Theology and the Technologies of Communication: An Inquiry Into Epistemological Implications
By Joseph Palakeel
[Father Palakeel specialized in Fundamental Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, and did an additional two-year program in Social Communication from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social Communication in Rome.]
Technologies of communication have undergone constant changes. The new technologies have dramatically changed not only human media of communication, but also the patterns of interaction and habits of thoughts, expression, and styles of living from time to time. Some recent communication research points to an intrinsic connection between the technology of communication and cultural progress. Digital communication, for example, is a great technological leap and a major cultural revolution. Digital communication, made possible by the convergence of technologies, means much more than innovation of the media and resultant speed and reach of communication. These new technologies have given rise to a culture, with “new ways of communicating, with new languages, new techniques and a new psychology”.[1] Multimedia and multi-sensorial communication imply radically new ways of constructing and expressing meaning (new ways of communicating) with a new language (the audiovisual language) and a new psychology (state of mind). In other words, digital communication with its own logic, semantics, and epistemology, is characterized as a post-literate culture in contrast to oral and literate cultures.
This new situation requires theological attention. However, looking at communication from a theological perspective, one might be tempted to ask: “what has communications media to do !!>% in relation to the communication culture, which may be called communication theology. We will start by looking at the inherent connection between the transformations in the technologies of communication and their impact on the human state of mind and cultural manifestations during the oral, alphabetic, and digital technologies of communication. Then we will examine theology in each epoch with special attention to theology in the digital culture.
1. Communication Technologies (Media) and Culture - Interconnections
A cultural studies approach to communication maintains there is an intrinsic connection between the technology of communication and the cultural manifestations. They mean to say that all forms of intellectual activities, like thought and expression, social organization, and culture, are decisively influenced by the predominant communication medium and language of the period. This has far reaching consequences for all sciences, including philosophy and theology.
This study relies on the seminal research done by Eric A. Havelock, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Kerckhove, and a host of others. While Havelock[2] explores technologies of oral and written communication and the corresponding state of mind, Kerchkove[3], contrasts the language of the alphabet and that of electricity. Marshall McLuhan[4] gives an extensive treatment of the electronic media as extensions of man, while Walter Ong[5] elaborates on the transformations of the technologies of the word, especially in the oral-aural and print cultures. These words show us that each stage of communication technology represented not merely new tools, techniques, or media of transmission but also certain mental condition/habits and cast of thought. We are interested in these authors only as they try to bring to light the impact of communication technologies on the human mind and thought in general. Each form of communication has its own epistemological laws which govern the arrangement of its language and syntax. Thus, human history itself can be classified as oral, literate, audiovisual, and digital cultures.
1.1. Oral Culture: Oral-Aural Media and Oral Thinkers
The earliest technology of preserved communication was oral. Before Homer, Greeks stored all information for re-use in oral memory. Where there were no books to read or refer to, repeated performance through recitation and memorization had a monopoly for training citizens. Epic, poetry, and drama were the forms of preserved communication as record, narrative and performance. Epic served as the encyclopedia, tractate, or reference library as well as the didactic instrument for transmitting the tradition. Poetry was used not only for amusement, but for instruction and handing over the traditions, viz. nomos and ethos.[6] The performance of poetry and drama served as vital forms of preserved communication in the Greek cultural pattern.
In oral culture, all information had to be stored in living memory; recitation, record and recall constitute the basic syntax of oral preservation. “The only possible verbal technology available to guarantee the preservation and fixity of transmission was that of the rhythmic word organized cunningly in verbal and metrical patterns which were unique enough to retain their shape.”[7] Since speech can be preserved only as it is remembered and repeated, speech was produced through physical movements (visualization) organized in special ways.[8] Intimate correlation of words, meter, music and dance led to automatic performance and enjoyment: Metrical pattern was wedded to verbal formula to express meaning powerfully; complex body action and body movements to match inner rhythm are used to say something rhythmically; music and dance would assist the record and recall of significant speech.[9] All preserved communication in this culture was orally shaped. Even when written down they were framed orally for easy memorization, transmission and recall, and performance. As a result, communicators were seers, prophets, and performers and live recording through the sense of the ear, following acoustic laws, was the only way of learning. The content and form (performance) were intimately connected.
