The Social Logic of Communication

Most of the sessions that I attended at BibleTech 2010 were focused on technical matters, but one of them was focused on humanity. Elizabeth Drescher's session, "People of the Facebook," addressed sociological issues around the use of digital technologies, and how this use impacts the interpretation of biblical texts. These are important issues that we need to think about and discuss as we dive more and more deeply into the use of digital technology, because as Dr. Drescher said, we are currently going through a digital reformation. Drescher is a professor and Director for the Center for Anglical Learning & Leadership at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, one of the official seminaries of the Episcopal Church of America.

She tackled this issue from an historical angle, explaining the development of "the social logic of communication," showing the relationship between communications technologies and the types of social interactions that these technologies have promoted.

• In the pre-modern era (before 1400), communication was rhetorical -- culture was oral, biblical texts were read aloud in community, and authority was in what is said.
• With the advent of print (1400s to present), communication became grammatical, dependent on reading texts privately; authority was in what is written. Drescher pointed out that this is the era in which the language of "personal relationship with God" became dominant -- which was only possible as people were able to have a private experience of the text, which they then took into their communities.
• Then, in the high-modern era (1920s to present), public broadcast became a central element of culture, so authority moved to what is presented. This is the era that we have all grown up in, gathering around the radio and then the t.v. to learn the news and to find out what is interesting in the world.
• But now, we have entered the postmodern digital era (1990s to present), in which communication is dialectical -- the digital culture is interactive, and authority is in what we create together.
  

The changing nature of communication culture brings us to an era in which more and more people are using interactive digital media in order to communicate with one another. One of the important aspects of this shift is that people no longer look to the printed text or the broadcast for authoritative communication. Instead, they really do look to "what we create together" -- think about Wikipedia, which is the first Google result for many, many subjects on account of the many inbound links to most Wikipedia pages -- and the first place many people go to find out more about many subjects. Wikipedia is something that we have all created together, and yet many people consider it more authoritative than an old-school edited encyclopedia like Britannica.

One thing that Drescher didn't address is the fact that we now have print, broadcast, and digital communication cultures all overlapping, co-mingling, and interacting -- with no sign that any of these communication media and cultures is on the wane. The doomsayers say that print publishing is dying, but I expect that we will print more, not fewer, books in the future. I also expect both radio and t.v. to continue and thrive for a good long time. What I am interested in discussing is, what is the social logic of communication in a culture that contains all three of these approaches? Drescher also talked about how different types of communication have traditionally been associated both with people of different developmental ages, and with different social classes. She aligned these with the classical trivium of the liberal arts, as follows:

1. Grammar: structure and rules == children, women, slaves
2. Dialectic: reasoning and argument == adolescents, boys, peasants/laymen
3. Rhetoric: presentation and persuasion == adults, men, lords/clergy, the learnèd

These labels are the ones that Drescher used (above) to describe the different eras of communication. What I would like to know is, how do we get to a culture in which all people are empowered to participate in communication in all of these levels? We need a mastery of structure and rules, and we need people to master the responsible interpretation of texts. We also need dialogue and argumentation, and we need people to create texts together. Finally, we need persuasive presentation of ideas by all who are capable of learning to do so (not just by lords, clerics, and men). And we need forums in which all of these things can take place.

How does all of this affect what we do in digital Bibles? Some reflections:

We need to enable a greater level of dialogue and interaction around Bible texts and Bible-related texts in digital contexts. In the first 20+ years of Bible software, all digital interactions with the Bible have taken place offline in "desktop Bible software." In the first 10+ years of the web, there have been Bible texts online, but very little means of interaction -- most of this has been broadcast-only. Now, with the rise of social media, more and more people are sharing Bible texts with each other online and discussing them. There are problems with this -- problems that Drescher discussed in the second half of her talk, which I plan to review next time.

We need a way for people to have coherent dialogue in a coherent textual context -- so that their dialogue and interaction around the texts is not divorced from the texts, and the texts are not fragmented by being shared. Some online Bible sites have the ability for users to add their own comments on the text -- YouVersion seems to have the lead in this. But I don't see enough evidence that coherent dialogue is coming out of this; instead, people are simply putting up their own thoughts about the passages.

We need a way for people to create something together around the Bible text. Just as some very smart people have figured out how to let all kinds of people create Wikipedia together, we need some very smart folks to figure out how to let all kinds of people create together a kind of shared Bible-related text. There are so many issues and fears that hinder this -- the Bible is the central spiritual authority in the lives of tens of millions of people, and yet there are thousands of different ways of interpreting it, all of which have fierce adherents. In this kind of world, letting all kinds of people create together a shared Bible-related text is a dicey undertaking.

What else do we need? What are your thoughts about all of this?

I am grateful to the organizers of BibleTech 2010 for inviting Elizabeth Drescher to give this talk on the "social logic of communication." She is raising important issues, and we need more discussion about them.