new media fundamental debate | clifford christians
Clifford Christians , a national expert on media ethics and communications professor at the University of Illinois, is also a Christian who has thought deeply about spiritual implications of new media.
Writing a recent book forward, he explains that, regarding new media technologies, a fundamental debate remains unresolved. The issue is whether communication is most productively oriented:
- To the epistemology of virtual reality (What does it mean that our relationships are disembodied?)
- To the nature of the human (What is authentic humanness in virtual space?)
- To social structures (Are political and social formations offline and online fundamentally different?)
The Christian choice, he believes, is the anthropological one, the second option above. Understanding new media from a presuppositional, spiritual perspective of the human being gives us a holistic, spacious framework that beats out communications approaches that struggle with the nature of knowledge (epistemology) or social constructionism. The "communicating human" is not simply a biological or psychological entity, but a "spiritual being seeking expression in culture."
Christians writes his forward in Understanding Evangelical Media: The Changing Face of Christian Communication