The syntax of oral composition consisted primarily of repetition and rhythmic motion by gifted performers, who were capable of manipulation of verbal, musical, bodily rhythms to produce psychosomatic effects. “Hence laws of composition were acoustic and subservient to oral technique. Technology of recital and performance became not only a way of recreation – enjoyment and relaxation through symphony of verbal, vocal, gestural, instrumental – but also the way of preserved communication.” “In non-literate cultures the task of education could be described as putting the whole community into a formulaic state of mind.”[10] Thus the technology of oral-aural communication and preservation had its own logic and syntax and episteme.
Plato, in his book Republic, criticizes the traditional pattern of instruction as primitive because he considered the oral state of mind as too naïve and incapable of abstract and conceptual thinking as it is bound up with past events re-created in many words. It required total involvement and identification, which did not favor critical thinking and creation of new patterns and relation.[11] Plato is not against poetry or drama but the oral state of mind, a mode of consciousness, vocabulary and syntax using rhythm, repetition, and other mnemonic devices, which works through mimesis and identification. It reveals the dynamics of oral communication, which was capable of only simple truths explained in many words and connected to mythical characters and events. Modern dismissal of oral cultures as mythical and primitive in the sense of being pre-rational shows the Platonic criticism of the oral cultures is followed to this day.
1.2. Language of the Alphabet
The alphabet proved to be a more powerful and effective instrument of preservation and of fluent communication. Writing is “the secret of making the word immortal, in so far as the symbols on the page can be kept and copied and repeated in unchanged form, theoretically forever.” With alphabetical writing, and later printing, man got a technology of preservation and transmission which was several times more efficient than oral communication; it did not depend on living memory and repetition but could be left around to be available for consultation anywhere anytime. Although it took hundreds of years to full literacy, alphabetic technology made it possible to liberate knowledge from living memory and syntax of rhythm and image, releasing a lot of energy for dialectical thinking which brought about human progress, by giving rise to science. Kerchkove thinks the alphabet is the system of the world that changed the orientation of human culture from tradition to innovation, forever. “Developed and refined over five millennia, the alphabet became the most important concept ever to occupy the mind, soul and body of any human culture until the discovery of electricity.”
In the view of Kerchkove, the alphabet has reframed our mind between the Golden age of Greece and Gutenberg. According to him, alphabetic writing created two complementary revolutions: one in the brain and the other in the world by changing forever, “the way we see the world.” The alphabet is the software of the brain and language is the software that drives human psychology[12].The functions of the brain, as well as the organization of thought, are deeply affected by the phonetic alphabet.[13] He argues the doctrine of the autonomous psyche and the concept of self as subject or the reflective, critical thinking self, originated with alphabetization. This is indicated by the origin of new words as thinking, thought, self, and psyche appeared. For Plato, reason is the principle of unity and control, and reflection and cogitation are the essence of personality and of education as is indicated by the idea of philosopher-king. In Plato’s thinking, a self-governing personality is distinguished “by the power to think, to calculate, to cogitate, to know in total distinction from the capacity to see, to hear, to feel.”[14]
A subject’s separate identity as a personality, that thinks and knows, leads to the understanding of the object as something known and thought as a body of knowledge that is thought, known and communicated. In this sense knowledge came to be considered as objective because it should speak of thing per se, an abstracted object divorced from a concrete situation. The knower knows, not recalls, or feels, and knowing happens through abstraction of concepts from sensible data.[15] This mental faculty of abstract knowing is called gnome – the knowing faculty and specific objects of knowledge are called gnosis. This leads to cataloguing, classifying, and contrasting objects into opposites such as just and unjust, or good and bad. Naturally, the idea of content (logoi) and medium (lexis) also originated with this.[16] Thus, alphabetical writing and thinking marks the discovery of intellection in the form of a mechanism of reasoned calculation in place of memorization through association.
Print universalized literate thinking by making copies of books widely available and perfecting abstract thought and communication in “black and white”. Silent and sequential reading as an art of deciphering a figure in a white background (blackboard and white writing) became the normative means of communication. Writing and print universalized literacy – not only the ability to read and write, but also a corresponding mindset of rational and abstract thought and scientific precision and rational explanation of all realities. Print glorified and fortified subjectivism, idealism, and rationalism. Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” and the Kantian quest for the “pure and logical idea” show the extent of the refinement of literate thinking and communication. The language of the alphabet and literacy is also described as print culture or print mind-set. Most of the sciences and educational systems today, including theological formation, follow the print mind-set.
