We want your soul
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 4Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
I was pointed to this clip by a poster on a recent Out of Ur interview with Shane Hipps. I'm using it for my prospectus presentation to set up the cultural backdrop for my study, which will be centered on competition, consumerism and commodification in church advertising and marketing. I highly recommend the Out of Ur post and a trip through the comments by readers. I'm not sure if anyone has seen this video before (it dates to 2003), but I thought it was a great illustration.
At this point, I'm planning to look at examples of advertising and marketing materials from churches and apply a media-centered critical methodology rooted in McLuhan's media ecology and Innis' communication bias. In short, advertising is a non neutral medium, despite the prevailing assumptions of those who use it to promote churches. Here's one excerpt from my draft prospectus:
According to Vincent Miller, author of Consuming Religion, “religion is as susceptible to abstraction and reification as other aspects of culture” (2005, p. 105). There is no neutral ground in mediated communication if Innis, McLuhan and others are taken seriously. The forces of consumerism in contemporary culture endanger the message of the church by reducing it to “abstracted, virtual sentiments that function solely to give flavor to the already established forms of everyday life or to provide compensation for its shortcomings” (p. 105-106).
Looking back at the video, is the church allowing itself to become just another consumer option vying for brand awareness and patronage?
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J-bro returns
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Huge Jonatha Brooke fan here. Recently I was able to pull down her latest, Careful What You Wish For, from iTunes. Have been listening to it on and off for a few days now--and am exceedingly happy. The tunes are a cut above her last project (which was pretty good), and many have more of a hard edge, without detracting from her ability to craft beautiful melodies and lyrics. And, she sings one song in French, no less. C'est magnifique!
I’m a quantitative research methods survivor
Thursday, April 19, 2007
I just finished up my last project for this class, and can now concentrate completely on my prospectus due in a couple weeks. Given the fact that I entered the MA Comm program with an exception on the statistics prerequisite, I was a little worried about staying afloat in this class—where the math really hits the fan, so to speak. Well, I made it through. I’m thinking about planting a tree to commemorate this life event. I just realized there are five more classes, then comprehensive exams, then two more classes (seminars), the thesis and defense—and that’s it! This is really starting to fly by.
More on the choice paradox
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Here's a 20 minute talk by Barry Schwartz about the central themes of his book, The Paradox of Choice.There's so much here to think about. Like the example he gives on the inverse relationship between more choice and participation. Does turning church into another consumer decision induce spiritual paralysis in the long run? Does ostensible church growth via sheer population increase and megachurch methods mask an underlying reality that the truly unchurched in society are actually immobilized by being confronted by more decisions? I see an impact on existing Christians, as well, with large churches offering increasing levels of choice for spiritual growth opportunities and Christian service. How much is too much?
The new paradox of church choice
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Recently ran across a book and an article about the problem of too much choice. The hypothesis put forth is that consumer satisfaction degrades when presented with increasing numbers of choices. While Americans have become a society obsessed with consumer-driven choices (many of us believing more options are always better), the “piling on” of decisions is resulting in growing levels of fatigue and buyer’s remorse.
Read the article here, and reference the recent book by Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice.How does this apply to the notion of the church in America today? A few thoughts that have crossed my mind in the past few days: For the past 100 years or so the number of denominations and sects in the United States as grown to huge numbers (around 30,000 for protestant groups alone). In addition, large mega churches have become known apart from denominational affiliation in local, regional and even national contexts. Add to this the multiple service format and venue trend, and you exponentially multiply consumer options. Simply put, people who may consider attending a church next Sunday face an extraordinary number of choices. Sure, not every group is represented in every community. But gone are the days of the Walnut Grove-esque church or the all-American town with just a handful of mainline churches to mull over—each with little metal signs on the outskirts of town. Today’s church shopper has a shopping mall full of options to consider.
