Braving the New World (Wide Web):
Mapping Theological Response to MediA

by Justin A. Bailey

“Life is Short. Have an Affair.”
 
This brazen tagline belongs to Ashley Madison, the infamous Internet site whose stated mission is to facilitate covert infidelity for its customers. Ashley Madison’s guarantee of secrecy, however, was not as sure as it seemed. Last July “hacktivists” broke through the sites defenses, and then presented site with an ultimatum: shut the site down within a month, or expect a leak of all “customer records, profiles with all the customers' secret sexual fantasies, pictures, and conversations and matching credit card transactions.” When the demands went unmet, the hackers made good on their threat. Chaos ensued: millions of names were released, the CEO of Ashley Madison resigned, and concern about online data protection rose to new levels. The hack is just one example of the phenomenon known as “doxxing,” which involves exposing someone’s private information to the public eye. Hell hath no fury like the Internet unleashed.
 
The story got stranger, however. A researcher analyzed the site’s source code and found that Ashley Madison had created more than 70,000 female bots “to send male users millions of fake messages, hoping to create the illusion of a vast playland of available women.” In other words, there were astonishingly few actual women among the 5.5 million alleged women (compared to 31 million men) boasted by the site.[i] The grand twist is that millions of men were logging on to have racy conversations with Internet bots.
 
Welcome to the brave new world (wide web). Indeed, our hyper-connected reality may more often resemble the wild, wild West, with its seeming unlimited possibility for exploration and exploitation, for romance and violence, for secrecy and for vigilante justice. It’s not just the Internet, of course. The web is just one (very expansive) province of our media-saturated reality.
 
What does it mean for Christians to live faithfully in the rapidly expanding new media frontier? How should we navigate a culture in which everything – the beheading of journalists by the Islamic State, the foibles of the flavor of the month celebrity, our own lives – has become a matter of public consumption and entertainment? We can hardly stand above the fray; any reflection on media comes from actors deeply embedded in the subject, awash in the imaginaries of Facebook, Netflix, and Google.
 
Fortunately, there is no shortage of theological reflection to social and entertainment media. With the increasing ubiquity of media, there has been a corresponding proliferation of theological reflection on media. This can make it difficult to get a sense of the full range of response. Thus, the purpose of this article is to sketch a conceptual map of theological engagement with media.
 
I propose to locate such approaches in relationship to two sets of poles. We can get at these polarities with two diagnostic questions.
 
Question One: What is the Posture Towards Media?
The first set represents either a positive or negative posture towards social and entertainment media. Technophobes tend to be suspicious and critical, emphasizing the negative potential power of media to deform us, while technophiles tend to be optimistic, exulting in media as full of kingdom potential:

It is very rare to find evaluations of media that are simply one extreme or the other. Nevertheless, the general evaluative posture is usually evident.
 
Question Two: What is the Understanding of Human Agency?
The second set of poles represents various understandings of human agency with respect to media. Instrumentalists tend to construe media as a tool that we can shape for our own ends, while determinists emphasize the way that media form us, structuring our cognition of the world. The former tend to make ethical judgments on the basis of how media is used, the latter focus on the “brave new world” created by the ubiquity of media. The former emphasize content; the latter, form. Mediating between the two is a focus on the act of communication itself. Within this spectrum, human actors are afforded various levels of agency.

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Each approach to media will place itself somewhere between both sets of extremes. Most approaches tend to seek a middle way or dialectic between them. The purpose of this map is to sketch both a range of responses, as well as ethical emphases that emerge along both continuums.

 
 

A. Focusing on the Content of Media
The first two approaches are similar insofar as social and entertainment media is evaluated primarily on the basis of content it carries. Accordingly, media tends to be construed as having neutral, mediating value (media = middle), with potential for good or evil depending on our use. Accordingly, these are worldview approaches where ethical use centers on discerning, consuming and creating quality content, content that guides individuals and society towards God, virtue, and greater flourishing.
 
A1. Worldview Challenge: How do media fit with the Christian worldview?
Perhaps the most familiar Christian approach to entertainment media is found in the question: “How much sex, violence and profanity are in this movie?”[ii] Emblematic here is Focus on the Family’s Plugged In media project.[iii] The website, which aims to “shine a light on the world of popular entertainment,” provides media reviews through “a biblical worldview filter.”
 
The site warns viewers (especially families with children in the home) of things like audibly broken bones, partial breast nudity, and f-bombs, as well as alerting them to possible faith connections. Although reviewers identify positive themes, the reviews have a strong sense of antithesis towards the world of entertainment, which provides a foil for the biblical worldview. Underneath Plugged In’s approach is a “Christ against Culture” orientation committed to the preservation of Christian family values.[iv] On this basis, Plugged In hopes to help families make better choices concerning which media to consume.
 