1.3. Electronic Technologies and Transformation of Mind
Today’s electronic technologies are capable of a much greater impact on the human mind, thinking and living. It began with photography and telephony and became common place with films, television, computers, and the internet. The computer has replaced some media apparatus - typewriter, A/V recorder player - and it can handle data formats like images, sounds, and texts at the same time. Multimedia communication, in which sounds, images, and text together create and communicate sense, is a major gain for human experience of the world. Our experience of reality achieves a further dimension of tactility with virtual reality and hypertext with random access. The electronic media have given rise to oral cybernetic culture, which is marked by a return to orality and tactility in communication.
McLuhan speaks of the electronic media as extensions of man and Kerchkove adds that electronic media have extended, not only our nervous system and bodies, but also our mind and psychology. There are several features of electronic technologies, like the pictorial turn, a new orality, hypertext, and multi-sensorial communication, that are radically transforming human culture and living.
1.3.1. The Pictorial Turn
Contemporary culture is inundated with images and communication is increasingly a product of what we watch rather than what we read. No one can ignore that visual culture is deeply embedded in the modern technologies and the mediated culture. Mitchell characterizes it as the “pictorial turn” of modern communication: in this “age of spectacle” and “all pervasive image-making”, “the picture … is emerging as a central topic of discussion in the human sciences in the way language once did.”[17] It is not merely a simplistic division between TV and book, nor an iconology as a discursive science of images – the attempt to master the icon by the logos.[18] What is called the visual culture is about an “actual visual experience” which includes vision, space and forms, where the ground is constitutive of the figure that it is a visual-spatial culture and amounts to a “systemic shift” or “a rift between the discursive and the visible, the seeable and the sayable” as an alternative to the “phonocentric” language.[19] In the modern language of the media, form, image and symbol work together to create the world-view or world-vision. Visual communication is emerging as a language in-its-own-right, beyond the status of illustration, with its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.[20]
1.3.2. New Orality
Literacy has privileged vision over hearing, by taking over and rewiring the nervous system, whereas non-literate persons think of the world in oral-aural terms. McLuhan and Kerchkove consider the “split between the eye and ear” or the “neglect of the ear” and the “tyranny of the eye” as the price we have paid for literacy. Modern electronic media are reversing these effects. McLuhan mentions "retribalization" a return to tribal and mythical existence, while Ong speaks of a return to primary orality.[21] For both, orality is closer to the human life-world and promotes participation and community, while writing promotes distance and individualization through mental habits of distanciation and objectification. Today we have a new understanding of oral-aural communication and poetic and narrative storytelling. The electronic communication technologies like radio, television, audio and video recording and computer have rendered our culture once again oral/aural by bringing back music and narrative, analogies and associative listening.
1.3.3. Tactile and Virtual Communication
Touch is the most primitive sense, and touch is considered as the ground of reality and the integrating (tangere) principle. In cyberspace, virtual reality (VR) is going to revolutionize the way we know and experience reality by making it possible to “touch” and feel.[22] The virtual reality provides artificial sensation (vision, hearing and touching) and artificial consciousness. VR will eventually allow the experience of depth and spatiality making it possible for many people to collectively process a kind of group consciousness. Kerckhove is emphatic that TV speaks to the body, not just the eye or ear. “TV is challenging our previously dominant, literate mindset by substituting its own tactile, collective orality.[23] It threatens the sacrosanct autonomy we have acquired through reading and writing.” TV speaks to the whole body rather than to the mind or any sensorium; TV sense is different from book sense, in that it “impairs verbalization”; cognitive process happens through “felt-meaning” (E.T. Gendlin), taking place not in the mind but within the neuromuscular system through a process called “sub-muscularization”. He adds “felt meaning is rarely conscious” …Felt-meaning precedes logic and may be more comprehensive than thought.”[24] These developments would have great implications for philosophy and theology, not to mention sciences.
1.3.4. Hypertext
Unlike the codex book, the electronic text of the computer and the worldwide web is a new form of text called hypertext, which essentially refers to non-sequential writing, in which the text is rendered interactive through random access. Hypertext essentially refers to any data, including, words, images, sounds, files, and any media or link. While the written/printed text is static and fixed and demands sequential reading, hypertext allows the reader to choose the sequence of thought and choose what to read and where to read. This allows new connections initiated by the reader of the text with great semantic consequences.[25] As a result, while the linear, hierarchical nature of the printed text promotes a single point of view, hypertext allows multiple, even conflicting, views. Hypertext thus undermines printed text and its logic and semantics, just as literacy destroyed orality. There was no permanent word in oral cultures but writing and printing allowed a sort of final word. Digital technologies have enabled networks and systems that promote interactivity, demanding an active reader and they reduce the gap between reader and writer in information production and processing.
