CAPÍTULO V: DISCUSIÓN DE RESULTADOS
5.1 Prueba de Hipótesis
The transformations in media throughout history have led to changes in human
consciousness and culture. These also brought forth changes in mission consciousness and
experience. For a long time, however, media just like mission was treated as an adjunct topic,
2 Pope Benedict XVI, Message for the 47th World Communications Day.
3 Peter Horsfield, “A Moderate Diversity of Books?” The Challenge of new media to the Practice of Christian
Theology,” in Pauline Hope Cheong, ed. Digital Religion, Social Media, and Culture: Perspectives, Practices, and Futures (P. Lang, 2012), 246.
4
This is an idea that is influenced by the school of media ecology. We shall expound this more when we talk about the ecological perspective of media.
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tools or means for the practical application of theories and systems of theology. To understand
media beyond tools, we need to critically examine media from different perspectives and
theories. These perspectives are not strict delineations and may sometimes overlap with each
other in their depiction of the media. No one perspective can fully explicate the whole reality of
media; we need to understand media from different angles and lenses. Our objective is to have a
holistic view of media for a theology of mission today.
In recent years, there has been a renewed interest on the significance of communication
and media in official Catholic Church documents. This is shown by the fact that the theme of
social communication5 and media received much attention from the church from the second half
of the twentieth century up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. These documents show
that the church has a rich reservoir and resource of teaching on communications. Many lay and
even the clergy are, however, either unaware or seldom draw inspiration and guidance from them
even in today’s hypermediated world. We will refer to these documents as we go through each
of the perspectives on media.
a. Instrumental
The most basic understanding of media is that they are instruments of communication; of
transmission of message. One person develops ideas within himself/herself, and then transmits
5
Franz-Josef Eilers explains why the church prefers to use the word social communication instead of media. The word social communication was introduced in Vatican II’s Inter Mirifica.Eilers offers three understandings for the concept of “social communications”:
1. It is just considered as a common expression for all kinds of communication including the media, especially the so-called “Mass Media”;
2. It refers to interaction and instrumentality of the communication process especially in view of modern techniques and mass media (actioneminstrumentalem)
3. It refers to all means and ways of communication in human society. This way, the expression becomes open to the past as well as to the future in such a way that it includes all ways of communicating in history, with traditional communication from early non-verbal means to verbal, writing and actions. Social communications would include drama, theater, art, music, dance and all other communicative performances in human society and culture. The concept also includes the newest developments in cyber-, digital and converging
communication. Franz-Joseph Eilers, Communicating in Community: An Introduction to Social Communication (Manila: Logos, 1996), 316.
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them to another. This is the linear theory of communication which is called transmission or
instrumentalist theory. The audience of the message has little role except as receivers of the
message. The most popular transmission theory of communication is the “Shannon-Weaver
model of communication.”6
Instrumentalists see technology as neutral or benign. Nicholas Carr describe the
instrumentalist perspective as seeing technology as just tools; instruments used as a means to an
end, tools “entirely subservient to the conscious wishes of their users.”7
Media as instrument and means for transmission of the message, raises the critical issue
about the role of technology. Media in itself is also technology. Technology is an inherent
dimension of humanity ever since humans appeared on earth. It is one of the outstanding
qualities which made humans distinct as a species. Technology is an extension of human beings
as rational creatures. William A. Stahl argued that in the past two hundred years, it has become
common to define human species as Homo faber, “man the tool-maker,” and to identify cultures
with their technology—neolithic, Bronze Age, Space Age. Those who have the latest gadgets are
defined as modern while those who lack such are “old-fashioned,” “quaint” “underdeveloped” or
“backward.”8
6 Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver outline the five parts of their basic communication theory:
1. An information source which produces message or sequence of messages to be communicated to the receiving terminal.
2. A transmitter which operates on the message in some way to produce a signal suitable for transmission over the channel.
3. The channel is merely the medium used to transmit the signal from transmitter to receiver. It may be a pair of wires, a coaxial cable, a band of radio frequencies, beam of light, etc.
4. The receiver ordinarily performs the inverse operation of that done by the transmitter, reconstructing the message from the signal.
5. The destination is the person (or thing) for whom the message is intended. Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, 1949), 33-34.
7
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 39 – 56.
8 William A. Stahl, God and the Chip: Religion and the Culture of Technology (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier
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Technology has always been with human beings since the beginning. With the advent of
new media, however, we have suddenly become aware of the hyper-technologization of our
lives. The technologization has become ubiquitous in everyday life not just in communication
but even in the most basic structures of our daily lives: technologically mediated basic activities
like eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, walking even relationships (technologically mediated
dating). We have become a homo digitas—technological person.
