The Mediahood of All Receivers: New Media, New 'Church' and New Challenges (original) (raw)

The Mediahood of All Receivers: New Media, New ‘Church’ and New Challenges This paper will examine new media efforts that focus on issues of faith through Stuart Hall’s cultural studies perspective and through the theological framework of the priesthood of all believers. Through textual analysis of various new media efforts by Emergent church members, this will use the priesthood of all believers to explore the ways new media changes the relationship between pastor and parishioner and church and world. The final portion of the paper will discuss the implications of new media for the church in the future. The Emergent church movement is of special interest because it is a cross-denominational, cross-national movement of Christian believers that has grown up in the postmodern age and has specifically come into prominence through new media like the Internet. It is still in its beginning stages, with many discussing its outlines but few actually putting the philosophy into practice. The theological perspective of the priesthood of all believers is particularly apt because of its implication that all Christians have direct access to the throne of God. Through a variety of new forms of media production, notably weblogs, podcasting, and digital arts software, individual believers have opportunity to express their views on faith and practice without the screen of the minister. Likewise, ministers can propagate their views on issues of contemporary import to the entire world, much as Martin Luther expressed himself through the 95 Theses nailed to the door of the Wittenburg church. A suitable perspective from which to examine Emergent church new media efforts is that of Stuart Hall (also known as British cultural studies). Hall and his compatriots at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) took a stand for defining “culture” as the everyday life of people within a society, contra traditional views of “high” culture as the only worthwhile culture, and argued that this “culture” deserved study within the academy. Moving beyond that basic assertion, Hall argued forcefully against what could be considered the predominant paradigm of communication research as it existed in the United States at the time (Hall, 1993). As Hall’s interests were in culture, how it is formed and how it is maintained, he took a natural interest in the media. Hall viewed the media as having an ideological role in the ‘reproduction of dominant ideologies’ (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978, p. 60). The media performs this role through “structural imperatives” that determine what version of reality gets reported. Even as various news outlets produce somewhat different outlooks on the news, all of these outlooks exist within “certain distinct ideological limits” (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978). Within the church, therefore, the culture of the parish, the theology and hermeneutic of the denomination, and the privileged “structural imperatives” of the pastor and leaders work to frame “distinct ideological limits.” If the paradigm of the mediahood of all receivers is useful, then at least some of the cultural importance of media will blunt the emergence of new “receiver” voices that propose and champion oppositional readings of the dominant media’s ideological role. Recent skirmishes between blogs and mainstream media outlets demonstrate that there are powerful countervailing decoding patterns - left and right - that battle with the encoding provided by the media system. Likewise, the Emergent church movement itself is an example of often countervailing voices rising through new media outlets to challenge dominant paradigms of praxis and theory in the western church. This phenomenon works to short-circuit the organizational tendency to restrict debate on issues, even when those organizations claim to foster debate and constructive discussion. Understanding the media usage of new generations is important for any religious organization. Understanding how those media efforts can challenge the dominant schema of any religious organization is crucial.