1.3.5. Effects of Electronic Media: Multimedia Epistemology
Just as language and story changed the species, and then Gutenberg’s printing press and the widespread availability of text fundamentally changed how we think, digital epistemologies … will alter the very nature of what it means to think, to learn, to teach, to see. [26] The convergence of technologies is adding new dimensions to human experience. Before, it was only in the human mind that diverse physical phenomena like sound and light could be interchanged. Today multimedia provides man with a synaesthetic experience of sound and sight, which is natural to man.[27] In this process the successive achievements of the species will be assimilated into a new way of thinking.
According to Kerchkove, electronic media are “reversing the effects of literacy and language” by returning us to near-life experience through sounds, images, and touch (feeling). This spells, not the end, but the removal, of homo theoreticus from centre stage, to be replaced by homo participans”[28] by moving “information processing from within our brains to screens in front of, rather than behind, our eyes”. In fact, “electronic technologies not only extend the sending and receiving properties of consciousness; they also penetrate and modify the consciousness of the users”. Our personal, ordinarily internalized, consciousness will itself become externalized. In other words, the whole external world will become an extension of our consciousness. According to Spiro, the new digital technologies, with the digital media and random-access capabilities, are making possible “a kind of nonlinearity and multidimensionality possible that could not be achieved with traditional linear media, refiguring thought from the ground up”, a new way of thinking that our ever more complex and rapidly changing world of life, work, and study so urgently needs. These changes have radical philosophical and theological implications.
2. Theological Implications: Communication Theology
2.1. Communication Technology and Thought
The above analysis of communication technologies from a cultural perspective amply demonstrates that there is an intimate connection between the technology of communication (preservation and transmission), and human consciousness. Accordingly, human self-expression and cultural manifestations are also linked to the predominant media of the time and place. The history of human culture can thus be divided in terms of the stages of communications media, as (1) oral, (2) written/print/document and (3) audiovisual and (4) digital/multimedia culture. Each era of communication has, not only a predominant medium and sensorium, but also a typical mindset or consciousness with distinctive cast of thought. Communication tools are rightly designated as technologies of the word and changes in technology imply transformations in the word[29] with direct implications for all sciences.
In oral communication the primary sensorium was the ear, in association with the eye and memory, while the eye has taken the place of ear in the alphabetic communication, shifting the storage from living memory to printed page. In electronic media, the whole body turns out to be the primary sensorium, with an integration of ear, eye, and touch (possibly in the future, smell, and taste too!). We find the communication process and outcome are also different in each era. In oral communication sounds spoken are alive, need no translation from eye-message to ear-message and it is direct and uncomplicated. Written and print communications promote silent reading and necessitate a translation from one sense to another, thus drawing upon psychic energies of the reader while the word itself is powerless.
Multimedia and multisensorial communication achieve an integration of all previous media and all senses and involves the sender, receiver, text, and medium in an interactive process of creation of meanings. Multimedia pack important content as it naturally occurs in real-world events. TV, film, and multimedia take us back to new orality, where the audio-visual-tactile communication is much more natural to everyone than a lecture or a book, especially to the younger generation, raised on MTV, video games, televisions ads, and the Web. Audio-visual and multimedia communication, with the creative integration of sound-sight and text with random access, are more concrete and experiential than the abstract and conceptual approach to reality in the alphabetical communication. Multimedia offer an open, flexible knowledge structure -- to think within, as context.
Increased interactivity, enabled by digital technologies, challenges the transmission model of communication epitomized by the Lasswell formula. The top-down (hierarchical), figure-based, one-way, and monosemic communication of the print culture, is substituted by a multisensorial, polysemic and participatory process of construction of meaning, where figure and ground, sender and receiver, medium and message, play creative roles. This has brought about a major shift in the epistemic agency of receiver, and the role of the medium. In the transmission/transportation model, borrowed from the telegraphic-railway model of communication, information flows from the knowledgeable (overhead water tank) to the ignorant (empty bucket) through instruction or books (pipeline). Today communication is viewed as a process of interactive construction of meanings by the sender and receiver within the given context. Knowledge is no more considered as static information, sitting in textbooks or the head of the teacher, but as constantly evolving. Advancement of knowledge is a communitarian and participatory process rather than an individual quest.