A lot of discussion on technology revolves around the utopian and dystopian view of
technology. Simply put, the utopian view is the optimistic view and the dystopian view is the
pessimistic view of technology. The utopian view is that technology will lead to perfect progress
while the dystopian view is technology will lead to destruction.9 Both are deterministic in their
approach. The dystopian view, however, is the louder voice of the two.
Many thinkers have raised alarm about the side effects of a technology-driven culture.
French philosopher and lay theologian Jacques Ellul, whom Postman calls a “Luddite”10
criticised the danger of technoculture. In his most well-known and influential book,
Technological Society, Ellul argues that modern society has given itself over to technique. He
defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency
(for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”11 Efficiency has taken
priority over people in solving problems of everyday life, i.e., output, quantity and measurable
9
For further discussion see, Robert Cole (ed.), Issues in Web-Based Pedagogy: A Critical Primer (London: Greenwood Press), 2001.
10 The term Luddite, used by Postman in a descriptive rather than the usual pejorative sense, comes from the Luddite
movement during the height of Industrial Revolution in England. Neil Postman says it “flourished in England between 1811 and 1818 as a response to the furious growth of machines and factories. Notwithstanding the excesses of their zeal, the Luddites seemed to be the only group in England that could foresee the catastrophic effects of the factory system, especially on children. They did not want their children to be deprived of an education—indeed, of childhood itself—for the purpose of their being used to fuel the machines of industry.” Neil Postman, “Of Luddites, Learning, and Life,” Technos Quarterly, Winter 1993 Vol. 2 No. 4. Accessed 03/04/2013 at http://www.ait.net/technos/tq_02/4postman.php.
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outcomes for everything we do; efficiency has become the new god.12 For Ellul, technique is a
mindset—a scientific and technological approach to all of life. Society has embraced
technology and science wholesale. Technology has taken over us rather than us directing
technology. 13 He argues further that contemporary society has made technology a substitute for
religion. He sees ideology inherent in technology which, as a result, the adoption of particular
technologies has implications for social and religious meaning and expression.14
Building on Ellul’s ideas, Neil Postman in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to
Technology calls the society in which technology is deified as “technopoly.” It is a society whose
culture “seeks its authorisation in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its
orders from technology.”15
Guy Ernest-Debord a French Marxist theorist built on the concepts of Karl Marx and
Georg Lukács particularly about alienation, “reification” and ”fetishism of the commodity” when
he wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. In this work, he postulates that life in modern
society is dominated by images which he calls spectacles. These have incorporated all other
forms of domination: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life
presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has
moved away into a representation.” 16 Debord argues that the media is a big purveyor of
spectacles. He contends that media is not a neutral instrument but preserves and nurtures the
status quo. “If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of ‘mass media’ which are its most
12
Ellul, The Technological Society, 21.
13 Ellul, The Technological Society, 137 – 139.
14 Peter Horsfield, “Teaching theology in a new cultural environment,” from Chris Arthur (ed.) Religion and the Media: An Introductory Reader, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993)
15
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 71-72.
16
Guy Debord, “Thesis 1,” The Society of the Spectacle. Accessed 12/03/2013 at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display_printable/16
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glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is
in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self-movement.”17 If Debord was alive
today he would have considered the Internet as a grand spectacle—calling the virtual
communities and superficial connections created by social networks like Facebook and Twitter
as characteristically “spectacular”.
Related to the idea of the spectacle is Jean Baudrillard’s take on simulacra. Baudrillard,
in his theory of simulacra, attacks contemporary society which defines reality through terms of
media claims. Baudrillard warns us about the danger of this “hyper-reality” where social reality
and its ‘simulation’ in media can no longer be distinguished: “It is no longer a question of
imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of
the real for the real.” 18 This blurring of the line between the real and the artificial has reinforced
the seduction of surfaceness. For Jean Baudrillard, the simulacrum becomes the real; reality
becomes hyper-reality. What appears on media becomes the real in actual reality. Video and
editing via photoshop, for example, can manipulate images and video to make it perfectly
beautiful even if it distorts the real. This happens typically among the actors and models that
many idolized; we identify their faces that we see on video and photographs as their true image
and identity in real life. These simulacratic techniques and approach are also utilised to the hilt
in advertising.
Technology will even become faster in the future; the future generation will grow with
more artificial intelligence all around them. This creates further anxiety about the expanded
mechanization of life, machines equalling human’s intelligence and eventually wielding power
17
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, “Thesis 24.”
18
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2.
