Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith
Shane Hipps: Zondervan, ISBN 978-0-310-29321-7
'The color of the world is changing day by day' Les Miserables
This is a very significant and strategic book because it explains the way that electronic media, especially computers and the Web, are changing our culture. As we use them, they are in fact changing us, in ways we may not realize.
For 500 years, Western culture has been a ‘left-brain’ print-based communication culture, where we expressed everything in 26 alphabetic characters. The way we preached the gospel, structured our Christian activities and systematized our theology all were completely shaped by print. But now technology is rapidly changing this print culture. When the medium changes, the message is changed too. Effective evangelism and Christian ministry must take account of these changes.
Hipps also looks at the changing nature of relationships: online versus face-to-face, with some surprising illustrations.
This is a short and very readable book, but the concepts and conceptual adjustments we need to make are strategic and profound. For a longer and more in-depth exposition of these same issues, see Hipp’s earlier book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church, and Rex Miller’s book The Millennium Matrix.
- Review by Tony Whittaker, Soon, December 2009
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