When Marshall McLuhan declared that the “medium is the message” few neither understood nor considered his implications.  Avante garde artists understood – but so what.  Advertisers understood but succumbed to mass-media’s addiction.  Some universities understood but they’ve only produced more professors.  The rest of us swim in the waters of mass-media and for the most part are completely unaware of its affect.

Marshall McLuhan was one of the fathers of communications theory and surfaced how our tools of communication shape us and in turn how we then reshape culture.  Neil Postman, in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” went on to express how the dominant medium becomes our cultural metaphor.  These works provide a key to understanding the roots of Modernism, Postmodernism and the characteristics of the emerging culture and church

The nature of print created a mindset that produced Modernism.  The nature of broadcast created a mindset that produced Postmodernism.  If we look at the nature of digital interactive media we see already how it is reshaping the minds of tomorrow.   The inherent nature of the digital medium holds the keys to anticipating tomorrow’s worldview.   I’ve developed a communications grid for understanding the differing qualities of ancient, modern and postmodern culture in an upcoming book called “The Millennium Matrix: Reclaiming our Past, Reframing the Future of the Church.”  It will be released July 9^th through Jossey Bass publishing.  By using the Matrix one can explore how the emerging digital culture will impact the influence of Modernism and Postmodernism.  It will also expand the dialogue to anticipate fundamental changes in art, architecture, worship, leadership, business, community as well as shifting paradigms for church growth and communicating the gospel.

I’ll offer a brief summary of the mechanics behind the Matrix.

Our communications tools have changed over time: from the spoken word, to the written word, to the broadcast image/word, to the digital multi-media/word. With each change has come a new and different way of seeing the world. Here’s what happens:

When our communication tools change, our perception’s change and impact our understanding of the world.  This alters our psychology, shifts our interaction with others and leads to new institutions that better support these new relationships.  At some point along this continuum a new worldview emerges.

I will conclude by listing seven inherent characteristics within digital media.  These qualities provide keys to understanding the emerging culture and church.  They are seven new forces that press against every institution, including the church.

The seven qualities of digital media include; interconnection, complexity, acceleration, intangibility, convergence, immediacy and unpredictability.  The young minds that are growing up with this experience will see the world through this filter.  They will relate within this paradigm.  They will organize in ways that optimize these capabilities.  In converse, if organizations and individuals that don’t adapt they will continue to experience stress, ineffectiveness, dysfunction and eventual breakdown.   Let’s take a brief look at these seven emerging realities.

Everything we do is becoming increasingly interconnected.  “Instead of living in a domino world, where one change logically causes the next, we have entered a chain-reaction world of exponential outcomes.  In this brave new world, interdependent relationships can exhibit extraordinary cohesion or, if destabilized, spiral out of control like a nuclear reaction.”   This quality has lead to a new level of complexity.  The linear logic that once allowed us to reduce everything to their component parts is insufficient to explain or understand our complex world.  Outcomes accelerate through this omni-directional feedback loop.  Most of us feel life’s exhausting pace which will ultimately force us to find new structures to restore equilibrium to the systems of our lives.

“We are moving away from the tangible world we can touch and hold toward world that operates on intangibles like information, potential, and reputation.”  This challenges our very notion of how to determine, create and exchange value.

The world is converging.  Thought disciplines within science, technology, theology, industry, politics and even geography are blurring.  This reflects a medium that is the first to combine text, sound, images and data onto a platform using a common language.  How will this metaphor change the church?

We’ve long left print’s reflective domain and have been prodded to keep up with broadcast’s reactive pace.  The digital world is pushing us toward a “real time” environment, beyond urgency and into immediacy.  This produces a paradoxical dynamic of accelerated calm, a state of mind I call “reflexion.”  Relexion takes place when highly integrated mastery allows someone to instinctively execute complex decisions in an unpredictable and rapidly shifting context.  These are the skills fighter pilots or emergency response teams posses.  Skills developed through repeated realistic rehearsal or simulation.

Old virtues of mass and strength are liabilities in a new world of complex volatile change.  Flexibility and adaptation are the new assets.  We live in a time where one word from the Federal Reserve chairman, finding a single cow with mad cow disease, a few patients reporting a new strain of influenza, the discovery of abusive military photographs or any imaginable trigger reverberates immediately and globally like fireworks gone haywire.  Massive inflexible entities will necessarily give way to smaller, more flexible but tightly linked entities.

If we look at Modernism as a construct of a print mindset and worldview and Postmodernism as a construct of a broadcast mindset and worldview we open the doors to some new questions and answers in this ongoing debate.  More importantly, we open the door for new dialogue about the threats and opportunities of an emerging worldview and an emerging church that seems to eclectically adapt to the new realities.  “The Millennium Matrix” continues the dialogue in greater detail.

Understanding the institutions of tomorrow is not that difficult.  I’ve listed seven qualities or capabilities they will possess.  “When it becomes necessary to develop a new perception of things, a new internal model of reality, the problem is never how to get new ideas in, the problem is how to get old ideas out.” – Dee Hock “Birth of the Chaordic Age” p 135.

The piece points out some good ideas, but the title left me wondering. To assume a new worldview is a little rash. In reality, the Digital medium will make the very concept of worldview an antique of modernism. Postmodernism will have multiple views of the world existing side by side in a culture competing for influence without any one gaining supremacy. Many modernists worry about this, but it recognizes the reality. There never was a singular worldview only a majority worldview and several minority worldviews.
--Rik Porch ( symieon at netzero dot com ) on 7/10/2004; 2:45:32 PM

nice piece - sounds like it will be an interesting book. i'm a big marshall fan though i find postman's analysis way too negative on culture! tv isn't that bad!!!
--jonny ( jonnybaker at btopenworld dot com ) on 6/8/2004; 2:08:17 PM

Rex,

Looking forward to your book coming out. As you mentioned the transition from oral to print to image to digital (for lack of a generally accepted term that describes it) communication you omitted an important point. Each succeeding layer does not replace the prvious layer - it subsumes it. Oral communication did not go away with print - it actually expanded. The broadcast media did not eliminate the printed word but actually promoted it. There is more print per capita in the broadcast age than there ever was in the print age. The web, I predict, will not signal the demise of image-based communication but will actually enhance and promote it.

In the paradigm shift you discuss, I don't see an abandonment of things past but a subsidence of the past causing an uplift of the future. And I am looking forward to it.

Good luck on the book.

rick
--Rick ( presleyr at usa dot redcross dot org ) on 6/4/2004; 2:02:37 PM