How Does Media Affect Us?

Because he finished his tasks and caught an early flight, my husband arrived home this evening, a day early, from a trip to Kenya and Rwanda. In the latter he delivered portable solar-powered data projectors so three church-planting teams of D. R. Congo nationals can project the Jesus film in the bush. Talk about your convergence of cultures.

Earlier today I attended an “Unconference” (no cost, no celebrities, just networking) at DTS. The event creator was DTS’s genius of a web-guy, John Dyer. When I saw him, he handed me a copy of his forthcoming book titled From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology. It’s super accessible, with stories and humor, but in it he explores a serious topic for serious persons.

My introduction to thinking about technology happened when my husband and I faced the question, "Will we use assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to conceive a child?" As most of my readers know, I ended up making somewhat of a career helping people answer the same question.

The nature of my ponderings shifted from medicine to literature after a prof assigned Leo Marx's book, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, written about fifty years ago. It examines the difference between the “pastoral” and “progressive” ideals which characterized early 19th-century American culture and that evolved into the basis for much of the environmental and nuclear debates today. Drawing on classic literature, Marx established that we have always loved the garden and idealized farm living, as rural life represents the middle space between wilderness and industrialized world.

Further adding to my ponderings was a workshop on media ecology offered this year at EPA in Chicago. Prior to that workshop, I’d not heard the term “media ecology,” which in the U. S. is the study of media environments and how modes of information and communication influence human affairs (and I would add vice versa).

What John’s book adds to the discussion is the missing element of a theological perspective. This time we go deeper to consider the intersection of technology and theology. Can you think of ways technology has changed you?