Introduction

This paper was submitted to Dr. A. Roger Gobel on Dec. 5, 1985, as part of “Religion and Human Behavior,” a first-year course at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg.

Paper

In virtually every congregation on any given Sunday, when the minister takes to the pulpit and preaches to the assembled congregation, the minister delivers a monologue. Exceedingly rarely, if ever, will the congregation respond to the sermon during its delivery. So the task of the minister is to climb, weekly, into the pulpit and to say some words about the Word of God, hoping to spur some change of heart, to elicit some reaction on the part of the parishoners, trusting, in most cases, “in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to do the job.” But the minister never knows whether the preaching falls on “those that have ears, letting them hear.” To borrow a term from the science of electronics, what the minister needs is feedback from the people in the pews. The minister needs the parishioners to indicate they have heard the sermon and to assure they will effect a change in themselves.

In short, communication—verbal exchange or dialogue—is necessary in this situation. The necessity of dialogue in the proclamation of the Word of God arises in two works in particular: The Presence of the Word Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History by Walter J. Ong, S.J. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), and “Religious Communication and the Nature of Meaning” by A. Roger Gobbel and Thomas H. Ridenhour (in Religious Communication Today, Sept. 1981, Vol. 24). Ong states, “In terms relating directly to the verbal media of communication, it is interesting to note how the catechism has made way for dialogue as a technique for presenting religious truths” (p. 300). Gobbel and Ridenhour say, “We invite them [men and women, boys and girls] to join with us in the creation, the constructing of new meanings and truth as we discover afresh what it is to be the people of God” (p. 26). Granted, the above quotation does not explicitly mention “dialogue,” but the communality of the act of creating meaning and truth suggests exchange, or dialogue. In addition, the role of “truth” in these two quotations bears examination, as the term is used in contradictory ways. Nevertheless, despite contradictory understandings of the nature of truth, both works point to the necessity for dialogue in proclaiming the Word of God, thus implying possible changes in the structure and style of preaching.

Before turning to the use of dialogue, the works’ uses of the word “truth” merit discussion. Early in his book, Ong states, “In literature cultures the illusion is widespread that if one has the exact words someone has uttered, one has by that very fact his exact meaning. This is not true” (p. 32). Here Ong contends that meaning is not borne by the words themselves, yet in the quotation presented above, a verbal exchange is “a technique for presenting religious truths” (p. 300). Yet here Ong contends that truth is borne by the words themselves. Clearly the two cases are mutually exclusive. Gobbel and Ridenhour, by contrast, agree with Ong’s earlier contention: “We cannot deposit in another person the meanings that we possess for a thing, event or words—including God and Jesus. And Abbey suggests, we cannot ‘give’ truth to another. We possess no pristine truth to be passed on via our communication activities” (Gobbel and Ridenhour, p. 25). So, on this question of the residency of truth and meaning, the two works disagree at the points under examination.

Even so, the two works agree on the need for dialogue in the task of preaching. Ong, in tracing the development of verbal media, asserts, “Today, even to disseminate the teaching it itself contains, the catechism is no longer the effective instrument it once was. Discussion is essential for assimilation in the post-typographically oral stage” (p. 300). Here Ong points to the efficacy of dialogue, even free-wheeling discussion, as compared to a rigid catechetical approach in the proclamation of the Word (leaving aside the problem of the residency of truth). Gobbel and Ridenhour mention, “The task of creation, construction of new meanings and truth is not just an individual task within the Christian tradition. It is also a task of the community of faith” (p. 26). In this communal task, during which the preacher “opens windows” onto “new horizons,” conversation and dialogue must take place. This is so because as “messages are transmitted and provoke and evoke meanings in persons” (pp. 25-26), for as windows are opened, the preacher knows if the windows open onto the same landscape only if the parishioners looking out of those windows describe a view closely resembling the preacher’s view.

