Toward a Missiology for the Digital World

Three Mass Migrations

One of the defining features of the 21st century is that we are living in the middle of the three largest mass migrations in human history, all at the same time.

The first of these historic migrations is urbanization. According to the United Nations, 3 million people—roughly the size of Chicago—move into cities every week. More than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas today, up from around one-third of the population in 1950. That number is projected to increase to nearly two-thirds of the human population by the year 2050. The world is moving into cities at an unprecedented and ever-accelerating rate.

The second historic migration of our time is immigration. The World Migration Report estimates that the number of people living outside of their country of birth has more than tripled since 1970 and has reached 281 million people today. More and more of these people are moving due to displacement as a result of violence, economic instability and other disasters. In 2022, there were 117 million displaced people in the world. The number of asylum-seekers has risen by 30% in just two years, from 4.1 million in 2020 to 5.4 million in 2022. People are moving around the globe—by choice and by necessity—in historic proportions.

The third migration is one that can go overlooked. It is the migration of peoples’ lives from the in-person city to the digital city. This migration could be called digitalization—a migration that was well under way before 2020 but was accelerated by the global pandemic. Across the world, people now spend more than six and a half hours online every day, with more than one third of that time on social media. That means almost 40% of our waking hours are now spent online. One author notes that the globe is becoming more and more “uniformly technological” and that our day-to-day activities and influences across very diverse communities are becoming more similar than ever before. “Technology has become a kind of supra-cultural phenomenon that finds its way into every aspect of our diverse lives.” The digital world has emerged as a new “public square” of a hyperconnected globe.

At City to City, we have long reflected on urbanization. We have reflected meaningfully on the importance of cities in the scope of God’s redemptive plan. We have also begun to give more attention to the growing diversity and interconnectedness of global cities through the dynamics of immigration and globalization. More work could be done in this area, for example, like reflecting on the missiological significance of diaspora communities in cities across the world. The work of the London Project is an important example of that currently.

However, to continue to effectively seek gospel renewal in the great cities of the world, we must begin to engage with this third migration—digitalization—with the same theological and missiological rigor. The hyperconnected digital city that exists within (and across) every global city can no longer be viewed as peripheral to our work. The purpose of this paper, far from presuming to offer solutions or answers, is to serve as a conversation starter to begin to wrestle with some of the complex questions around a missiological engagement with the digital city. To do that, we must begin by recognizing the crucial role that media plays not only in shaping how a culture communicates ideas, or even what ideas get communicated. We must look at how a culture’s media reshapes how it accesses and experiences truth itself.

The Digital World as a New Medium for Public Discourse

In 1985, now forty years ago, Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business predicted the impact that the new medium of television would have on public discourse in the West. He makes the case that while all technologies impact culture in some way, the technologies that become the media for facilitating public conversation (that is, for spreading ideas, attitudes, and beliefs across a culture) do not just impact culture; they come to define the culture. He explains that his argument is one:

… that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.

He argues that when cultures shifted from oral cultures to typographic cultures (via the printing press) and then from typographic cultures to visual cultures (via the television), what happened was not just the swapping in and out of interchangeable tools/technologies for communicating. And it wasn’t just that these new tools led to different modes of communicating (i.e., from oral myths to reasoned argument to visual experiences). It wasn’t even just that different tools inevitably wound up privileging certain kinds of content over others. His argument is that these changes in communication media facilitated massive changes in things like how a culture defined intelligence, acquired knowledge, experienced persuasion, and ultimately how they understood the nature of truth.

This is why Postman’s first chapter is entitled “The Medium is the Metaphor.” It is a take on Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “The medium is the message.” Postman, who studied under McLuhan, believed that this aphorism needed amendment. A medium, in Postman’s view, does not itself make concrete statements about the world and therefore cannot itself be a message. However, he argues that the medium becomes the controlling metaphor that the culture uses to make sense of reality. We can get a sense of what he means by considering how the defining medium of a culture might function as a metaphor for understanding truth.

ORAL CULTURE
In an oral culture, the medium of story, myth, and proverb become the metaphors by which an individual makes sense of the world. This means that truth in oral cultures is acquired through the lens of myth even outside of the immediate context of a tribal elder’s storytelling circle. The way a member of that culture thinks about and makes conclusions around reality is through the lens of myth and story. Their world is made coherent by the stories told and retold within a community. The myth is what counts as an explanation.