The value of this approach is its desire to shine the light of discernment on the world of entertainment. Nevertheless, discerning worldview compatibility is often more difficult in practice than in theory. A biblical worldview is not something that we can just go out and get, nor does thinking the right things about reality necessarily entail ethical action.[v] Furthermore, family values (as defined in American culture or evangelical subculture) are not necessarily synonymous with Christian virtue.[vi] Indeed, part of the problem in evaluating media content is discerning which vices of modern society are most deforming to our discipleship. Selective focus on sex, violence, and profanity may obscure blind spots such as sadism, vanity and prejudice.
 
A2. Worldview Window: How can media shine a light on the worldview of others?
Christianity Today’s review site is also a worldview-based approach. But in contrast to Plugged In, entertainment reviews found at Christianity Today tend to focus more on artistic quality: not sex, violence and profanity but storytelling, acting, and cinematography. Instead of seeking to legitimize the Christian worldview, entertainment consumption is an opportunity to engage in world viewing.[vii]
 
Alissa Wilkinson is representative of the general approach. Wilkinson argues that Christians must get beyond the question “do I agree with this?” and ask instead “what need is the audience looking to fill when they go to see this movie?” Avoiding this question leads us to make bad diagnoses, to invalidate the humanity of the audience in order to legitimize ourselves. Taking up the posture of the Pharisee, we congratulate ourselves on our wise media choices: “I thank you Lord, that I am not like this Fifty Shades of Gray moviegoer.”[viii] Here the ethical responsibility shifts away from an evaluation of the content itself and towards an appreciation of the imaginative vision contained therein. Christianity Today’s review site is representative of a shift away from suspicious critique and towards a less defensive discernment.
 
Although the former variety of discernment sometimes lingers (each review on CT’s site ends with a section entitled “caveat spectator” listing potentially offensive content), this variety of cultural discernment is more interested in appreciating the stories told by popular media. Fuller Seminary’s Reel Spirituality project is representative: it seeks “to simultaneously raise visual and spiritual literacy,” encouraging a dialogue “between our culture's primary stories, whether in film or television, and the Christian faith.” Co-director Robert Johnston elaborates on the evangelistic aim of this approach:
 
"If we are going to be effective in our outreach and evangelism, and if we are going to really know ourselves… we need to be able to engage the stories that are forming the metanarrative, the myth, the way we understand life around us and we then need to be able to put that in conversation with God’s story that can complete it." [ix] 

Notice that the goal is not to reject or replace cultural stories but to complete them with the gospel. Johnston notes the example of Paul at the Areopagus (Acts 17): Paul affirms part of the cultural story of the Athenians before bringing in the gospel message.[x]
 
The value of this approach is found in its lack of defensiveness. Listening to our culture’s stories is an act of love and hospitality, and the ethical focus is on understanding rather than critique. Yet the perspective may assume that consumers of media are firmly grounded in their faith and can engage in world viewing without being influenced to embrace imaginatively a vision of the world antithetical to the Christian faith.
 
We can illustrate these two worldview approaches by means of their reviews of the 2015 comedic film Trainwreck. Directed by Judd Apatow, Trainwreck tells the story of a woman struggling with the idea of monogamy, piling up obscene content along the way. Although reviewers for both Plugged In and Reel Spirituality note that the film ultimately affirms the good of monogamy in a roundabout way, for Plugged In reviewer Paul Asay, the payoff is not worth the ride. He writes:
 
"Trainwreck, at least in terms of content, is just that—a careening, cataclysmic disaster loaded with stuff that no one should really ever want to see but, once there, is hard to turn away from. Sure, you can find some positives here, just as we can find inspiring stories in the midst of real-life disasters. But that doesn’t keep you from wishing the disaster never happened in the first place."[xi]
 
Colin Stacy, who writes for Reel Spirituality, has a strikingly different take: “Sex is used neither to glamorize her lifestyle nor to condemn her, but the encounters grant deeper insight into the grammar of her worldview. Amy’s moral economy is revealed through her casual and often hilariously-staged sexual antics.”[xii]
 
Note that for Stacy, the obscene serves as a window to a worldview. But Stacy pushes beyond this, arguing that the writer-comedians may be something more than bawdy joke-tellers: “We should consider ourselves lucky that the main purveyors of that sweet raunchiness know how to point us toward the hope of the better, true self and community. I, for one, am glad the modern comedian can serve as prophet of hope.” This anticipates another kind of response to media, which sees revelatory significance in our entertainment offerings, which will be discussed below.
 
A3. Worldview Incarnation: How can media create constructive culture?
Before we can get there, however, we would be remiss to neglect a third variety of worldview approach, one that centers on content creation. Overlapping with the first two, this perspective argues that Christians must not only be discerning consumers of media but also distinctive creators: criticize by creating! Working to leverage new technologies for kingdom purposes, these Christians work to provide quality content and content channels. Andy Crouch is representative, arguing that the only way to change culture is to make “more and better culture.” [xiii] He writes:
 
"It is the very rare human being who will give up some set of cultural goods just because someone condemns them. They need something better, or their current set of cultural goods will have to do, as deficient as they may be."[xiv]

The question, which Crouch goes on to concede, is what constitutes better. Christians have certainly excelled at making more, churning out a massive output of alternative content in keeping with traditional Christian worldview and values.
 