True to the McLuhanian aphorism “the medium is the message”, we can today say that media are not mere instruments of transmission, but integral to the communication process and important for the understanding of the message itself. This epistemological shift necessitates non-dogmatic interaction around ideas, moving away from right and wrong ideas. What matters is more a coherence of ideas, among the ideas themselves, and within the rest of the system. Consequently, dialogue and communication among participants become important.[30] This challenges the hierarchical, communicator-centered, and purely text-based, theology.
Changes in the technology of preserved communication, from oral memory to written memory, brought about a major transition in the mental state from concrete and experiential to abstract and conceptual thinking which is the basis of the origin and growth of Greek rationalism. The pre-Socratics were oral or imagistic thinkers, while the Socratic thinkers were abstract, conceptual, and rational thinkers. Knowledge for primitive man was events in time, recited, recollected, and performed as episodes in time and personally identified with it, whereas the literate man shifts from the syntax of story to syntax of arithmetic, concrete events to timeless being, through non-visual, non-imagistic language which is wholly abstract vs. the vividness of a story. Thus “man’s experience of himself, his society and his environment are now given a separate organized existence in the abstract word”.[31] Aristotelian science, scholastic philosophy and theology and Kantian imperatives of mathematical relationships and analytical statements, and the enlightenment epistemology of logically (eternally) right and logically false, are made possible by these shifts. Most of humanities are still organized under this world order, using the language logic and syntax of abstract thinking, of the alphabet, even after the invention of digital communication. We have yet to explore the cultural implications of digital communication.
2.2. New Technologies of the Word: Theological Implications
Our findings compel us to look at theology from a communication-historical perspective. It does not take much effort to understand that the present theology belongs to the literate/print culture in its method and content. An analysis of the origin and development of theology corresponds exactly with the shift from oral to literate culture. The Bible, although it is written down, is oral in its character and content. The shift from the simple faith of the Bible to the learned faith of the Alexandrians marks a definitive shift from oral to literate theology. The traces of oral-cultural-theology are still discernible in patristic writing as well as oriental theology. Theology in the West, through the efforts of Augustine and St. Thomas, adopted the Socratic method, Platonic myth-o-logy and Aristotelian science to favor notional, analytical and conceptual knowing in Christianity. Although the primordial and intuitive ways of knowing survived through liturgy, arts and music, mainline theology grew into a logocentric (rational, conceptual, and theoretical) science which produced dogmatic statements and faith formulas, in place of the confessional faith of the Bible.
Theology, in the present understanding, is fides quaerens intellectum, where the emphasis falls on the intellectus in the rational-notional sense. Thus, the preferred medium of theology is verbal expression, and its tools are concepts, with a focus on truth. Philosophy or other social sciences are considered as handmaids rather than dialogue partners. Consequently, theology and faith formation have tended to privilege abstract statements over narratives, and revelation is considered as a creed or a series of clear statements to be assented to. The Bible is the written word and tradition (as) the handed-down word and reading-preaching-teaching-hearing are the privileged forms of theological expression. In this literate-culture-theology, word is rightly considered as the most refined expression of man and revelation is considered as God’s word (self-communication) in human words. However, when the word was identified with the logos as the rational-notional word (even in opposition to the incarnate word), theology became rational discourse on God. This move of theology towards logocentrism in the literate sense reached its peak in the time of reformation which corresponds also with the invention of printing, which established print media as the predominant form of communication.
The word has always assumed new forms (including flesh) and this is not hard to understand. However, today the ‘word’ also becomes image, colors, and sounds, acquiring varied forms from the diverse media of social communications. (Medellin Conference, 1968). The question then is: does the word change with the change in the vehicle or tools of the word? We are inclined to say that even as the incarnate word (logos-flesh) is considered as an immensely different word from the prophetic word, the technological incarnations of the word as spoken, written, printed, and digitized, can seriously alter the content or message. This has deep implications, not only for the communication (teaching, learning, and writing) of theology, but also for the content and the very act of theologizing.
2.2.1. Theology and Communication
Theology is conscious of the communication process involved in theologizing. All major theologians like Augustine, St. Thomas, and Lonergan, who occupied themselves with theology as a discipline, concerned themselves with communication in/of theology.