Thus the preacher needs feedback from the parishioners during the task of preaching to facilitate the act of proclamation. In the system of Gobbel and Ridenhour, the preacher will attempt to call forth, or evoke, a certain meaning in the parishioners. The parishioners should then describe to the preacher the meaning they have created within themselves. If the preacher finds the description fitting closely his or her own meaning, the preacher can continue to the next point of the sermon. Otherwise the preacher can refine or elaborate the message, trying to evoke the desired meaning.

This explanation of the role of dialogue in the proclamation of the Word suggests several possible changes in the way preaching is structured and viewed. First, the preacher could encourage parishioners to respond to the sermon as it takes place, thus turning the sermon from a monologue to a dialogue. Or, if persons feel uncomfortable with that brand of spontaneity, pastors and parishioners can discuss the sermons afterwards. Further, the pastors can take the long view, seeing the proclamation of the Word as an on-going process, occurring week after week, and adjust future sermons to attempt evoking the desired meanings. These suggestions point to an interactive, dialogical approach and away from an active-passive, monological approach to the proclamation of the Word of God.

Introduction

Within the text of Bridging Physics and Communications: Experimental Detection and Analysis of Web Site Users’ Paths in an Environment of Free Choice, the thesis I wrote in 2000 for my master of arts degree in journalism, I embedded seven essays that each stand alone, yet work together to present the thoughts underlying the thesis itself. These essays originally served as the content appearing in the test Web site.

This is the seventh essay.

Essay

Professional communicators search for ways to engage community members in multimedia conversations.

The depictions of journalists in various media capture the ways that people have understood the roles of professional communicators and the relations those roles have to the surrounding community. Clark Kent/Superman pursued “truth, justice and the American Way” in an era when his creators, Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, thought those qualities faced challenges both from within and beyond the borders of the United States. In a time of deep questions about the the place of authority in our culture, Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein crusaded for the source of the “dirty tricks” played by “All the President’s Men.” For a few years in the mid 1990s, ABC News ran commercials that glamorized its on-air personalities, not the stories they told, ending with a Mt. Rushmore-like frieze of Jennings, Koppel, Donaldson, Brinkley and Sawyer captured in heroic profile. In the age of the Internet, when anyone with a computer and a modem can become a publisher of web content, Matt Drudge dredged up the dry goods on President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

At the same time that popular culture plays seriously with the various roles journalists and other professional communicators can assume within that culture, the research and study within journalism, as an academic discipline, have explored various roles and relations as well.

In the early years of broadcasting, the journalist served as surrogate adventurer, providing an audible sense of presence. Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting from the streets of London during the Blitzkrieg, with the sounds of incoming bombs exploding in the background, exemplified this role. The surrogate adventurer ventured where the average listener could never go. By mixing on-the-spot narrative vocals with ambient sounds, the journalist created a sense of place and activity for the audience. The form of the medium—radio—shaped the function of the journalist within that medium. Because the ear relies upon descriptions, narration, interviews and sounds to create the sense of the place and the event, the successful journalist in this medium needed to be an adept and agile speaker. Looks did not matter.

One of the more traditional roles a journalist could play was the gatekeeper:

For this discussion, “gatekeeping” in mass media is viewed as including all forms of information control that may arise in decisions about message encoding, such as selection, shaping, display, timing, withholding, or repetition of entire messages or message components. (George A. Donahue, Phillip J. Tichenor and Clarice N. Olien, “Gatekeeping: Mass Media Systems and Information Control” in Current Perspectives in Mass Communication Research, Gerald Kline and Philip J. Tichenor, eds., 1972, p. 43.)

The success of this role depends upon the community embracing the premise that there exists an objective standard of truth, propriety and conduct. The journalist works as the gatekeeper, deciding whether items will “make the news.” The standards for newsworthy stories are met when the items serve to increase truth, when they can be told within the bounds of propriety and when they can be obtained within set standards of conduct. An exemplar of this role is Walter Cronkite. The notion of the gatekeeper works in a system where the access to and the quantity of available information is limited. Network news broadcasts in the 1960s fit these criteria.

