In addition to the GodBlogCon coverage here by Jordan, I’d like to point readers to two speakers who gave thought provoking talks on the careful use of language. That is, the careful use of language in a time where language is often treated as an ephemeral or disposable thing in the service of the latest Web-enabled communications widget. Not really.
On Saturday, Ken Myers offered “Renewed Minds Online: The Internet, Media Ecology, and the Christian Consciousness.” Myers is host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, a high quality source of audio programming on a wide variety of issues. Here is the gist of Myer’s talk (podcast available here):
The word, spoken and written, lives at the center of Christian faith. The case has been made by many theologians and philosophers that human nature is in its essence linguistic; we are, after all created in the image of a speaking and writing God, one who utters all things into existence, who reveals his law by writing with his finger on tablets of stone, who reveals himself in dreams and visions, but who also provides words to accompany and sometimes explain those images; who comes among us as the living Word. Bread alone is not the source of our life, but rather words.
How we use language should thus be a matter of thoughtfulness and deliberateness. Not only should we pay attention to the way we use words; we also need to attend to how the setting within which our words are presented to the world spins their reception, often in ways we never intended.
Also see Myers’ online essay, “Configuring Church and Culture” here.
The closing talk by John Mark Reynolds, “On The Art of Online Conversation,” looked at how online discourse too often degenerates, particularly in political circles, to a harsh and unhealthy contest of who can shout the loudest. Reynolds, a philospher and director of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, also looks at the way online writing has landed in the strange middle ground between books and conversation. Reynolds observes that the “immediacy” of online conversation is its great advantage, and also its great drawback. Those online conversations, authored with great care or with almost no thought at all, tend to stay around a long time after the live interaction is over.
Reynolds also offers rules for good conversations starting with, “A good discussion begins, most critically, with the right question.”
Listen to his entire talk on the Scriptorium Daily blog. The full list of posted GodBlogCon podcasts is available here.
And check out “The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting for Christ,” edited by Reynolds and Roger Overton, on its way to bookstores later this month from Crossway.