PRINT CULTURE
In a print culture, the metaphor for reality is one of conceptual reasoning and propositional argument. This means that even outside of the context of reading a pamphlet or listening to an extended argument, an individual immersed in a typographic culture looks to make sense of reality through logic and reason. Their world is made coherent by reasoned theory and conceptual explanation. Logic and reason are what count as an explanation. Truth is thought to be accessed through the pursuit of rational argumentation of the written word.

VISUAL CULTURE
According to Postman, in the visual culture created by television, the metaphor for reality has shifted to image and entertainment. Again, this means that even outside of the context of watching television, an individual interprets reality as a series of images or experiences that evoke emotions which are not necessarily connected to each other. Understanding the world no longer requires coherence apart from the emotions or sequential experience of the viewer. The result, Postman argues, is that all information is received as part of the larger pursuit of amusement and self-gratification. Authentic feelings and experiences are what count as an explanation. Truth is accessed through the passive reception of images and sensation.

AN EXAMPLE
One author wryly noted that when the only tool you have is a smartphone with a camera, everything begins to look like a selfie. That is to say in a smartphone world, the metaphor through which one interprets natural beauty is not that of sacred myth as it would be in oral cultures: “I make sense of this mountain by understanding it as a part of the same sacred, mysterious universe within which my tribe also finds its place.” Neither is the metaphor that of rational treatise as it would be in typographic cultures: “I make sense of this mountain as an immovable argument for a majestic, ordered universe.” Nor is it even the case that the metaphor is that of visual image as it would be in a television culture: “I make sense of this mountain as a sensation of beauty and possibility and adventure.” Instead, in a smartphone world, the mountain becomes the backdrop to an authentic display of a self fearlessly pursuing its own self-actualization. The primary medium of a culture (in this case of self-curated social media content) provides the metaphor through which all reality is interpreted.

So Postman’s argument is that the primary medium of public discourse did not act purely as a neutral tool that could be utilized in the service of a user’s intent or not, a view sometimes called “technological instrumentalism". Instead, he wants to show that they each acted back on the culture to determine not only the kinds of content that could most easily be shared, but shaped the culture’s very experience of knowledge, plausibility, and coherence. Postman would likely consider himself closer to a second school of thought sometimes called “technological determinism.” More extreme versions of this view would say our technologies (especially our communication media) determine our culture, while more moderate views would make room for the ongoing agency and responsibility of individuals.

Whether or not one agrees fully with Postman’s assessment, the point that is salient for our purposes is that technologies that serve as the primary media by which a culture communicates ideas warrant far more careful reflection than others. They shape the environment for and the rules by which truth is apprehended and regarded in a culture in profound ways.

The Age of “Digital Orality”

Today’s digital world of social media and AI represents a new age that Postman, 40 years ago, could not have even imagined. Media ecologist Andrey Mir refers to our current age as an age of “digital orality.” Advancing rapidly to a stage beyond Postman’s “visual culture,” today’s “digital orality culture” alchemizes aspects of the visual, the literate, and the oral.

Like a visual culture, “digital orality” primarily relies on the power of images, experience, and emotion to persuade and convey truth. However, like a literate culture, discourse continues to employ the written word, but in forms that are adjusted for the power of the visual image and for shorter attention spans. Extended discursive reasoning is replaced with clickbait headlines, appeals to emotion, and salacious gotcha pieces. But like an oral culture, information (as well as stories and images) is trusted only when they come from those seen as “elders” in one's digital tribe. When sources of information are seen as conflicting, incoherent, and no longer reliable (whether because they come from other “tribal” sources, generated artificially by AI, etc.), we trust our tribe to offer us the authorized “mythology” that makes sense of the world.

For Mir, the age of digital orality—now accelerated exponentially by the advent of AI—threatens to undo many of the revolutionary gains of the Axial Age. But this time, the changes that took a millennium to take root could be transformed in a single decade. As Russell Moore summarizes, “Mir believes that the acceleration of technology today means that what we now face is an Axial Decade, one in which, in just a few short years, the entire structure of human life will again be changed.”