Yet Christian media offerings have had a questionable impact the wilder public. The mainstream audience celebrates few explicitly Christian filmmakers and musicians. Those who have broken through eschew the “Christian” label that relegates their work to a marginal subculture, where Hillsong offers alternative content to Katy Perry, and where GodTube serves as an alternative content channel to YouTube. Unfortunately, with such a heavy focus on content over artistry, Christian entertainment media often comes across as sterile, sentimental, heavy-handed, and moralistic.
 
Kirk Cameron’s 2014 film Saving Christmas stands out as a recent and infamous example of a failed foray in both entertainment and social media. Widely panned as Christian propaganda by critics, Cameron attempted to mount a social media campaign to boost the movie’s online rating. The campaign backfired, sending Saving Christmas to the bottom of the Internet Movie Database’s movie list, effectively designating it the “worst movie ever.” This is an extreme case; yet it remains to be seen if Christian entertainment can escape the tendency to perpetuate sectarian Christian subcultures.[xv]
 
Nevertheless, the strength of the content creation approach is that it recognizes the need to offer a compelling alternative vision of human beings and the human good. It shares with the previous two approaches the conviction that media content is the definitive locus of ethical deliberation. The call is for media discerning content consumption and distinctive content creation.
 
B. Focusing on Technology rather than Content
Christians have traditionally tended towards instrumentalism in evaluating technology, repeating mantras such as “the methods may change, but the message stays the same.” Yet a growing minority of Christian thinkers is sounding the alarm that the method of content delivery always shapes the message.
 
This brings us to a second broad category of response: one focused on the power of new media technologies themselves. This perspective argues that although Christians should be taught to discern questionable content, content can be a red herring. What is most formative or deformative is the medium itself, which is never neutral. Media technologies are a partisan powers that arrest our attention, inscribe our imagination, and change our relationship with the world, for good or evil.
 
B1. Deforming Power: How might media be deforming our discipleship?
Medium as the Message
The cautionary posture towards technology is usually drawn from the larger world of media criticism, where Marshall McLuhan’s mantra “the medium is the message” remains the central insight. McLuhan argued that “societies have always been shaped more by the nature of media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”[xvi] In other words, media is not simply a vehicle for content. The way content is communicated – whether verbally or virtually, in person or online – is meaning and value-laden, carrying determinative properties that shape the communication regardless of what the communicator wants to say. There is, of course, a difference between getting the message “I love you,” by text, email, mail, carrier pigeon, or in person. The method of delivery means something.
 
Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier agrees. In his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, he argues that communication technologies have embedded philosophies, which imprint themselves on users: “we [computer scientists] tinker with your philosophy by the direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument.”[xvii]
 
Media writer Nicholas Carr’s popular book The Shallows takes a neurological approach, arguing that our saturation in the online world is altering the structure of our brains, making it increasingly difficult to sustain depth of concentration.[xviii]
 
These critics argue that the sheer omnipresence of social and entertainment media has a more profound effect than any specific messages media carries. In his well-known diatribe Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that entertainment culture is not just distracting us but actually making us dumber. Published in 1985, his comparison of the future visions of George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) remains relevant and is worth quoting at length:
 
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture…. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."[xix]

Postman argues that Huxley got it right, and that modern civilization is dying the death of a thousand distractions. Many media prophets have followed in Postman’s wake, warning of entertainment technology’s propensity to breed distracted multi-tasking, addiction to novelty, vulnerability to hype, superficial relationships, inattention to others, and narcissism. Appropriations of the McLuhan-Postman stream can be found in many astute Christian assessments of media, most notably Shane Hipps.[xx]
 
Media as Fallen Power
It is Brent Laytham, however, who gives a robustly theological version of this response, approaching entertainment under the theological category of “principalities and powers.” As a created power, entertainment is a created structure meant to serve and enrich life. As a fallen power, entertainment has diverged from its purpose, becoming “self-referential and self-aggrandizing.” Entertainment as a power is more than the sum of its individual and institutional parts, and its capacity for malforming us is “greater than the sum total of the human sinners involved.”[xxi]
 
"Laytham argues that 'entertainment’s massive impact on us is rooted mostly in its mundane everydayness.'[xxii] That we regularly watch Netflix is more significant than which shows we watch. Laytham wants to draw our attention to the unconscious ways that various entertainment media 'shape our sensibilities, cultivate our desires, form our feelings, discipline our bodies, pattern our actions, and determine our relationships."[xxiii]
 