In Augustine, we find a tension between the oral and written forms of communication of theology; even his theological thinking is qualified by the medium he used. For example, his homilies and catechetical teachings favor theology as credo ut intelligam, while his treatises favor an approach of intellego ut credam. It is quite understandable, given the fact that Augustine lived at a time when oral communication dominated (he was a great orator himself), and written communication was used to preserve oral communication, thereby leaving the traces of oral communication styles even in written communication.
St. Thomas moved into the alphabetical culture through his familiarity with the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, who inaugurated the transition from oral to alphabetic mindset. Their objectification of knowledge, through intellection, naturally favors neutral media and channels which have no influence on the content they were transporting. St. Thomas believed in an objective, impassionate communication of eternal truths and logical syllogisms. Communication, for him, was efficient and effective transmission of mental content (thought) through the medium of writing. His formulaic style, doctrinal content and the scholastic method of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, still have some traces of oral communication, although the Summa is a supreme example of a shift from a typological to a topological treatment of theological subjects. The Thomistic theologians, who lived in the period of printing, developed a theology that is objective, rational, and notional, in terms of abstract and universal language and phrases which are mostly monosemic.
Modern theology, in the strict sense, was born in this period of enlightenment which corresponds roughly to what can be called the print culture. All modern theologians are under the influence of the print culture and its logic. Lonergan can be treated as representative. For him, theology is the eighth functional specialty, ‘in which theological reflection bears fruit and without which the first seven are in vain’.[32] However, as the last functional specialty, communication has no role in theologizing except as the means of transmission. It comes in handy for the transmission of theological content once it is formulated and written/printed.
It is perhaps only the linguistic-hermeneutic traditions of theology which have paid any minimum attention to the role of communication in theologizing. Their concern for the semantic role of words and language in the construction of meanings points to the role of media in shaping the message. Here again, we find an instrumental approach to communication, where words and language are believed to carry the meanings, and understanding comes from a genuine hermeneutic or interpretation of the words in context. The hermeneutic theologies may be utterly qualified as communicative theologies as they pay special attention to the communicational competence of language and words. Likewise, many contextual theologies, in recent years, may be said to be more and more sensitive to the implications of linguistic patterns and paradigms. Communicative theology of the Innsbruck school[33] also focuses on a kind of contextual theology and does not take communication as integral to the theological process and content.
Rahner’s attempt to define revelation as God’s self-communication and Dulles’ definition of Church as communication, go a step further in understanding the intrinsic relation between church and communication. It is Dulles who has suggested some integral approaches to church, theology, and communication. According to him, “theology at every point is concerned with realities of communication” as “the communication dimension is inherent in theology.”[34]
Church documents on communication inspired by Inter Mirifica, invariably, have an instrumental approach to communication. Depicting communication as the God-given means for the proclamation of the Gospel and as modern housetops and the declaration, so the church would feel guilty if these means are not used, reflect the Gospel message as an instrument. John Paul II, who was himself a media icon, goes a step further to speak of mediated communication as the modern cultural context, when he stated that mass media are the modern Areopagus. (RM37c).
2.2.2. Towards a Communication Theology
The intrinsic link between communication technology and culture, as we have explained above, challenges the method and content of theology in the changed communication culture. The present communication culture is post-literate, whereas theology is literate. In this process we come to realize that theology, which was born at the period of the birth and spread of alphabetical literacy, and matured during the period of printed word, shows heavy dependence on the language of the alphabet; it is hardly prepared for the electronic media. How can a theology of a previous era make sense to people of a fast-changing and constantly evolving mediated culture? Theology needs to reform itself to make sense to the mediated generation.
Here what we need to develop is evidently not a theology of communication, nor a communicative theology. While theology of communication attempts to cast communication into the molds of theology, communicative theology envisages a theology dressed up in communication categories. Communication studies today can become a privileged partner of theology, just like philosophy and social sciences. A theology conversant with the emerging communication culture may be called a communication theology. Communication theology means, not only a change in method of doing theology, but also a radical rethinking of theology through the language, logic, and semantics of the predominant communication culture. Theology was born from the necessity to communicate effectively in a specific time and place. Theologizing is an ongoing process of self-expression of faith in cultures. The identity and relevance of theology suggests a close link to the predominant culture of the place and time. Primary to this approach is a shift from an instrumentalist to an integral vision of communications media.
