52 books #8: The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture – Shane Hipps

The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture – Shane Hipps

Around the end of 07 I decided I wanted to read 52 books this year. I read a lot, so that’s not really a step down in quantity for me, but I wanted to step up in quality. So I got on my email and facebook lists and asked everyone for book recommendations. I’ve got a great list and this one from Dale Dirksen is the first of those. Dale was a professor of mine and Teddi’s and is a friend of Bridgepointe. It would be safe to say that worship is his area of expertise so I was looking forward to reading this.

First of all, Brian Mclaren wrote the forward. Just to make things clear, I like Brian Mclaren. I thought Generous Orthodoxy was brilliant. But I’m beginning to tire of of his recommendation being the ultimate stamp of approval for anything emerg… whatever. I don’t think it’s his fault, it just that he recommends and does forwards for so many books I don’t know if I can trust him. As an aside two guys whose recommendation is completely irrelevent to me because they attach themselves to too many books: Tony Campolo and John Ortberg. Publishers take note.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. This is a good and helpful book. It’s basically a walk through Marshall McLuhan specifically for the contemporary church. McLuhan is one of the most quoted and least understood thinkers of the twentieth century. As we have, and continue to pass through an age where communication and media are changed incredibly quickly by the blistering pace of advancing technology, the church has struggled with media and electronic culture. We struggled with the planet being round and the earth revolving around the sun, it’s no shock that that the television age makes us sweat. Like so many other things, the church has tended to fall into two ways of relating to electronic culture: Blind acceptance or stubborn resistance. as most of us realize, neither of these are very helpful.

Hipps uses McLuhan’s work as a platform for rational discussion and engagement with new media as they appear in church life. Very basically, any new media’s impact can be divided into four categories: The media can enhance something, the media can reverse into or degrade into something unintended, the media can retrieve something held in the past, the media can make something obsolete. We can apply this to something to something like the digital projector.

1. The projector enhances the human eye and makes us able to view written song lyrics and announcements. It can enhance the communal experience the communal experience by lifting heads from individual hymnbooks onto a shared screen.

2.The projector reverses or can become a television screen, rendering the gathered an uninvolved observing mob.

3. The projector, through its use of images, can retrieve the stain glass that was commonplace for non written communication in our churches.

4. The projector makes obsolete the overhead (thank God) and the hymnbook, as well as possibly the bulletin and the service program or service books.

Now there could be any variety of opinion on the value of or problems caused by bringing in a projector, but at least we have a common language with which to discuss it. The truth is, the good news we share is affected drastically by the ways in which we share that good news. To ignore this reality by behaving either as technophiles or as Luddites is dangerous and irresponsible.

Hipp’s strength is that this book is about how to discuss these things, rather than what to think about them. He seems to acknowledge that there may not be a single right answer for all congregations in all places and Hidden Power is better for it. I would have left out the last chapter as it has been written better in other places but, all in all, a good book. Thanks, Dale.

Listening to: Peter Elkas, Nathan Carroll