Laytham describes entertainment as a species of play, “an activity that stretches the imagination even as it sharpens the mind and engages the body.”[xxiv] His concern, however, is that “play’s creativity is increasingly constrained by corporate scripts… play’s performances are increasingly limited by capitalistic interventions.”[xxv] To illustrate, my son does not simply want to build with blocks; he wants Lego blocks that correspond to The Lego Movie, the Lego app, and the Lego amusement park. My daughter does not simply want to be a princess; she wants to be Elsa from Frozen, whose doll displaced Barbie in 2014 as the top girls’ gift for the first time in over a decade.[xxvi] 
 
Laytham argues that entertainment media means to colonize our experience of the world by filling up all of our time and space. Drawing a parallel to the way that the industrial revolution gave us the concept of free time, he argues that:
 
"Broadcast media and mass entertainments took things further, colonizing our evenings as prime time for television, scheduling our weekends for sports contests and movie premiers, and ordering our years with seasons (television series, individual sports), championships (Super Bowl, World Series, March Madness, World Cup), festivals (Oscars, Grammies), finales (American Idol, Friends) and pilgrimages (to Disneyworld or other themed entertainment environments."[xxvii] 

Most significantly, in an entertainment culture, Laytham writes, we are led to believe that “free time is me time.”[xxviii]
 
Laytham’s engagement with entertainment media as a rebellious power leads him to advocate for an ethic of resistance. This means resisting its idolatrous trajectories, “the way it morphs limited goods into utter necessities, the way it incessantly demands more from us – more money, more time, more attention, more commitment.”[xxix] Laytham suggest that we unmask entertainment as a colonizing principality, and treat it instead it as a triviality. Laytham’s explains that part of the problem is our overestimation of entertainment’s determining importance. Paradoxically, we resist by being aware of entertainment’s false claims and putting it in its proper (trivial) place:
 
"Thus we are not required to square off against the principality of entertainment in order to control or redeem it; the future of goodness, truth, and beauty does not depend on our grasping Hollywood by the director’s seat and steering it towards the kingdom of God. In the meantime, God give us trivial pursuits that free us from false claims to ultimacy."[xxx]

Laytham admits this is difficult to practice, however, and he prescribes a robust counter formation wherein the rhythms of the Christian story determine the shape of our lives rather than entertainment technology. Andrew Byers takes a similar position, arguing that “Christians are called to media saturation, but the primary media that are to shape, form, and saturate our lives are the media of God,” the great antidote to being malformed by the philosophies of new media.[xxxi]
 
To summarize this category of response: this school of thought presents an ethical critique that social and entertainment media technologies are embedded with reductive, commodified, and unhealthy visions of personhood, community, and human flourishing. Being human is more than being constantly entertained. Friendship is more than the exchange of personal trivia. Being connected is more than virtual availability. A focus on the media themselves explores the ways that our technologies short-circuit our humanity. The call for ethical action is usually framed in terms awareness, resistance and moderation: an appreciation for the gift of technology along with a refusal to idolize it. Ethical prescriptions within this second category of response emphasize counter formation, as well as moderation in the time and space we give to.
 
B2. Revelatory Power: How might media be creating a new world in which God is at work?
Where the former category of response tends to emphasize the deforming power of technology, a second type of technology-based response reverses the emphasis. Although they are willing to note some pitfalls of our hyper-connected world, these thinkers are more interested in the way that technology has created new conditions for God’s work among humanity.
 
Craig Detweiler gives a representative nod in this direction, suggesting that behind the power of technology is divine agency: “Technology reveals the potential contained in our physical world. What powers have today’s technology tapped into and how might God be working through them?”[xxxii] He goes on to argue that we can study technology “as a potential source of divine revelation…. In examining why particular companies have come to dominate our culture, I hope to uncover the deeper longings that they unlocked.”[xxxiii] Nevertheless, like Laytham, Detweiler’s optimism is mitigated by his conviction that we can only learn from technology once it has been put in its proper place.
 
Barry Taylor, on the other hand, is more radical. He calls for Christians to come to terms with the way that Internet technology has changed the game. He writes that Internet technologies have led to a radical democratization of society: “a less hierarchical and authoritarian exchange of ideas, ethics, information, and just about everything else in contemporary society.”[xxxiv] He points to the 2006 Time magazine “Person of the Year” issue which featured a mirror-like metallic computer monitor on the cover and proclaimed the most significant person to be “You”.[xxxv]
 
Taylor writes that it is not for us to declare this new reality good or bad; rather we must simply accept it and deal with the facts on the ground. He asks us: “Are you living in the new world?”
 