Now, evangelistically oriented people will point out that growing communities need more churches to reach a growing population. At face value, this is a perfectly reasonable assumption. But it breaks down when you apply the supermarket analogy. The article mentions how today’s supermarket carries more than 30,000 items, and 20,000 new products are introduced each year (most of these fail to catch on). Because people come to the supermarket to choose from these products, they don’t consider the impact of a growing population on their ability to choose a product. They make individual choices facing the same pool of options regardless of how many other people are shopping (even though the store may become more crowded—but let’s not take the analogy too far). The point is, population growth and increased church planting only adds additional choices for people, and these choices are not limited by increased population or actual church capacity in any way. We may need more churches to accommodate growing communities, but this also unavoidably adds more for people to choose from.Here’s the problem: The more attempts that are made to package and expand the church to reach people (new churches, venues, alternative services, more programs, etc.), the more options everyone considering church participation has to choose from. As the article and the book point out, this leads to people who are “less satisfied and…less happy…with those choices.” This presents the new church choice paradox.
Is it any wonder we live in an age of church hoppers and increasingly demanding congregations?
Discover the woeful inadequacy of my education
Saturday, April 14, 2007
My previous post led me to check out a unique approach to higher learning. St. John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe features only one course of study. No choice of 40 different majors—just a four year trek through all of the ‘significant’ literature of Western civilization. It’s hard to look over this reading list and argue that St. John’s graduates wouldn’t emerge as more highly educated and literate thinkers than those earning degrees from the many supermarkets of higher learning across most of the country (that includes me). Reading their web site makes me want to go there and get a real education (preferably in Santa Fe).Here’s a fun little game: How many authors on the St. John’s College list have you read? They need not be the same titles or the complete works of these authors to play. Shoot me a comment and let me know.
Todd’s list: Austen, The Bible, Dostoevski, Eliot (George), Tolstoy, Twain and Shakespeare.
Pretty scant. I credit my college freshman lit. teacher for likely helping me double the size of my list. I’m a little shocked at not seeing some big names on the St. John’s list—but with all of Western civilization to get through, I suppose you gotta make some cuts. Hemingway is probably ticked off. How did you make out?
Ignore this if you’re sick of my Mac apologist rantings
Saturday, April 14, 2007
For those that may be interested, another edition—even when I said I’d not be doing too much of this in the future. I lied.
I’ve often tried to explain the security difference between Windows and Mac OS X. It’s something I’m asked about fairly often. Rarely have I been able to provide such a user friendly yet sufficiently explanatory answer as the one provided by Paul Venezia, writing an article for InfoWorld entitled, "The Myth of Apple's Insecurities." Note, InfoWorld is not a Mac magazine—not by a long shot. It is an IT trade publication, and its writers focus mainly on that market, which is dominated by Windows PCs and servers, but also a fair amount of UNIX servers. So consider the source when reading the quotes below and the linked article. This is not some Mac PR hack writing. This is someone who knows what their talking about. Also, when you read the word “network,” remember that the internet is the network that matters.“If an OS is built on shaky ground, everything layered on top will suffer. This is the position that Microsoft is in now. Apple was in this very position at the end of the last century. They decided to start over, providing a clear upgrade path and supporting legacy applications on the new platform.”
“Apple had to rebuild their entire OS. They did, with a huge helping of public code [Free BSD UNIX] vetted over the decades and proven secure and reliable. Microsoft didn't. They’re faced with massive-scale exploits like the spreading ANI vulnerability. That affects every Microsoft OS, server and workstation alike, across the board. This gives us a glimpse into the code shared between generations of Microsoft OSes, and it's not a pretty view.”
Apple and EMI walk the talk
Monday, April 02, 2007
Sorry for the number of posts concerning Apple. Today was a big day: the beginning of the end for DRM-laden digital music. Apple and EMI announced DRM-free music via iTunes, plus higher bit-rates for higher quality playback. A good thing has just begun. I neglected to post when Steve Jobs posted an open letter on Apple.com February 9 calling for record labels to do away with DRM as bad for music and music fans. After a first quarter with falling CD sales, EMI is ready to differentiate itself from the pack with this bold move. Bravo! Video from CNBC below:Apple TV's disruptive technology
Sunday, April 01, 2007
I have to admit that I didn't expect the Apple TV to get as much attention as it has been getting since it began shipping a couple of weeks ago. But, then again, I didn't think much of the iPod's impact when I first beheld it at an Apple store five years ago. Why could something so simple and pretty limited in scope create a fundamental disruption the TV marketplace? Carl Howe, writing for investment site Seeking Alpha, offers some compelling reasons for your consideration:
"Apple TV is about to attack the fundamental assumptions underpinning the TV business just as the iPod cut the legs out from under CDs and radio stations. How? Because with Apple TV combining the flexibility of the Internet with a living-room, big-screen experience, consumers now will:1) Vote for programming with consumer dollars [instead of via the viewer rating and ad-supported paradigm], 2) Watch what they want, when and where they want it, 3) Enjoy TV programming a la carte."