Some Initial Principles for Faithful Witness in an Age of Digital Orality

These preliminary reflections on the missiological opportunity and challenge of “the digital city” only begin to scratch the surface. Much further reflection and dialogue are needed by academics, practitioners, and everyday users to more adequately engage with these themes. However, a few initial biblical principles seem immediately relevant and could serve as possible starting points for a much larger conversation.

The Word and the Image: However one might assess the opportunities or threats afforded by visual communication, a prominent Scriptural theme to reflect on is God’s apparent preference for the word over the image as the primary means of his own self-disclosure. The biblical religion (and indeed all Abrahamic faiths) stand out in their quality as being “religions of the book” and comprise a significant part of the literate revolution of the Axial Age. The Second Commandment explicitly prohibits the use of images in worship for God’s people. The primacy of the word would affirm that the loss of positive elements of the “literate culture” (as Postman argues in his book) would indeed be tragic and should be resisted. However, this perspective need not preclude the use of images in communication entirely. After all, the giving of the Second Commandment was accompanied by a mountain engulfed by smoke and cloud and lightning and fire—a striking visual image if there ever was one. It is also important to remember that the prohibition against the use of “images” (the same word in Hebrew as “idol”) was at least in part meant to remind the people of God that God already gave us an “image” of himself that would be present in worship and in the world–our fellow image-bearers. Our image-bearing neighbor was meant by God to be a primary means of understanding who he is and what he is like. (This point will become relevant for us again in the Incarnation of Christ.) So while the centrality of the word as the preferred medium for accessing truth and communicating ideas should be affirmed, neither should it close off for us the use of more visually-driven modes of communication as a valid means.
The Gospel as Good News: The very essence of the gospel is that it is good news to be received, not good advice to be performed. It is verbal proclamation. News, by its nature, can be conveyed using a variety of means. There may be better and worse media by which to convey specific kinds of news, but news is inherently adaptable to various forms. We will return to the central importance of an embodied community in the biblical faith in the next point, but at its core, the gospel as good news means that the Christian can approach any new communication technology as a new opportunity for spreading the faith. From the development of the codex (over the scroll), to written epistles carried along on a Roman road, to the printing press, to radio and television, to airplanes dropping tracts in remote regions, to the internet and social media—media technologies present new opportunities to faithfully share the good news.
The Logic of the Incarnation: As much as we see an apparent preference for the word over the image in God’s self-disclosure, and as much as we can affirm the nature of the gospel as good news, it is crucial to recognize that the pinnacle of God’s own self-revelation was in the incarnation of the Son—the Word made flesh. The gospel is the message, but the incarnation is the medium. The logic of the incarnation is relevant here in at least two ways. First, the revelation of God in the face of Jesus Christ must at least temper our first principle on the primacy of the word over the image. In the end, it was the embodied, visual, living breathing Christ who was the ultimate revelation of God. He is both the Word (John 1) and the Image (Col 1) of God. Second, the incarnation also means that while the news of the gospel can legitimately be transmitted using various forms, it is decidedly incomplete if it is not firmly fixed to embodied presence. The gospel is both verbal proclamation and embodied incarnation; to lose one or the other would be to lose our way. John Dyer notes an interesting passage in 2 John 1:12 where the apostle writes: “I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete.” For the Apostle John, there are some elements of gospel that can be conveyed through paper and ink, but there are others that require a face to face visit. A missiology of the digital city may, in part, be learning to discern wisely which is which.

Conclusion

The growing importance of the digital world as a public square for cities is both a social fact and a missiological opportunity. But if Neil Postman and others are right, the media used for public discourse and the spreading of ideas are uniquely formative for cultures and their conception of truth and therefore warrant deep reflection for the missional Christian. The rise of this culture of “digital orality” presents significant challenges to vital elements of the Christian faith—from the very nature of truth and how to access it, to the place of discursive reasoning, to the role of incarnational communities. Guided by the principles outlined above, this new digital media, and the epistemological world it is forming, presents an exciting opportunity for Christian who have a gospel that is as communal as oral cultures, as reasoned as literate cultures, and as experiential as visual cultures. It may be that gospel-centered Christian communities in major cities that are able to hold these elements together in a way that brings together both the digital and the embodied (analog) world will be a place of hope in a quickly changing world.

Works Consulted