Taylor provocatively titles his book Entertainment Theology. Rather than reacting to the deleterious effects of entertainment, we should embrace the “democratization of spirit” that tech and entertainment culture has produced.[xxxvi] He calls this new world spirituality “techno-spirituality,” where the static, rigid, dogma of traditional religion is being replaced by a more fluid and vibrant spirituality, which abounds with new possibilities. He writes:
 
"Entertainment theology highlights the evolution of theology from a more didactic or studied approach to the question of God to a more global communal conversation about the sacred in general…. These developments in contemporary religious conversation are driven by a host of developments in media in the late twentieth century: Internet technology, which allows the flow of information and interaction with that material in unprecedented and uncontrolled ways; film which as a reflector of social values brought the contemporary search for spirituality to the big screen… [and] television, that most intimate of technologies, which in reconfiguring the layout of family living rooms opened us up to ideas and issues that were once discussed only in public spaces."[xxxvii]
 
Taylor argues that while he is confident that the Christian faith has the resources to meet the challenge of the times, he is also concerned that in many ways, the Christian church is lagging behind the advances of contemporary culture, unwilling to meet people in the hyper-connected world where they are. Taylor believes that if Christians would venture out into the new world of spirituality, they would meet more than people; they will meet God at work in surprising new ways.
 
Taylor’s work is intentionally provocative. Yet like Postman or Laytham, he believes that new technologies have shaped us far more deeply than the content they present. While the former thinkers sound an alarm over the changes, Taylor calls us to embrace them, and to step in to the new reality where God, through God's Spirit, continues to be present and active. In any case, this second family of response focuses on media rather than message.
 
C. Focusing on the Communication: How might media serve or undermine community?
We now turn our focus from content and technology to evaluate social and entertainment media as an act of mass communication. As such, media should be governed and guided by God’s vision for human communication.
 
Quentin Schultze is representative, arguing that communication is a God-given gift intended to nourish communion with God and community with others. The gift of communication enables humanity to build life-giving cultures. As a species of communication, social and entertainment media are “are really extensions of our God-given ability to cocreate culture. In spite of their limitations, the media are potential resources to help us serve our neighbor by telling the truth and building communities of shalom.”[xxxviii] Media technologies may alternatively promote flourishing or perpetuate conflict, and each new media technology, Schultze writes, is “both a source of social and spiritual problems and also a reservoir of opportunity.”[xxxix]
 
In emphasizing the potential of media, Schultze’s focus is on the social and cultural act that it represents. This requires understanding mass media in terms of its propagation by culture-making social institutions, “communities with their own values, practices, and beliefs.”[xl] As social institutions, we can evaluate social and entertainment media by particular ethical criteria:
1) in terms of the kinds of community they engender
2) in terms of their relationship to cultural mythologies
3) in terms of how authentically our media represents and serves our society.
 
Communication and Community
Entertainment media has a propensity to build community; social media arguably exists for little else. But what is in the center of the communities that are built? Common interest, shared enjoyment, but almost always also brands they represent. The world of social media is a telling example of the way that consumption, not just connection drives the media enterprise. Most social media trades on the promise of increased connection and friendship; online friendship, however, is difficult to monetize. The solution for Facebook was to reimagine the user experience by carefully integrating ads (drawn from tracking users’ online activity) and encouraging users to “like” particular brands, in essence becoming “friends” with companies. Facebook became a treasure trove for marketers, providing an unprecedented amount of specialized information about consumers. Facebook’s mantra is connection, but connection has been re-defined according to the values of consumerism.
 
Historian Daniel Boorstin names the result “consumption communities.”[xli] Schultze warns of the pitfalls of such communities: “Mass communication restructures our communal lives by inviting us to ignore our religious communities and to identify instead with people who consume the same goods and services that we do.”[xlii] Surely it can be a boon to connect with others who enjoy the same products and entertainment that you do.  The problem is that if this becomes the primary basis for common life, it is a thin substitute for embodied, local communities where flourishing can actually take place. In consumption communities, rather than drawing our sense of identity and belonging from the stories of our tribe, we now draw our identity and belonging from stories told by the brands that we consume.
 
Communication and Cultural Mythology: Priest or Prophet?
This means that social and entertainment media plays a huge role in propagating and legitimizing cultural mythologies, “public expressions of what most people truly believe and value.” Schultze notes that media can play either a priestly or prophetic role in relationship to cultural mythologies. Media usually functions in a priestly role, legitimizing people’s existing beliefs and values. This happens, for example, on every “entertainment news” show that follows the feats and foibles of celebrities. Entertainment media’s celebration of celebrity legitimizes our own pursuit of power, wealth and beauty. The dark side of this is that media often fulfills this priestly role by means of scapegoats, demonizing certain individuals and groups. Our scapegoats reflect cultural judgments on the nature of virtue and vice. What sorts of characters consistently play the role of evil in our entertainment media? The Russians? Muslims? Fundamentalists? Demonizing reinforces the “us vs. them” mentality, excluding our scapegoats from sharing in our common humanity, and suggests that “evil resides only in evil people, not in all of us.”[xliii]
 
Although media usually plays a priestly role, it sometimes also functions in a prophetic role, challenging society’s existing beliefs. It is evident, for example, that popular opinion on gays and lesbians has been enormously aided by their consistently positive portrayal in entertainment media. Exposure to gay characters and personalities, on Ellen, Modern Family, and the Office has done much to destigmatize gays and lesbians.
 
