The Rehoboam Effect
It is clearer than ever that ours is an age of such information glut that our biggest problem is our inability to process it. We’ve become obstructed and the stuffed quarters are rotting. Like the Hebrew children in the wilderness, info-junkies are just as hungry and God has given them the desires of their hearts, stacked chest high, like cord wood.
Hear the words of Neil Postman, from Amusing Ourselves to Death:
In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?
A recent study in the UK shows that most young people have abandoned television news networks almost completely. This could be a good thing given the Sinclair scripting fiasco and countless other scenarios just like it. Unfortunately, the turning from mainstream media outlets has been replaced by a turning to the opinions of their peers on social networks. We can consider this a necessary ramification of what Robert Bly called our sibling society. Christians might think of it as a Rehoboam effect of sorts. Rather than learning to read the new in light of the old, we simply ask our friends what they think. The answer isn’t to necessarily pray in a revival of young people willing to watch Dan Rather again. Please, no.
Firstly, it seems that there are a couple of factors that contribute to the problem. Public schools keep students in an over-extended grammar stage. Instead of learning to think critically during the dialectic stage and finally advancing on to rhetoric, the average public school student continues to memorize data in order to score well on the SATS. American education has become one of the world’s longest games of trivial pursuit. This creates an operating system in the young professional class that runs on small packets of memorizable information. Because of the advanced adolescence that accompanies the never-ending grammar student, the funnier you can make it, the better. Enter memes.
Some would consider this stage of post-journalism to simply be Protestantism gone wild. These critics like to blame the Reformation on the printing press and the resulting 30,000 Protestant denominations as simply being the logical consequence of schism. Schism itself is always a fractal. When Protestants supposedly rejected one authority, we by necessity said yes to authorities ad nauseam. Thanks to Luther, there are over 31 million Youtube channels.
While there is a worthwhile conversation to be had here, I am more inclined to remember Francis Schaeffer’s warning from How Should We Then Live that if you remove the Christian consensus in a society, you make way for the emergence of a consensus that establishes absolutes in an arbitrary manner. Schaeffer suggests that somewhere between the visions of John Kenneth Galbraith and Daniel Bell, we will either be governed by the university intellectuals or the technocrats. We are presently watching them jump ball for possession.
If we are to pray for the peace of America and pray with specificity, we should ask not only for God to grant us a Christian consensus but one that is dedicated to knowing God’s Word and how it makes sense of God’s world.
The breakdown of mainstream journalism is not a problem. Localization of analysis could be a healthy bi-product of the present collapsing of systems. Vishal Mangalwadi argues that churches should employ something like a four-fold view of church officers in which local congregations would have an in-house professor. This educator could not only tie in, virtually, to a larger and accredited network or institution, but could facilitate the in-person component on a much smaller and regionalized scale. This could be a wonderfully helpful model for a number of system rebuilds . . . not simply in a post-journalism stage, but for life in a post-university world. The church would not only have academic life being developed in the local expression of the Body, but they would have in-house, rigorous engagement with the thought trends and idols of the day. Churches could be taught, from within, how to critically engage issues with thoughtful, Biblically-based tools of interpretation. Who knows, perhaps this would even be the foundation for a resurrection of local journalism?
