flickering Pixels should be required reading for churches thinking about taking one or both of those plunges. Even for those who would disagree with the conclusions Hipps would likely draw about the online and multi-site movements, his method for evaluating how technology shapes our faith could be invaluable to us as we stand at a bustling technological and ecclesiological crossroads. Flat acceptance and flat rejection of technology are both insufficient philosophies as we proceed. There will be times when we should embrace and implement, times when we should ignore or condemn, and times when we should wait patiently while we evaluate further.
Let us commit to making the best decisions we can make about media, technology, and the Church. If we’re to honor that commitment, we can’t allow ourselves to be hypnotized by flickering pixels like mythical sailors enraptured by the Sirens’ song, unaware of the treacherous rocks they were hurtling toward. We must resolve to understand our technology, our humanity, and our calling (not in part, but in its entirety) as the Church of Jesus Christ. The clearer our understanding of those concepts, the clearer our decisions about technological implementation may become.
For more information about Shane Hipps and Flickering Pixels, visit www.shanehipps.com.