Diakrisis

I am among those convinced that every media shapes its message; further, when employed extensively, the media shapes the messenger.

For the first claim: when you choose to blog, or tweet, or make a phone call, or put up a billboard, the medium that you employ constrains your message; if constrain is too strong a term, the medium at least presses your message to fit certain parameters. Thus, you could tweet the next great American novel, 140 characters at a time. But you’d be fighting the medium. Or you could put up a billboard with a 10,000 word refutation of Harold Camping; there’s certainly enough space on a billboard, right? But, again, you’d be fighting the medium.

This much oughtn’t be tremendously controversial. But taking this one step further, I believe that the medium of communication that we employ not only molds what we express, but, when such a medium becomes our primary mode of expression, it also pushes us to certain patterns of thought. Twitter is a great example here: if you’re an active user of Twitter, you start to become aware of items in your daily experience that would make great tweets. I assume photographers experience a similar phenomenon: they see pictures in their ordinary experience that the rest of us miss, because we are not accustomed to express ourselves in that medium.

All that to set up my point: I think that Christian blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking incline us to look at things a certain way, and I’m not convinced that this is good for us. Let me cite two examples.

First example: I must confess that I found the Facebook brouhaha that erupted after the killing of Osama bin Laden amusing. Essentially, the matter became an occasion for tossing verses back and forth; some favored the verses which speak of exulting when justice is done, others the verses which warn us against rejoicing in the misfortune of our enemies. It is not my intent to offer any evaluation of the merits of these positions; I’m merely observing the phenomenon.

Second example: I noted that, on Mother’s Day, several people (some notable Christian spokesmen) offered thoughts to this effect: “Let’s consider, on Mother’s Day, those without mothers, those barren, etc.” Again, I do not in any way wish to make light of this admonition; I’m drawing attention to it to make a broader point.

And that point is this: I believe that for many of us, social media tools press us (especially those believers who have some influence) to publish an insightful angle our topics, preferably before anyone beats us to it. And as Christians, that “insightful angle” tends to be accompanied with a (variably) subtle message: “you really should have thought of this, if you were really spiritual/gospel-centered/etc.,” and “aren’t you glad I noticed it?”

The upshot of this is not that we should refrain from posting insightful, contrarian bits of wisdom. The point is that we must be aware of the truly egomaniacal tendencies that these media foster.

And I must add the obvious disclaimer: I’m well aware of the self-refuting nature of a post like this, delivered by this medium.

Consider the following statement explaining the presumed alienation of pre-multiculturalism black students from the masterpieces of Western culture, an alienation she implies was corrected by ethnic-studies courses: “In short, for a black student being asked to study the great books was not like being asked to do so for a white student. For the latter, it was an initiation into the elite stratum of one’s own world (159)….” [By contrast,] the “price of admittance” to the great tradition required black students to “repudiate their origins and to avow the superior value of European civilization” (151).

These statements make sense only in terms of a simplistic racialist view of culture that sees it as somehow biologically linked to race. Consider all the identity-politics assumptions in Nussbaum’s statement, leaving aside the marvelous variety ignored by the catch-all phrase “great books,” and the implication that they are mere hosts for uniform totalizing ideologies. The first is that if you are white you immediately feel some mystic kinship with Homer and Shakespeare. Presumably, Caucasians have a “great books” gene that can overcome the limitations of economic class and ignorance. Maybe in Nussbaum’s privileged “elite stratum” reading Homer is an initiation into a world recognizable because one’s upbringing has been surrounded by the art and literature of high culture, but for many so-called “white” people who lack such cultural advantages, the only Homer they know is surnamed Simpson. Or does Nussbaum believe that a poor-white Appalachian by nature has some racial affinity with a Mediterranean Greek?

Bruce S. Thorton, “Cultivating Sophistry,” in Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001), pp. 8-9.