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.

The Experience Era

One of the speakers at Tools of Change commented that we are coming into the "experience era." First we had the industrial era, then we have had the information era, now we're moving beyond that to an era in which people value experiences most highly.

I've been thinking about this idea and asking, What does a digital Bible for the experience era look like?

A digital Bible for the information era is information-oriented: It emphasizes access to information in and about the Bible. So search is a key function, as are passage lookup and topic guides.

What about an experience-oriented digital Bible? What are the elements of that? Here some things that come to mind:

An outstanding experience of reading the Bible text. Not only does the Bible text have to be present, but it has to be beautifully formatted, with an excellent design on screen, and fully accessible to people with disabilities. It has to look and feel good on all kinds of devices. [Difficulty: Moderate]

A thoughtful, uncluttered space for Bible journaling. Access to the journaling function needs to be very natural and easy from within the Bible text, and it needs to be given a clean, uncluttered interface. When people are journaling, they don't want to be looking at all kinds of gizmos and doodads in the interface. Instead, there needs to be an open space in which their thoughts and spirits can soar and roam. [Difficulty: Easy (techically), Hard (for business people to do)]

Personally-relevant additional content related to what I am reading. It's not terribly hard to gather together piles of content and link it all to the Bible text in various ways. What is much harder, but much more necessary, is to provide people, from that limitless pile, a selection of additional content that will be personally relevant and meaningful to them in light of their own experiences and context in life. Online shopping sites like Amazon have been doing something like this with books - when you put a book in your Amazon shopping cart, the site suggests some other things that you might be interested in. We need something similar in digital Bibles, but with content. Providing this for people will be technically very challenging. [Difficulty: Very Hard]

An enjoyable experience interacting with others. Not only should it be possible to interact with people in various ways, but there should be mechanisms to help ensure that the experience is beneficial. For example, I don't like the public notes feature in YouVersion, because it's cluttered with all kinds of unhelpful stuff. More helpful would be an ability to share notes with my Bible study group, and let us have conversations around each passage right in the digital Bible interface. [Difficulty: Moderately Hard]

An experience-oriented digital Bible cannot neglect the more information-oriented functionality, but gone are the days when information is enough. People are looking for a better experience than sifting through too many search results, seeing piles of irrelevant content in the interface, and having to look at a cluttered, ugly Bible interface. Doing this is not easy.

In other words, it's going to be much harder to provide people a pleasing experience in using digital Bibles, and the winners will be those, not who provide the most information, but those who provide the best experience.

Do you agree? Are there other things that are very important for an excellent experience? Would a better experience win you over the most information? What do you think?

About the Digital Bible Blog

Recently, when people ask me what I’m working on for Tyndale House Publisher, I have been telling them, “I’m trying to figure out the answer to the question, How can we make a profitable business out of digital Bible publishing?”

I've spent quite a lot of time over the past few months researching and thinking about this question, and we've even tried a couple of things (like the NLT interlinear site). I recently attended O'Reilly's Tools of Change in order to help answer this question, and I am scheduled to be at BibleTech later this month (March 2010).

So it seems like the time has come to broaden the conversation to a wider community. What do people want in digital Bibles? What do you want? What can we learn from the digital publishing business in general that will help us understand digital Bible publishing? What good examples are there of digital Bibles and Bible study tools? How can we cultivate community around the Bible in online contexts?

These are some of the topics that I hope we can discuss together.

What topics would you like us to discuss here?