September 5, 2008

The new media can’t rightly be called new media anymore, but its rules of operation are still emerging. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of people – including Christians – are venturing into the blogosphere and Twittering away online. The opportunities of instant updates present themselves along with the pitfalls. Where does a person even begin to evaluate the new media, much less participate in it?

Perhaps new media is like new music, suggests Dr. John Mark Reynolds, founder and director of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. Should the music change just because we now record to mp3s and have left vinyl records behind?

“Conversational styles in some ways will have changed and in some ways will not have changed,” he said in a recent interview with Crosswalk.com, TheHighCalling.org, and MereOrthodoxy.com. “We’re going to have to have new rules all around about what we’ll tolerate and what we’ll do online.”

“Some people make a big splash the minute they get on the Internet; they have one big post or they say nasty things but then their nastiness catches up to them. On the other hand, there are people who are so careful about what they say online that it just puts you to sleep to hear them. So how can we be ourselves, but our best selves, and so survive within the new media?” Reynolds said.

The Questionable Courage of Political Blogging

Reynolds, a professor at Biola and a speaker at the upcoming GodBlogCon conference Sept. 20-21, encourages Christians to weigh in to join the online conversation on all subjects. But the subject of politics can be daunting, as Reynolds knows from his own blogging experience on scriptorumdaily.com.

“[If] I take political stands, no matter how carefully I nuance them, however carefully I say it’s my point of view, people are going to be offended,” he said. “But I think it’s important for me to both show my students and the broader Christian community how I’ve tried to integrate my role as a citizen in this republic with the rest of my life – with my life as a philosopher, and with my life as a teacher.”

Bloggers that swing the opposite direction, however, are not marked by courage or great will in Reynolds’s eyes.

“In new media, we always act like it makes us really sad that, I don’t know, people at Focus on the Family might not like us if we were liberal Democrats, when in reality if you’re this kind of person, you don’t hang out with that kind of person,” he said.

“I think sometimes we give ourselves courage points for offending people that we don’t actually like,” Reynolds continued. “I have some concern online that it will become trendy to kind of despise and loathe the actual people who are sitting in the pews… our spiritual grandparents.”

Blogs, Cars, and the Younger Generation

The younger generation – those that are most apt to jump onto the new media bandwagon – still needs help regulating itself, Reynolds noted. Without the old publishing structures and their scores of editors, however, younger writers need to look elsewhere for feedback.

The new mechanism, Reynolds said, can be found by joining and forming group blogs that have behind-the-scenes help. “I have yet to go to a blog where the comments were by and large helpful,” he said, adding that a network of proofreaders and reviewers can help avoid bad or harsh content.