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over humanity in the future. The fear of robots taking over humans or humans becoming just a
tiny cog in one big machine is not farfetched. Vincent Mosco, echoes this fear, in his concept of
the digital sublime which talks about the immense possibility and threat of cyberspace:
“Cyberspace has become the latest icon of the technological and electronic sublime, praised for
its epochal and transcendent characteristics and demonized for the depth of the evil it can
conjure.”19 Similarly, Henry David Thoreau expressed the fear of technology taking over our
lives two centuries ago: “Men have becomethetoolsof theirtools.”20 While Martin Heidegger
argued that technology has obliterated all distances but has not necessarily generated any
nearness.21
The utopian and dystopian ideologies are also present in church’s utilization of media as
instruments of mission. The utopian position, for example, proclaims that media technologies
will solve the problems of mission; technology is the best thing that ever happened to mission,
technology is mission’s best friend media technologies. On the other hand, the dystopian
position is technology will neither help nor promote mission; technology is the enemy of mission
as it will usher in the obliteration of mission.
Both utopian and dystopian position manifests the danger of seeing media in a
technologically essentialist way, and of seeing technology in an isolated and deterministic way.
Our position is neither utopian nor dystopian, although, we can utilize some of their insights.
We will not take the anti-technology nor the pro-technology stance. We will not take the
technocratic stance nor technological totalism but the humanization of technology. What we are
more interested is how media technology can enter and apply in God’s mission today.
19 Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2005), 24. 20
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods, Vol. 1 (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), 61.
21
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstafter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165.
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Church Perspective:
The Catholic Church accepts the potential good for evangelisation of the media by calling
media as gifts from God. Inter Mirifica expresses this, “The Catholic Church, since it was
founded by Christ our Lord to bear salvation to all men and thus is obliged to preach the Gospel,
considers it one of its duties to announce the Good News of salvation also with the help of the
media of social communication and to instruct men in their proper use.”22 This is also the World
Communications Day message of St. John Paul II in 1990 when the internet was only beginning
to explode. Church leaders are obliged to use “the full potential of the ‘computer age’ to serve
the human and transcendent vocation of every person, and thus to give glory to the Father from
whom all good things come”.23
The church documents asserted that it is now the duty of the church to utilise the means
of social communications as gifts from God.The first fundamental teaching of the church on the
media is that it is a wonderful gift of God to humanity. This highlights two fundamental
principles in God’s communication: First media are gifts and secondly it is from God. Pius XII in
Miranda Prorsus affirms this, “Those very remarkable technical inventions … though they
spring from human intelligence and industry, are nevertheless the gifts of God, Our Creator,
from Whom all good gifts proceed.”24 Paul VI first World Communication Day statement in
1967 re-echo this: “Thanks to these wonderful techniques, [humankind’s] social life has taken on
new dimensions: time and space have been conquered, and [humankind] has become as it were a
citizen of the world, sharing in and witnessing the most remote events and the vicissitudes of the
22Inter Mirifica #3 23
Message for the 24th World Communications Day, 1990.
24
Pius XII, Miranda Prorsus, (Vatican: September 9, 1957). http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius- xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_08091957_miranda-prorsus.html#Nota%201
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whole human race.”25 Fifteen years after Miranda Prorsus, PCSC document, Communio Et
Progressio reiterates this fundamental teachings: “The Church sees these media as ‘gifts of
God’ which, in accordance with His providential design, unite [all men and women in
fellowship] and so help them to cooperate with His plan for their salvation.”26
It is in this light that the church documents underscore that media also has an ambivalent
character. “We remind ourselves also that, like so many other good things in creation, they are
open to misuse; and, still all together, we consider, before God, what measures may be taken to
prevent their desecration.” 27
Communio Et Progressio counsels the church that it is reneging on Christ’s command if
they did not use the media: “Indeed it would be difficult to suggest that Christ’s command was
being obeyed unless all the opportunities offered by the modern media to extend to vast numbers
of people the announcement of his Good News were being used.”28 PCSC’s document The
Church and Internet upholds this commendation and admonishes the church that it should not be
hindered by fear of technology in the utilisation of the Internet: “It is important, too, that people
at all levels of the Church use the Internet creatively to meet their responsibilities and help fulfil
the Church’s mission. Hanging back timidly from fear of technology or for some other reason is
not acceptable, in view of the very many positive possibilities of the Internet.”29 Benedict XVI,
in his message for the World Communications Day in 2013, warns of the danger if the church
defaults on the new media: “Believers are increasingly aware that, unless the Good News is
25
Paul VI, Church and Social Communication: First World Communication Day
26Communio Et Progressio, #2
27 Paul VI, Message of the Holy Father for the World Social Communications Day: The Mass Media and
Reconciliation, Vatican, 19 April 1975, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-
vi/en/messages/communications/documents/hf_p-vi_mes_19750419_ix-com-day.html.
28
Communio Et Progressio, #126
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made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people for
whom this existential space is important.”30
To utilise the means of social communication, it is imperative that the church study,
examine, as well as evangelise the social communications. Aetatis Novae confirms that it is now
the fundamental responsibility of the church to study and evaluate the media:
As the Spirit helped the prophets of old to see the divine plan in the signs of their times, so today the Spirit helps the Church interpret the signs of our times and carry out its prophetic tasks, among which the study,