This prophetic edge is not necessarily virtuous, however. Powerful institutions control entertainment media, and these institutions stay in power by playing to the broadest possible audience. Like good politicians, entertainment power brokers make carefully calculated moves, paying careful attention to the pulse of a culture.[xliv] By contrast, social media represents a grassroots approach in which underrepresented stories can “go viral” and become a cultural phenomenon. In this sense, the kinds of stories that go viral can tell us a lot both about our cultural mythologies as well as attempts to subvert them. Yet here again we must be cautious: brands go out of their way to manufacture viral phenomena and to leverage viral marketing.
 
Communication and Representation:
This brings us to the issue of how authentically social and entertainment media represents our society. Schultze points to three categories of communication-related ethical decisions here: “(1) truth telling – when to tell the truth and when we might justify a lie, (2) privacy – when to maintain confidentiality and when to reveal what we know, and (3) representation – who should have a voice in particular situations and when we can ethically exclude someone.”[xlv]
 
The concept of truthful communication is complex, especially when entertainment media is heavily produced and edited, and when what one shares on social media reflects a sort of “personal brand.” Nevertheless, Schultze is emphasizing the fact that healthy communities are built on covenants of trust. Media that spins the truth in an effort intentionally to deceive or obscure the truth should be held accountable. 
 
Privacy concerns are especially relevant in the world of social media. The practice of “doxxing” mentioned above is relatively rare compared to the more everyday practice of filming people in their worst moments. An embarrassing moment, indiscretion, or angry tirade can be captured on a smartphone and instantly uploaded where its shame can live in infamy. Those who delight in this power argue that it holds people, especially public figures, accountable. But we should be cautious: although a short video clip may capture a person in a bad moment, it hardly gives us a comprehensive picture of their character. Schultze argues that virtuous communication requires deep respect for the personal and public reputation of others, and a refusal to violate the privacy of a person or organization unless there are “compelling reasons grounded in love.”[xlvi]
 
Schultze further argues that virtuous communication requires a commitment to fair representation. While mass media has always held out the promise of connection, not all parties are connected equally. Notwithstanding furious debates over “net neutrality,” media continues to favor those with power, money and social standing. Seeking fair representation in social and entertainment media means asking whose stories are consistently being told, which perspectives are consistently being shared, and which voices are being consistently overlooked and excluded.
 
A communication-based approach, like Schultze’s, pays attention to the intentional acts of communication in social and entertainment media. Since the goal of virtuous communication is community, ethical criteria tend to focus on how social and entertainment media contribute to or undermine greater human flourishing (shalom).
 
Updating our Map
As we have seen, approaches to social and entertainment media tend to locate their ethical engagement in terms of one of three focal points: the content communicated, the media that enables the communication, or the act of communication the media represents. We might, for example, judge entertainment media deficient because it contains salacious content, or because it addicts us to distraction, or because it misrepresents a particular group. Each of these is a legitimate ground for ethical concern and deliberation, and within each category there is a range of responses bearing a family resemblance. We can now attempt to chart our interlocutors on the map:

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A Preliminary (and Personal) Conclusion
In closing, I want to offer a few preliminary forays for life on the media frontier. Theologian Albert Wolters highlights an important distinction between structure and direction. Structure refers to “the order of creation… the constant creational constitution of any thing”, whereas direction is the “distortion or perversion of creation through the fall.”[xlvii] When we apply this to social and entertainment media, we can affirm the structural good of technology and entertainment as part of the human project of unfolding creation, but we must evaluate and critique the direction in which specific technologies take us.[xlviii]
 
We should also acknowledge that optimism and alarmism over new media is nothing new. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recounts the legend of King Thamus of Egypt and the god Theuth, inventor of writing. Theuth displays writing to King Thamus, exulting that it will “improve both wisdom and memory.” Thamus argues that the opposite will be the case; writing will impair civilization:
 
Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instructions, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.[xlix]
 
Neil Postman writes that Theuth’s error is that he only sees the blessing that the new technology will bring to the world; Thamus’ error is that he only sees the burden. Both are “one-eyed prophets” who only see half the picture.[l] With every new technological innovation – the telephone, the television, the Internet – this scenario plays out afresh. One-eyed technological determinists speak of how the new medium will “change everything” for good or for ill; one-eyed technological instrumentalists maintain that our innovations are simply tools to be used for good or for ill.
 