Secondly, there is a clear shift in the epistemic agency of theologizing, from sender (magisterium) to receiver (every believer). Communication itself may be redefined as something beyond transmission of message -- to a process of creation of culture, through a participatory construction of meaning leading to communion (connection). Theology is faith seeking self-expression or meaningful communication. The theological process of making sense of faith will be a self-expression of faith (sensus fidei) through a participatory process of construction of meaning by Christian believers in their life situation (consensus fidelium), open to the global and plural existence in the flat world (catholic). Communication theology cannot be purely rational and notional; it must be experiential and tangible through multimedia and multi-sensorial communication.
Such a theology can explore the breadth and depth of the Word of God in the many and varied ways of human communication, inviting everyone into a life-giving fellowship.
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Footnotes
[1] Redemptoris Missio, 37c; Aetatis Novae 11.
[2] Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1963.
[3] Derrick de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture. Investigating the new Electronic Reality, Sommerville, Toronto, 1995.
[4] M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964.
[5] W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word, Routledge, London, 1982.
[6] Havelock, Preface to Plato, 91ff.
[7] Kerckhove, Skin of Culture, 43.
[8] Havelock, Preface to Plato, 147-151.
[9] Regular performance caused pleasure through hypnosis and relaxation. The psychological effects of poetry are described by the names of the muses. Through action of minstrel muses, one gets an embodied existence as sweet dew, honey, grace, passion – the unconscious mind is mobilized through body reflexes – then to assist memorization, later to release erotic emotions. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 152-4, 166.
[10] Havelock, Preface to Plato, 137.
[11] Silent reading is a recent phenomenon. Even in our times reading aloud is not uncommon and many phrases like “can’t say”, "Who can say?" etc. refer to an oral mind set.
[12] After surveying all the writing systems of the world, Kerchkove says that the intrinsic structure of language determines the direction of writing: Sound writings are horizontal; image writings are vertical (Chinese) and are read from right to left. Alphabetical writings without vowels (Hebrew) were written and read from right to left. Greeks in the 8th century BCE started writing with vowels and wrote from left to right. The alphabet is a linear, sequential system of coded information, written from left to right. He concludes “learning to read and write alphabetic text will condition the basic processing routines of eye-brain coordination.” For example, most of us can write a description of a friend’s face but few can draw it. Drawing is a right hemisphere activity. Today many think over-emphasis on writing and literacy has caused right hemisphere illiteracy.
[13] The “hypothesis is that the alphabet has played a determining role in emphasizing timing and sequencing, two core functions of the left hemisphere of the human brain. In the long run it has led to the typically western reliance on rationality and the rationalization of all experiences, including that of spatial perception.” Likewise, “frame or mindset” and the analytic method of sequential analysis and assembly to dig deep into matter, by analyzing small entities are products of the alphabetic culture that goes with the alphabetical writing and reading. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 13, 29-30, 34-5.
[14] Havelock, Preface to Plato, 200-05. For Plato, the aim of education is to form a self-organized and autonomous personality; an educated man has a psyche, with three forms of reason: will / spirit, and the appetition or desire.
[15] In Greek thinking, mathematics is the first science “because it is the primary example of a mental act which is not one of recollection and repetition, but of problem solving”. Mathematical thinking is a symbol of free autonomous reflection and cogitation as numerical relationship in terms of ratios, equations, formula in need of personal separation. In this process, sensual data is bypassed and the visible becomes invisible, the sensual becomes idea, loses plurality of action in time, color, and visibility. The knower is thus one who understands formulas and categories lying beyond experiences; education is not implanting new knowledge in the psyche, but cultivating the faculty of thinking as a function of converting experience into concepts. For example, one moves from many beautiful things, events, and persons (pragmata) to beauty per se, a thing in itself. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 226.
[16] Havelock, Preface to Plato, 219.
[17] W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, 13. We find a penetration of visual communication at all levels of culture in the global village. Visual culture is all pervasive and has developed new forms of visual representations including computer assisted simulations.
[18] Mitchell, Picture Theory, 24.
