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Book Discussion: Flickering Pixels
Shane Hipps on how technology shapes your faith.| Outcomes, Fall 2009
Prior to accepting a call to pastor Trinity Mennonite Church in Phoenix, Arizona, Shane Hipps was a strategic planner in advertising, where he gained experience in understanding media and culture. Much of his time was spent working on the multimillion-dollar communications strategy for Porsche Cars North America. A nationally recognized speaker and communicator, Hipps has a master of divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary. Outcomes editor in chief Scott Brown recently interviewed Hipps about his most recent book, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith (Zondervan, 2009).
You write in Flickering Pixels that your purpose is to make us aware of the hidden power of technology. What is that hidden power?
My point is to help people to train their eyes to see things in a new way. Christianity spends most of its time debating the content of our media, often ignoring the media, the very tools we use to communicate. I'm trying to help train our eyes to see the media and the inherent bias they contain.
The hidden power is different for every technology and medium, but the reason it's hidden is that we aren't looking at it. The image that comes to mind is The Wizard of Oz. We all stand gape-mouthed staring at this wizard head wreathed in flame, debating what it is and what it is doing to us, while all the while we miss the man behind the curtain actually pulling the levers.
Television causes us to think in more right-brain, concrete, image-based ways. It invokes intuition and emotion rather than reason and logic, and that's a shift. The flickering mosaic of pixilated light is re-patterning neural pathways of the brain, causing us to think differently. Whether that's good or bad depends on your values. If you think that intuition and visceral responses are healthy, this is a good shift. If you think the loss of reason is dangerous, you would find it a very threatening shift. But my interest isn't so much in telling you what is good or bad. My interest is helping you to see.
How do we draw the proper balance in using technology as Christian nonprofit leaders?
My warning to people is not that they shouldn't use technology. My warning is to avoid granting it powers that it doesn't possess, and to not rob it of the powers it does possess. For example, take social networking. People seem to think it is the holy grail of creating community in the 21st century. But it doesn't really create much in the way of sustainable, life-giving community. It creates meaningful connections, most often superficial and primarily intellectual. For me to say that does not undermine or undo the value of that. But it honors what it is really good at.
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