The challenge for Christians is to appropriate social and entertainment media in a way that avoids the naiveté of instrumentalism and the inevitability of determinism. It is possible, after all, for technology to undermine aspects of embodied life without fundamentally effacing it. Media culture forms us, but we in turn make something of the culture that made us through “living, on-the-ground, variable practices.”[li] In other words, the fact of digital distraction rarely exempts us from regular physical interaction with the people that we see at work, church, school, gym or grocery store. Our response to each of these embodied domains form us deeply as well, becoming part of a larger narrative in which we pursue a meaningful and integrated life.
 
My interest in the theological implications communication technology began during 15 years as a youth pastor. For these students, screens had become irreducible extensions of themselves. I once had a student who told me that his beloved computer had broken early in the week, and been sent in for repairs. I asked him if he was bored, but was unprepared for the honesty of his answer.
 
“No,” he said, “It’s so lonely.”
 
Loneliness and connection are not new. What is new is the sense of possibility that social and entertainment media technologies provide for re-making ourselves. It is common to hear laments over the deleterious effect of social and entertainment media on our faith. Often the prescription goes something like, "we are too plugged in, we need to unplug and rediscover offline practices." This is important, but it is also important to say that online life is also grounded and governed by those very offline practices. We are embodied beings, and bodily interaction continues to give shape to our interaction online.
 
Integrity requires rediscovering what Mike Mason has called, “practicing the presence of people,” in a world where we are so often found staring into our screens. We must relearn what it looks like to be truly engaged, truly attentive to people, to communicate that they are more important than our text conversations or whatever is on our screens. We can be conscious about strategically silencing our cell phones as an act of resistance to the temptation to be always available across multiple worlds. Embodied presence is irreducible to our electronic media. As one wit has put it: “When the flesh becomes data it fails to dwell among us.”[lii]
 
At the same time, we can give our attention to media, and not just try to be "good" in spite of it. Social and entertainment media offers a window into the world that we have been called to love. We can seek to understand the grammar of life made visible there, before seeking to critique objectionable content. At some level, this can only be done with a healthy sense of hope that God is still actively engaged in the world, and that the Spirit continues to do God’s creative work in surprising ways.
 
We would do well to discern what longings lie beneath new media technologies. Facebook may sometimes reduce friendship to the exchange of personal trivia. But it also is a site that trades on visibility rather than anonymity: “Here I am. See me. Take me seriously.” As Niklas Serning writes: “Facebook alienates and shames, but it also validates, comforts and supports.”[liii] Our appropriation of Facebook should include not just a wariness of its tendency to waste our time but also a willingness to take seriously and the faces of those who become visible there.
 
Indeed, the success of social media (in all its iterations) is a call to build robust local communities, where social media serves as a supplement rather than substitute to common life. We need to create communities that are more interesting than the online world, in which genuine, healthy interaction is practiced rather than superficial community.
 
Indeed, superficiality thrives in the absence of commitment to local, visible, embodied communities. I once counseled a very bright student who told me that her greatest strength was her love of learning, while her greatest weakness was her inability to commit to anything. I asked her if she thought the two were related. She said she hadn’t thought of it before, but as she reflected she admitted that her inability to commit does stem from a desire to “keep her options open” and the thought that somewhere out there might be an opportunity or experience that she might miss.
 
I think this student is a good picture of our modern situation. Our hypermodern condition is one of oversaturation and over-stimulation. Media (particularly social media) makes more information available to us that ever before: it is quite literally fed to us through our myriad “feeds”. The glut of information facilitates the opportunity to feed on information and feel emotion without having to take meaningful, committed action.
 
C.S. Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Letters that the goal is of the tempter is to elicit feeling without action.  The more humans are led to feel without acting, the harder it will ever become to act, and then the harder it will become even to feel. Our endless options so often catalyze our emotions but paralyze our action. When this happens, we grow numb.
 
One of the only antidotes for this is a community of committed action, where flesh-and-blood connection can take place between hurting bodies. Indeed, increased contact with the difficult aspects of the human condition may alleviate some of the unrealistic expectations that we place on technology. Media culture threatens to obscure, trivialize, or paralyze us through by drowning us in the 24-hour news cycle. Yet thoughtful and engaged presence, especially among the least of these, can give us all a healthy glimpse of the real. There is simply no substitute for this.

Questions for Reflection:
1. What, in your opinion, are the most significant ways that social and entertainment media has redefined life in the modern world?
 
2. What are some evidences of technophilia (unthinking acceptance of social and entertainment media) in the church?
 
3. What are some evidences of technophobia (fear of social and entertainment media) in the church?
 
4. What, in your opinion, is the most significant locus of ethical concern: content, technology, or the communicative act?
 
5. How do you perceive the primary posture of the larger church towards social and entertainment media? How do you perceive the primary posture of your church?
 
6. What are the ways that social and entertainment media has shaped church culture? What are the positive or negative aspects to this?
 
