Faith and fourth

Areopagus: what’s on the other side of the media’s collapse?

Bramwell Ryan is a journalist and producer. As a content creator and controller, an ex-publisher, ex-editor and ex-producer of newspapers, magazines and radio/television, Ryan is fascinated by the collapse of the media (as we know it).

There are parallels between the panic and angst in today’s media and the spiritual exhaustion with the state of the church when Martin Luther grabbed a hammer and headed to the cathedral in Wittenburg.

Ryan specializes in multi-platform content and creates video, audio, print, photographic and web material for media outlets and NGOs. His stories range from coverage of the largest caribou herd in the world to underage prostitutes in Bangladesh; grave robbers in Haiti to post-tsunami rebuilding in Sri Lanka.

In this podcast he offers an analysis of the current situation in the world of media and an invitation to the church to begin to imagine how this shifting reality might actually offer fresh opportunities for the shaping of the culture in which we live.

Bramwell Ryan is the editor of theRubicon and gave this talk at a public lecture series in April in Winnipeg, Canada.

There are two ways to hear this Areopagus presentation (runs 1:12:11) and the question period that followed:

click on the arrow below
click here to download the episode from iTunes

Saturday, May 30th, 2009 Areopagus, Think

2 Comments to Faith and fourth

Bram, thanks for this - I’ve been waiting a few days until I had some time to sit down and give it a complete listen. I hope that more people are listening than are commenting.

If that’s the case, maybe many are like me - completely overwhelmed at the enormity of it all. For me, communicating and interacting through the internet is so second nature that it’s very hard to try and explain (and many times appear to be justifying) how and why it works the way it does.

What many still do not get about the new forms of media that are emerging online is that it is not just about the dissemination of information - there are real communities being built through the 0s and 1s transmitted millions by millions on the hundreds of millions of profiles, groups, websites, wikis, photos, videos, blogs, forums…

Having just come back from a conference about the online future of not-for-profits, it was a sad realization that although I’d been living and talking and dreaming for a few days about life “in the cloud” (with all of its potential), most of the Army is in “the tower” and will be for the foreseeable future. (See this link: http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud)

I think one of your questioners was onto something when he mentioned “this kind of thing” happening in smaller groups. The fact that there are minimal costs involved in publishing these new forms of media (combined with their near-universal accessibility) means that the future “face” of the Salvation Army (at least in the West) could well lie in the hands of those who dare to use those forms.

And that may not be a bad thing at all…