The Internet’s networked communications challenges these traditional roles on several fronts and drives the development of varying roles responsive to changes in forms of media. When each person with a computer and an Internet connection can publish material to web sites viewable to anyone else anywhere with a similar computer and connectivity, the notion of the gatekeeper loses its power. There can be no gate when everyone is already (potentially) within the walls containing the gate. In addition, the notion of community standards of conduct and truth undergo revision when community is redefined broadly as the whole world and narrowly as anyone who shares an individual’s narrowly crafted niche, like Power On Software’s Up-to-Date and Contact for Macintosh Users’ Group, for example.

Further, the sheer magnitude of the available content creates new challenges and pushes new roles on professional communicators. Because the Internet has grown exponentially rather than linearly, the task of organizing and sorting and making sense, in short, of navigating, has arisen. This may explain the choices behind the naming of browser software. Netscape’s choice of “Navigator” and use of the icon of a sailing ship’s captain’s wheel seems to connote the sense of exploration on the uncharted waters of the high seas. Similarly, Microsoft named its browser “Explorer,” and occasionally used the icon of a globe. This appears to connote a similar sense of adventure. Apple Computer’s ill-fated CyberDog sported a different image, one in which you sent the browser to bring back information to you, as a dog would fetch the daily newspaper.

Whole industries, companies and fortunes have risen and fallen in recent years in the search for a meaningful, useful and profitable way to make sense of the masses of content on the Internet. Search engines, portals, top-100 lists, software for storing and sorting URLs and other methods promote themselves as ways for helping people make sense of the content available to them on the Internet. But hidden behind these flashy on-screen aids is the work of scores of professional communicators. While masked, the communicators are playing an important role in the relations between people and the information they seek on the Internet.

There doesn’t yet appear to be a dominant image emerging to describe the role of the professional communicator in this context. But even so, some characteristics can be teased forth from the discussion above. Sometimes explorers need guides; Lewis and Clark had Sacagawea. Sometimes connoisseurs need experts; home cooks need the Food Network’s Emeril Lagasse and the syndicated Martha Stewart. Sometimes do-it-yourselfers need consultants. Sometimes there exists a need to organize, to provide structure, to customize features to meet a user’s needs or desires. It seems that the breadth and depth of content on the Internet, the velocity with which technological change sweeps across the medium and the diversity of users is leading to a variety of roles for professional communicators.

But despite the variety of images one can sketch out for professional communicators, there remain some common motifs that inform those images. First of all, whether one sees the role of the professional communicator as a guide, an expert, or a consultant, within those roles lies the task of seeking out and encouraging connections among users and between users and content. Linker is a clinker of a job title, but it captures something of that key task of connecting, of encouraging conversation.

If one accepts James Carse’s premise that people can play either finite or infinite games (James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, New York: Ballantine Books, 1986, p. 7.) , and if one buys the notion that good and useful communications lead to further communications, then one can put those two premises together to say that a good conversation is a form of infinite game. Then one can also see a role for the professional communicator as one who encourages the conversation, the give and take that arises among users and between users and the content and computers comprising the Internet.

Professional communicators search for ways to engage community members in multimedia conversations.

Introduction

Within the text of Bridging Physics and Communications: Experimental Detection and Analysis of Web Site Users’ Paths in an Environment of Free Choice, the thesis I wrote in 2000 for my master of arts degree in journalism, I embedded seven essays that each stand alone, yet work together to present the thoughts underlying the thesis itself. These essays originally served as the content appearing in the test Web site.

This is the sixth essay.

Essay

Living systems develop complex and responsive ways of engaging their environments.