7. What are the ways that social and entertainment media has shaped the larger culture? How should the church engage this?

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[i] Annalee Newitz, “Ashley Madison Code Shows More Women, and More Bots.” Gizmodo. August 31, 2015.
http://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924

[ii] This question, found in the FAQs of movie listings on the Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com

[iii] “Plugged In,” accessed April 21, 2015, http://www.pluggedin.com/.

[iv] “Christ Against Culture” is the first category of cultural engagement from H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975).

[v] See the critique of the concept of worldview in James K. A Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).

[vi] Cameron Lee, Beyond Family Values: A Call to Christian Virtue (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

[vii] I first heard this distinction from Richard Mouw.

[viii] Alissa Wilkinson, “Asking Insufficient Questions.”  Christianity Today, March 2015. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/march-web-only/asking-insufficient-questions.html

[ix] http://www.brehmcenter.com/initiatives/reelspirituality/about/

[x] For more substantive reflection on this passage, see Robert K. Johnston, God’s Wider Presence: Reconsidering General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014).

[xi] http://www.pluggedin.com/movie-reviews/trainwreck-2015

[xii] http://www.brehmcenter.com/initiatives/reelspirituality/film/reviews/trainwreck

[xiii] “Being Culture Makers: An Interview with Student Soul.” Originally published at Intervarsity’s Studentsoul.org, January 2007. Available at http://andy-crouch.com/articles/being_culture_makers. Accessed April 21, 2019.

[xiv] Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2008), 68.

[xv] Robert Johnston notes the emergence of film study programs at several Christian colleges and universities, suggesting that as Christians improve at hearing and appreciating the stories of others, so too they will improve at telling our own in ways that are both aesthetically excellent and theologically faithful. 

[xvi] Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 9th edition (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2001), 8.

[xvii] Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), 5–6.

[xviii] Nicholas G Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).

[xix] Neil Postman and Andrew Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 2005), vii-viii. See cartoon at http://all-that-is-interesting.com/post/1002783134/amusing-ourselves-to-death) See video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-vLPvFskkg

[xx] See Shane Hipps on McLuhan’s Four Questions: https://youtu.be/3cQTSvTi5iA?t=24s

[xxi] Brent D. Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 27.

[xxii] Ibid., 1.

[xxiii] Ibid., 11.

[xxiv] Ibid., 12.

[xxv] Ibid., 13.

[xxvi] “Elsa Dethrones Barbie As ‘Frozen’ Everything Takes The Top Holiday Toy Spot,” The Huffington Post, accessed April 21, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/26/frozen-elsa-overtakes-barbie-most-popular-holiday-toy_n_6225430.html. 

[xxvii] Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play, 15.

[xxviii] Ibid., 16.

[xxix] Ibid., 28.

[xxx] Ibid., 29.

[xxxi] Andrew Byers, TheoMedia: The Media of God and the Digital Age (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013).

[xxxii] Craig Detweiler, iGods: How Technology Shapes Our Spiritual and Social Lives (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2013), Kindle Location 471.

[xxxiii] Ibid., location 464

[xxxiv] Barry Taylor, Entertainment Theology: New-Edge Spirituality in a Digital Democracy (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 12.

[xxxv] “You – Yes, You – Are the Person of the Year” http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html

[xxxvi] Ibid., 17

[xxxvii] Ibid.,15

[xxxviii] Quentin J. Schultze, Communicating for Life: Christian Stewardship in Community and Media (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), 105.

[xxxix] Ibid., 104.

[xl] Ibid., 101.

[xli] Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1974), 89–90. Cited in Ibid., 98.

[xlii] Schultze, Communicating for Life, 97.

[xliii] Ibid., 108

[xliv] Schultze reminds us that lest we be over-critical, Christian media can be just as strongly priestly, and just as weakly prophetic, as mainstream media.

[xlv] Ibid., 123

[xlvi] Schultze, Communicating for Life, 126.

[xlvii] Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, 2 edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1985), 49.

[xlviii] For an astute application of this see Derek C. Schuurman, Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture and Computer Technology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2013), 55–56.

[xlix] Plato, Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters (New York: Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 96–97.

[l] Postman, Technopoly, 5. Postman concedes that his own work falls closer to the side of Thamus, which he considers the lesser of the two errors.

[li] Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Duke University Press, 2006), 129.

[lii] I first heard this from Douglas Groothuis, who reports reading it in a now-forgotten email.

[liii] Niklas Serning, “Towards the Cybernetic Mind,” Existential Analysis 23, no. 1 (2012): 12.
​

 
Justin Bailey is a PhD candidate at Fuller Seminary. After 15 years as a youth pastor, he moved to Southern California to get better answers; instead, he got better questions. His research focuses on the relationship of faith, doubt, and the Christian imagination. 

***This article is adapted from a longer, forthcoming piece for the Ogilvie Institute’s Micah Group project at Fuller Theological Seminary and is used by permission.