Rising to the challenge of new media

by Msgr Cuthbert Alexander

taken from Catholic News Feb 18, 2007 page 8

Any appraisal of Church today that fails to take into account the impact of the new media of communication on the institution – that sees little or no connection between, for example, waning membership and these media – is flawed or at least inadequate.

Church leaders, as everyone else, see a connection between the life of their institution and new media – television, computers, the Internet and the various tools of communication to which the new technology has given rise.

 The problem is that often they do not realise how deeply the institution is affected by the very structure of these media and pay only a passing glance at what deserves their fullest attention.

Last week’s Tablet magazine carried a story about the reaction of the Archbishop of Paraíba, in Brazil, to a sect which inaugurated a 5,000-seat temple in Paraíba, one of the poorest states in the country.

The Archbishop denounced the sect for its prosperity gospel and attributed the loss of members of his flock to a lack of guidance by a community of faith which made them vulnerable to “religious groups who captivate people by inducing them to show their faith by giving their money”. He described the work of the sect as the “commercialisation of faith”.

The story is significant. Brazil, with 138 million faithful, is the largest Catholic country but it also has the highest number of Pentecostals of any country – 24 million. One must acknowledge the zeal or audacity of the sect and admire the forthrightness of the Archbishop.

But the story also revealed that the temple contains television and radio studios. The presence of these tools of media indicates more than the ability of this particular church to possess cutting-edge technology.

The technology there says something about the nature of Church today and the influence of the electronic media upon society in general and the people of the Paraíban state in particular.

The Paraíban problem, surely, can be approached from a variety of standpoints. But a media ecology focus can offer some vital insights concerning the defection of so many from the Paraíban Church and, perhaps, indicate why so many in the Western world, including here at home, have left or have stopped attending Mass.

The term ecology is used because it signals that a change in one area of media – similar to change in the physical environment – can bring about a whole range of other changes. One significant change can generate total change.

Media theorist Neil Postman explains the concept this way: “If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”

The new technology has influenced Church and how our faithful see Church in ways that are often little understood.

The Church in its “Pastoral Instruction of Social Communications” (1992) states why an awareness of the ecology of media is important:
Today’s revolution in social communication involves a fundamental reshaping of the elements by which people comprehend the world about them, and verify and express what they comprehend. The constant availability of images and ideas, and their rapid transmission even from continent to continent, have profound consequences, both positive and negative, for the psychological, moral and social development of persons, the structure and functioning of societies, intercultural communications, and the perception and transmission of values, world views, ideologies, and religious beliefs. The communications revolution affects perceptions even of the Church, and has a significant impact on the Church’s own structures and modes of functioning.

In 2005, the New York Times carried on its front page the opening of the new church of spiritual leader Joel Osteen. A used-to-be sports arena, former home of the Houston Rockets, was renovated to make a crowd of 16,000 comfortable. The church was said to have a congregation of 30,000 and a “television audience in the millions”.

The church contains no cross, no stained glass, no reminders of the “old religion”. At its opening it offered access to the Web, 32 video game booths – and a vault for the offerings.

A new technology changes things. Radio, television and the Internet render time and space invisible, which is not say that they overcome distance and separation and influences of one kind or another in the process of communication. 

These media, in Joshua Meyrowitz’ phrase, give “no sense of place”. Osteen’s “congregation” is almost limitless. Television, says Postman, is not just entertaining, “it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience”.
The Times article notably refers to Osteen as a “motivational speaker and celebrity”.

Television also reaches out and touches the individual in contrast to the printed word that requires the individual to seek it out.

Of particular importance to the Church is the effect of television on authority as we know it. Authority gets its power from the control of information.

The electronic media and the Internet, however, give the average citizen the ability to access information instantly – at their choosing. As never before, the Church is one voice among many. It is hardly surprising that Osteen’s Lakewood Church is non-denominational.

At its beginnings, Christianity found itself in the cradle of Graeco-Roman literacy. It did nothing to create such a situation. As Marshall McLuhan puts it, this position was “providentially designed, not humanly planned.” The Roman Church owes its structure and the shape of its theology to literacy and the print medium.

Print, unlike the spoken word gives fixity to ideas. It provides, as Socrates perceived in the Phaedrus, “one unvarying answer”. Print aided, therefore, the promulgation of encyclicals and other letters which helped the Church achieve its centrality.

The Church relies on sameness and tradition. It finds itself today, though, immersed in a mediated culture that relies greatly on difference and innovation. What this means for the Church and how it deals with the present situation is an opportunity and a challenge.

It is clear that the potential for teaching and learning was never greater than today. The very real danger is for Church communities to take lightly the changes that new media – by their very structure and operation – force upon their congregations, quite apart from the content of the message. This is not to underestimate content, of course; only to stress the need to look carefully at the medium itself.

It remains vital for the Church, at all levels, to seek to understand the subtle effects of new media. This is a process that has to go on in our local Church at all levels, including the parish level.

The Archdiocesan Commission for Communication will begin, next month, a training programme for community or media teams in parishes. I will say more about this next week.