[19] What he calls the “picture theory”, however, is not a linguistic hermeneutic of art history in terms of ‘textuality” and discourse”, or the old iconology, but rather a post-modern “account of visual representation”. “Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear it is not a return to naïve mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial “presence”: it is rather a post-linguistic, post-semiotic rediscovery of picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies. and figurality.” It is about “spectatorship” as visual experience or visual literacy, even as reading or literacy (decipherment, decoding, and interpretation). Mitchell, Picture Theory, 12-16.
[20] Mitchell, Picture Theory, 31. Image cannot make sense as figure as in writing where only figures matter. If the human body is a language (figure) to be seen, the ground is the space where it is situated. Meaning can be constructed with figure and ground like text and context.
[21] Ong, Orality and Literacy, 42-46.
[22] Kerckhove, Skin of Culture, 37-49. Computer-enabled 3-D is more tactile than visual in that it allows us to go around and feel.
[23] There is a big difference between oral, literate, and electronic listening. Oral listening is global, comprehensive, context-bound, cosmo-centric, and concrete, whereas literate listening is specialized and selective, context free, logo-centric, and temporal. Literate listening looks for information, structure and thought and is aimed at abstraction of concepts from the verbal sings, for which they eliminate noise. A literate person listens, through selective attention, to vocabulary more than words; to words and meanings and not to the intention of speaker or his non-verbal communication.
[24] Kerckhove, Skin of Culture, 13, 101. Pierre Babin speaks of the electronic media as vibrations – not only in the ear but the whole body.
[25] From the Neolithic to Gutenberg, information was passed on from mouth to ear, changing with every retelling (or re-singing). The stories which once shaped our sense of the world did not have authoritative versions. Print made everything fixed, including morals and lessons and interpretation. Hypertext challenges presuppositions of print culture such as: (1) authors can be distinguished from readers; (2) a text is the property of its author; (3) a text is (or should be) fixed, unchanging, unified, and coherent; (4) a text should speak with a single, clear voice; (5) a text has a beginning and an ending, margins, an inside and an outside; (6) the center of a text, of a group of texts, or of anything else, is fixed, stable, and single; (7) a text is (or should be) clearly organized in a linear, hierarchical structure; (8) generally speaking, an author writes by himself, and a reader reads by himself; (9) the act of writing or reading is (or should be) ethically and politically neutral. See Robert M. Fowler, “How the Secondary Orality of the Electronic Age Can Awaken Us to the Primary Orality of Antiquity”, http://homepages.bw.edu/~rfowler/pubs/secondoral/index.html#anchor45421 (Oct 31, 2007).
[26] Spiro, R., “New Gutenberg Revolution”: Radical new learning, thinking, teaching, and training with Technology” in Educational Technology, 46 (1), 2006, 3-4; Spiro, R., “The post-Gutenberg world of the mind: The shape of the new learning” in Educational Technology, 46 (2), 2006, 3-4.
[27] We have synaesthetic experiences in our early childhood and learn to separate images from sounds only slowly. It is said that children cannot distinguish sight and sound in perception. Sound is primal to man.
[28] Kerckhove, Skin of Culture, 5, 9, 12, 49.
[29] J. Palakeel “God’s Word in Human Words” in J. Palakeel (ed.), The Bible and the Technologies of the Word, ATC Bangalore, 2007, 16-38.
[30] New educational models mark a clear shift from traditional models of education. For example, see, Knowledge Forum model (Scardamalia, M. (2004). CSILE/Knowledge Forum®. In Education and technology: An encyclopedia. (pp. 183-192) Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO). Remember here Plato’s critique of the oral instruction model.
[31] Havelock, Preface to Plato, 283-90, 305.
[32] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, Seabury press, New York, 1979, 355.
[33] “Das Forschungsprogramm "Kommunikative Theologie" hat sich im Zusammenhang mit der systematischen Reflexion theologischer Kommunikationsprozesse nach dem Ansatz der Themenzentrierten Interaktion - R.C. Cohn (TZI) schrittweise herausgebildet (Entstehung). Es ist auf eine theologische (Differenz-)Hermeneutik im Hinblick auf Glaubenskommunikation und Alltagskommunikation ausgerichtet; das TZI Modell dient als Aufmerksamkeitslenkung und als Handlungsperspektive.” http://www.uibk.ac.at/rgkw/komtheo/. Scharer, Matthias and Hilberath, Bernd J., Kommunikative Theologie Eine Grundlegung, Matthias Gruenewald, 2002.
[34] Avery Dulles, The Craft of Theology, Gill and McMillan, Dublin, 1992, 22.