Communication, cultural form and theology

This essay explores some relationships between the areas of communication science and theology, beginning with a brief examination of what is called the \u27cultural studies\u27 model of communication and the institutional roles of communication in contemporary society. The second section presents a look at some models of communication interacting with theology in an earlier historical era, while the third reviews some contemporary models of communication within theology. The last section also examines the contemporary period but focusses on more specific projects

Communication models, translation, and fidelity

The fact that people regularly translate from one language to another or-as the American Bible Society (ABS) New Media Translations Project has done-from one medium to another, may seem to make it easier to evaluate those translations. At some point, people can, and do, claim that one translation works while another does not, that one translation has greater aesthetic qualities than another, or that one translation is more faithful than another. The fact that people make such judgments, though, does not necessarily make it easier to explain theoretically how they make them. Among other things, communication study examines both the process of communicating and the product. What might it contribute to an understanding of fidelity in translation? Various perspectives on communication, reflected in models of communication, can illuminate the process and, indirectly, the attendant question of fidelity. Without attempting any comprehensive treatment, I shall present four such perspectives: communication as transportation, communication as a semiotic system, communication as ritual, and communication as conversation. After a brief introduction to each, I shall examine the consequences of each for fidelity in translation. Finally, I shall offer me more genera l comments drawn from this treatment. Early communication theory, following a kind of transportation model, fosters a view of fidelity that favors a sense of equivalence-something that can be measured . Later communication theory follows a more ritualistic view and asks what communicators do with communication; in this view, fidelity becomes more functional. Yet another approach sees communication as a manifestation of semiotic systems; in this view, fidelity manifests surface changes in a deeper structure (see essays by Hodgson and Stecconi in this volume). Finally, an interactive approach places communication as a conversational system; here fidelity takes on a different value-more a characteristic of the audience than of the text

Jesuit response to the communication revolution

This essay will consider both. In order to offer a context, it begins with a review of the impact of the communication revolution on our individual and collective lives. Communication, the process of exchanging information and influence, occurs through interpersonal methods or through the mass media. However, recent technological advances lead me to focus more on mass communication

Ethics @ email: Do new media require new ethics?

As more and more day-to-day interaction in business and academia has begun to take place through electronic mail, probably every one of its users has experienced some breakdown. By now, we have come to expect occasional hardware failures, but the human ones still catch us by surprise. That message we dashed off with no ill intent is received with hard feelings. Or it is forwarded to someone we never meant should see it. Or, unbeknown to us, it is read by our boss. E-mail has raised a host of ethical questions about how we treat one another and how we work, but its very newness as a medium can make the answers more obscure

The Church as a moral communicator

What role does the Church-as a communicator-play in shaping the moral imagination of society? The question itself poses further questions. What is the Church, as a communicator? How does the Church act as a communicator of morals? What should the Church do to shape morals? Briefly, I will argue that the Church functions as a moral communicator at several levels, that the Church works best as a moral communicator when the Church shapes the imagination, and that such shaping occurs when the Church is most honestly the Church at the local level

Jesuit pray-ers

Some trepidation accompanies this account of prayer, for I have long held the Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality in high regard, perhaps too readily canonizing its members and their writings. We entered the Society at the same time, the Seminar and I; from the middle of my tertianship, the Seminar-like my fellow tertians in faith sharing-now asks an account of my prayer

Technology, Theology, Thinking, and the Church

From the midst of what sometimes seems a brave new world of communication—Web 2.0, blogs, mobile phone service from almost anywhere, video by mobile phone—we should not forget that the Church and humanity have lived through it all before. In fact, our communication revolution follows several others, dating back at least 3500 years, starting with the invention of writing, jumping to the mechanical writing of the printing press, to the electrical communication of the telegraph, and finally to our electronic world. At each stage, humans encoded communication in ever more complex symbolic and technical systems, which make communication more powerful but require more sophisticated interpretation. Both have an interesting and not always predictable impact on theology and Church life. The pattern of our communication and the larger communication world, of which it forms a part, create a communication environment for human living. Like any environment, one can study it, and people do, under the general title media ecology. What can we know about the communication environment? Several principles apply to its study. First, like all environments, its elements interact and affect each individual and process within it. Second, a change in one area will lead to changes in others—enhancing or diminishing them, for example. Third, people often take their environments for granted; not noticing them, they do not notice their influence. Media ecology attempts to call attention to the environment created by communication. To see how communication technology has influenced the Church, we can start with how the People of God have interacted and shared their faith. It shouldn’t surprise us to see changes in one area—communication technology—prompting changes in another—the articulation of faith; similarly, we should not find it surprising that other parts of the environment (including religious practices) trigger changes in communication. Addressing only writing, Walter Ong, S.J., memorably called attention to this pattern of interacting changes with a chapter heading, “writing restructures consciousness.” Here he traced thousands of years of the history of writing systems, using evidence from oral tales, proverbs, and epic poetry, and later novels and printed texts, to show how key elements of our thinking processes and self-consciousness changed once humans had mastered writing

Understanding audience understanding

Communication study has approached the issue of audience understanding of messages from the perspective of the message and from that of the audience. On the one hand, the powerful-message construct paints the audience as passive recipients of the meaning presented in the media. On the other hand, the active audience construct places most interpretive power in the audience, stressing their selectivity of messages, their use of the media, their social positions, and their ability to generate new messages based on the media. A middle position sees audience understanding emerge from an interaction between messages and audience members

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

Studying soap operas

This present issue of Communication Research Trends will focus on research about soap operas published in the last 15 years, that is, from the year 2000 to the present. This more recent research shows one key difference: the interest in soap opera has become worldwide. This appears in the programs that people listen to or watch and in communication researchers who themselves come from different countries