Check out the entire article here.
The PoMo and the bait & switch
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Thoughts on thesis, part 3Posts in a series of commentaries on my thesis project for the Master of Arts in Communication.
There are two lines of thought emerging from the review of literature at this point. One is the point of departure for postmodern advertising from modern, pre 1990s advertising. Where modernism created a consumer culture by harnessing image and textual advertising to stimulate and cultivate desire and felt needs for products, postmodernism is an evolved consumer culture where advertising transcends product by presenting a hyperreality where self becomes defined by consumption and brand images become iconic—disassociated from the products they represent. The second is a recognition of the aware consumer of the postmodern era with a highly evolved sensibility when it comes to advertising that is perceived to be deceptive or misleading. The “bait-and-switch” of some ad messages creates and increasingly guarded and skeptical consumer, the effects of which can even bleed over into other brands and products. It’s a break in the sacred (or profane) bond between consumer and producer where consumers are aware and accept they are being sold to, and in exchange for receiving a sales pitch, expect to be given honest, albeit hyped, information.
In the case of the former line, church growth advertising fails to recognize the impact of the postmodern shift as it pertains to advertising messages. Many church marketers make the faulty assumption that modernist approaches in creating advertising messages will reach postmodern-minded people. The truth is that both modern and postmodern consumer messages are problematic at best when applied to fulfilling Christian evangelistic aims. Product marketing approaches targeting consumers often repackage the enterprise (institutional services) of a church rather than present a gospel message. Or, the Gospel itself is productized as a turn-key consumer product, making conversion purely transactional rather than transformational. Theologically both productizing the church and elevating Christianity or the church to image-driven brand status is troubling. There is much to explore here.
In the case of the second line, some church marketers have resorted to concealing their true identity in their messages in order to create “buzz” marketing campaigns to bring more people through their doors (like the one pictured that made national news last week). The trouble with this technique, as advertising research tends to support, is that the consumers intrigued enough to investigate the “buzz” inevitably find out the truth: the mysterious entity that is advertising on billboards or via direct mail is really just another church. This risks developing a growing audience of disappointed and even avoidant consumers. Churches overestimate their ability to truly differentiate themselves from traditional churches once the switch is made. Rock music worship and relevant, entertaining messages hold less sway with postmodern consumers with vastly superior alternatives to choose from. In such cases, I propose leading with spirituality and the message of Jesus could be a more effective (and honest) message strategy.Do either of the approaches generate a backlash with certain people (postmoderns seeking spiritual connection)? Does growth in simple, neo monastic and house church movements constitute a reaction to such approaches?
Vista security flaw curses the cursor
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Of the many things I could have posted in the past three months about Windows Vista (poor reviews, security issues, steep upgrade requirements, copied features), this one is perhaps the most damning indictment. It seems that the cursor itself—that pointer/hourglass icon that you mouse around and click things with (really the heart of the GUI experience itself)—is vulnerable to a recent malware exploit in all versions of Windows, including Vista. See it in action via video here. All you stalwart Vista and XP PC owners be sure to get that forthcoming patch. Beyond belief. Sorry, but can I mention that my Macs live off of a high speed Internet connection that’s on 24-7 and I’m running no antiviral software? Sure, I have a firewall on my router and in Mac OS X, but I have never had a viral infection of any kind—six years of Mac OS X and counting. I’m not really going to be posting too much more about why people should dump Windows PCs for Macs. Consider this post representative of 1,000 other reasons people should dump Windows. Yes, I’m an unashamed Mac fanatic. But I’m also seeing the writing on the wall. The Mac is hip again. The need for fanatics like me to evangelize is waning. To some, Apple’s recent market share increases may not seem like much, but it has everything to do with momentum increasing against the MS hegemony. The days of a single dominant OS—or even the relevancy of a dominant OS—are numbered. Evidence of that? Dell is now offering Linux as a preinstalled OS for consumer desktops and laptops.