As communication theorist Marshall McLuhan argued, the tools we use to communicate a message can shape that message in ways we may or may not intend. If this is true then Christians have a duty to critically evaluate the effect of our media choices on our message. Do our choices of media forms allow the message to remain Christian? Or are the tools with which we communicate at odds with the message of the Gospel? If the medium affects the message, how will the Christian message be affected by the new media?

A response to the Evangelical Outpost Symposium sponsored by Wheatstone Academy.

Media? Message? What?

After reading this explanation of Mr. McLuhan’s famous dictum, I am only somewhat less confused. If the “new media” we’re talking about are cell phones, the internet, ipods and whatever else is out there that I’m not hip enough to know about, and the message is whatever the use of these media is implanting into our subliminal culture, then certainly these new media are not inherently Christian and are not preaching the gospel as an intrinsic media-borne message. However, I’m not sure I see that the new media are distorting the gospel either.

One element of the gospel is the building of Christian community. Jesus said that Christians were to be the Church, a community of disciples, praying together, learning together, and worshipping together. The internet, like television and even radio before it, can be a somewhat self-indulgent and isolating addiction. But it doesn’t have to be. Just as we can isolate ourselves from real community by spending too much time in front of a TV screen or a computer screen, we can also connect with others, especially via the internet, in ways that were not possible even ten years ago. If the Christian brothers and sisters I meet via the internet become my church to the exclusion of a real physical church community, then the medium of the internet has twisted and limited my understanding of what a true Christian community is meant to be. If the information and the encouragement that I get from others, blogs and forums and such like, become an adjunct to the community I experience and cause me to care not just about my immediate community, but also about the world and the Church around the world, then the underlying message of the internet is helpful and supportive to the cause of Christ.

Christians don’t control the internet any more than they control the publishing industry, and we shouldn’t aspire to do so. We can learn to effectively use the media—blogging, podcasting, music making, text-messaging, etc,—to communicate the most important message of all, the message of John 3:16 to a multitude of lost, hopeless people around the world. And as long as we remain “as wise as serpents and harmless as doves” and discern the limitations of the media we use, we can see these new media as a gift. When have we ever been closer to the day when the gospel of Jesus Christ would truly be preached “throughout the world?”

So I’m not sure I agree with McLuhan’s formulation in the first place. The medium carries a message of its own, yes. Television can cause us to focus on the visual to the exclusion of the other sensory apparatus that also receive communication. The internet can isolate and appeal to a limited attention span. However, the media, new and old, also carry the messages that the communicators put into their music, photographs, moving pictures, speeches, written words, and other forms of communication. And Christians, although we should be aware of the inherent limitations and distortions that accompany any given medium, need not fear that the message of the good news of the love of God through Christ will be lost in the messages of the new media, any more than it was garbled and made ineffectual by the printing press or the telegraph.