I like book reviews that don’t merely summarize the book but engage the book’s arguments and advance the conversation. I think Eric Eekhoff’s review of Tim Challies’s The Next Story is a good example of providing helpeful summary and then seeking to do some iron sharpening iron.
I appreciated this section in particular:
Another concern I had with the book was how Challies talked about mediation. As stated earlier, for Challies a medium is something that stands in between. What he doesn’t quite get right here is that media don’t just stand in the way, they are enablers. Phones don’t just stand between you and me, they enable us to have a conversation. To view media as something that enables rather than something that stands in between allows us to see mediation in a more positive light. For Challies, mediated communication is worse than unmediated or immediate communication. He says that unmediated communications is the ideal to strive for and anything mediated is only second rate (at best).
There are a number of things wrong with this position. First, Challies provides almost no argument for why mediated communication is worse than unmediated communication. He mentions one Biblical reference (Gen. 3:8) where Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the garden. Challies interprets this to mean that Adam and Eve enjoyed face-to-face, unmediated communication with God before the fall. But Genesis 3:8 occurs after Adam and Eve had already sinned.
Second, it isn’t exactly clear what Challies means by unmediated or immediate communications. Presumably, given his definition of medium, unmediated communication means any communication where nothing stands between two people. But how far do we take this? Does clothing stand between two people? How about cultures? Or language? Or air molecules? Challies never indicates what he means by this or where the line should be drawn.
Third, the lack of nuance in this position is unhelpful. Challies even (briefly) mentions a tool elsewhere in the book that would help him better evaluate communications technologies but unfortunately decided not to use it in this case. The tool I’m thinking of is McLuhan’s tetrad. The tetrad is a set of four questions to ask of any technology. These questions help determine what the technology enhances, what it makes obsolete, what it retrieves and what it reverses into. As Ian Bogost points out**, the tetrad helps us resist “our temptation to pass judgment on [technology] crudely – as merely good or bad, productive or distracting, enabling or dangerous. Such an analysis also reminds us that no technological object can be seen as a simple force of either progress or destruction.”
I’m not sure the reductio ad absurdum about clothing and molecules is all that compelling (except to point to the absence of a clear definition), but the lack of a biblical case for this is interesting. I wonder if Challies would say that having written Scripture—surely a mediated communication—is itself a concession to the Fall?
What do you think? Is the issue of mediated communication technology something addressed by Scripture, and if so, how does it impact the way in which you view and use technology?
