Just found a transcription of a pretty decent lecture given by a media studies person (Lynn Schofield Clark at the University of Colorado) to a group of Catholic theologians. It’s about the things that they can learn from each other and there’s some decent stuff in it. One of the better bits is about how media function as the language of stories and meanings that people nowadays understand implicitly:

The second reason studies of the media are relevant for contemporary theology is related to the first: The media provide a primary language of shared, cultural experience through stories, images, and ideas.

Whether we like it or not, the electronic and print media provide the common language, usually mediated through capitalism and consumerism, that is shared the world over. Here’s an example of this. One of the young people I interviewed during my dissertation research, a young Arab-African who is a devout Muslim, told me of his journey to Libya. He was anxious to talk about Muslim traditions with his relatives, but his cousins didn’t want to talk about traditional rituals or ceremonial garb. What did they want to talk about? They asked him, “You like Michael Jackson?”

In this example, we see the medium of popular music becomes a common and shared language for young people around the world. But of course, this is not limited to young people. When any of us write, for example, we draw on the cultural experiences that speak to us. Usually, if we admit it to ourselves, academics are moved by elite culture. We use sources like scholarly books, but also classic novels and poetry. We think of our experience in the art gallery, or perhaps of a recent critically acclaimed film. These speak to us, meaning that not only do they serve as illustrations for our ideas, but they capture something of the emotional experience of the theological moment.

Yet this relates to one of the challenges that Paulo Friere puts forth to educators. He writes: “Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the men they address…In order to communicate effectively, educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed.”

And how is the thought and language of the people framed? What is the language of the people? It’s the language of the popular media.

There’s also a cool thing in it about how people don’t really understand what the point of baptism anymore is, and so a couple of theologians struck on the idea to show the clip from the Lion King where little Simba is lifted up by that monkey medicine man guy, and then all the assembled animals sort of bow down before him. Also introduced to me in this piece is the term “communications theology” which may be what I was driving at in the previous post.