The Gospel Coalition

Yes, according to Ben Macintyre in his column at The Times of London. Here’s how he opens:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.

Macintyre is, of course, not the first to suggest that the Internet undermines our ability to sustain prolonged concentration on any one thing. But Macintyre’s commentary is interesting for its focus on storytelling. For example, he argues that the Internet doesn’t “do” narrative:

The internet, while it communicates so much information so very effectively, does not really “do” narrative. The blog is a soap box, not a story. Facebook is a place for tell-tales perhaps, but not for telling tales. The long-form narrative still does sit easily on the screen, although the e-reader is slowly edging into the mainstream. Very few stories of more than 1,000 words achieve viral status on the internet.

Meanwhile, a generation is tuned, increasingly and sometimes exclusively, to the cacophony of interactive chatter and noise, exciting and fast moving but plethoric and ephemeral. The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

As you can imagine I want to consider Macintyre’s analysis as it relates to the gospel—the ultimate story or meta-narrative. And, yes, I want to consider it through the medium of a blog. (Irony noted.)

Here’s how Macintyre concludes:

Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word, in the great narrative that is the Bible, was not written as twitter.

No, the Bible did not come to us in 140 character tweets. And, yet, the Internet, with all of its social networking platforms, is not going away any time soon.

So the question for us is, How can we live in this new media world in such a way that we don’t make the gospel obscure but clear? In other words, how can we help ensure that the great narrative of the Bible is not lost?

Would love your thoughts. And let me suggest that the answer has everything to do with the church…

Mike Pohlman serves as the Executive Editor with The Gospel Coalition. A former church planter and senior pastor in the Pacific Northwest, Pohlman is a Ph.D. Candidate in American church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.