One commonplace canard of every freshman biology class is the observation that living creatures respond to external stimuli. But external stimuli, by definition, come from the environment. So one can extend the observation to say that living creatures respond to their environments. Biology classes in most places also teach that over time living creatures, when considered as species, tend to evolve more nuanced and diversified responses to their environment. But a species can also be viewed as a system of creatures distributed in time. So again, one can extend the observation to say: “Living systems develop complex and responsive ways of engaging their environments.”

If one considers the system comprising people and their technology, one can see many of the same characteristics, in the behavior and development of this system, as one sees in the development and behavior of any other living system. For example, when the researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) were developing innovative approaches to personal computing in the era of mainframe computing, they saw the need for a much more highly developed visual display. Their thesis was that the eye was the fattest pipe for communicating information to the person from the computer. So their earliest designs virtually cannibalized the central processor unit time of other subsystems to provide the monitor with the processing time it needed:

[Charles] Thacker’s inspiration was to shift the bottleneck from the memory to the processor itself. In his design, only the CPU, which after all was the most important component of the machine, would be permitted to address the main memory at any time…. [Thacker realized] he could convert idle blocks of the Alto’s main memory into a bitmap for the display screen…. Without this sort of artfulness the Alto display would not have been possible at all (Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, New York: HarperBusiness, 1999, p. 172-174.).

One can see a subtle and sophisticated give-and-take between people and computers at work here. The evolutionary human preference for engaging the environment visually drove computer designers to modify computers, making them visual to make them personal. In turn, the notion of the desktop metaphor mapped a common human (or at least a common Western) experience onto the computer screen, replicating an aspect of the physical environment in everyday life in the visual environment of the computer-human interface.

You could build on the user’s existing strengths and aptitudes. Knowing something about how to organize a file cabinet would help you organize our digital files, just as being familiar with how trash cans work would help you delete files. The metaphors would make the user experience more intuitive, and the playful, graphic metaphors made the idea of using a computer less intimidating. If you could sit at a desk and shuffle papers, you could use the machine (Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1997, p. 48.).

Likewise, as the screens and peripherals for computers develop to better produce visual and now audible information for people, people have begun to make sense of their world in ways shaped by the medium of the computer. This is part of what Richard Coyne meant when he wrote, “We are shaped by our technologies as much as we fashion them” (Richard Coyne, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995, p. 7.).

What we see happening in us and around us as we and our technology influence one another is the evolution of a complex system. While one could disassemble this system into its constituent components—people, computers, networks, information and the environment—there remains value in considering the system in its complexity. As one does this, one sees that people and their communications technologies together exhibit the characteristics of an evolving species.

This process of shared human and technological evolution is like biological evolution. It happens within an identifiable system, environmental engagement plays a role, and adaptive changes tend to perpetuate themselves, while maladaptive ones die off. The distinction is that the system includes the behaviors of people, the capabilities of technology, and the information upon which they both base their interactions. Another glaring difference is the pace at which the system comprising people and technology is co-evolving.

But despite the differences, the metaphor of “system,” when applied to people and their communications technology, works well. The metaphor highlights the similarities and differences between technological and biological systems evolution. These distinctions illuminate the actions and paths of the human-technological system over time. The connections highlighted by the metaphorical comparison are more than merely rhetorical, in the commonplace sense of the word. The connections show the linkages inherent in the notion of a living system. That is, the metaphor works because the same process goes on in the two systems connected by the metaphor.

And so, whether one looks at the system of a forest and its trees, or the system of the Internet and its people, computers and information, one can draw the same conclusion: Living systems develop complex and responsive ways of engaging their environments.

NOTE: Recent developments point to the possibilities that complex robots can evolve. Early results from the GOLEM Project (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics) indicate that self-evolving robots can develop the characteristic of self-locomotion, a step on the path of life. Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack, “The Golem Project: Automatic Design and Manufacture of Robotic Lifeforms; available from http://golem03.cs-i.brandeis.edu/index.html; Internet; accessed 2 September 2000.

UPDATE: Site referenced above now appears at http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/; Internet; accessed 23 July 2009.