Working on: media change, our changing institutions, and a new reformation
A short programming note about my next set of projects
This little-Substack-that-could has been going on about 2.5 years by now. It’s been a good place for me to write about topical things in the news that relate to my teaching and research interests, and I’m thankful you’re still with me.
This fall I’m on research leave at Lehigh University, and I wanted to send a short update on what I’m up to and what kinds of writing will be coming your way in the next few months. We get a research sabbatical semester every 7 years here at LU. It’s a nice part of my job in that it gives me time and space to think and write with more intense focus than I normally have, and to take on projects that would be otherwise more daunting in scope. So I’m excited for what the fall holds.
A bit of backstory first.
When I came out of grad school at the University of Missouri back in 2009, I was one of the few PhD students who were studying social networks at decent scale. In context, Facebook was just starting to establish itself as something beyond college campuses. Twitter had been around a few years but really was just starting to become what it was. Instagram didn’t even exist yet. So what I was working on was, at that time, pretty cutting edge merely because I was studying it.
I started off with an intense interest in activism in social spaces. It was work that was a bit ahead of its time in that I was researching it before the networks themselves had matured or grown to great scale, and because of that the context of those results has changed greatly over the years. Those early days, I also felt a lot of optimism for those spaces because I was seeing them used for good in ways that our current scholarship wasn’t capturing, but in retrospect the good things really stood out in part because the networks were less populated and that allowed greater space for edge cases to stand out.
It’s no secret things are more complex now. Social networks have gotten bigger, more people are participating, and we’ve seen great social good and harm unleashed at scale as we’ve struggled as a society to make the most of this new publishing paradigm. These are problems not of technology but of abundance, issues that rise from something that used to be extremely hard suddenly become easy and nearly free. Our social norms (let alone our platforms) have not caught up to the challenges. We are still dealing with the aftermath and reorienting this society around a new media paradigm.
Truth? As a writer and scholar I’ve been struggling with how to square my previous work with what we’re seeing now. There are days that I look at my field and am distressed. We have a news system whose goal is to suss out truth from error in service to the public, but it’s crumbling. Bad actors are filling the void and weaponizing both self-publishing and social networks to tear at the fabric of society—of us—in ways that are difficult to contain let alone counter. I am not convinced the truth has a bigger market than lies in our current media environment, and that’s a real problem in a society where media is for-profit.
I still have optimism, but my faith in our ability to find progress is endlessly challenged by the news of the day. Students in my upper-level courses know I am prone to eventually returning to Ecclesiastes 1:17-18, perhaps one of the most profound truths I’ve learned in 40something years on earth:
So I set my mind to know wisdom and madness and folly; I learned that this, too, is a pursuit of the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow, and as knowledge grows, grief increases.
I do not reference this in classes as a call to ignorance or denial, but rather some understanding that sometimes the truth hurts us merely by knowing it and that we should be girded for that. Not all knowledge is happy, not all wisdom is tapped-into and used well. Sometimes understanding things makes it harder when you peek your head up and look around, realizing the world runs too often on ignorance and blind faith in simplistic thinking. But really the reason I share that in classes is that wisdom and understanding should be a roadmap and call for us to make change. We aren’t supposed to hoard what we know and do nothing with it. We are supposed to use it, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.
I come from a complicated background. I was raised in Christian fundamentalism before leaving it, and in the past 20 years I’ve had a unique vantage point in watching social change develop. Media culture definitely has taken a shift toward progressivism in my lifetime, but growing up made me witness to the parallel culture that exists in American fundamentalist media. They have their own music labels, periodicals, publishing houses, radio stations, TV channels, social media influencers, Facebook pages, YouTube channels and websites. It creates a culture that U.S. fundamentalists participate in, one that is often hidden from people who weren’t raised in it and don’t know where to look for it. Because of that, it might be easy to look at general media and feel the waves of change and progress toward greater understanding and enlightenment, but I’ve long seen the resistance culture in Christian media that was pushing back and pulling against that tide.
Which gets to what I’m working on.
The way I look at that parallel word is that it’s a largely insular media culture. It’s consumed within a bounded system by people in the culture, it rarely springs out into the larger culture, and thus is a type of language all its own. It’s there to inform the faithful, but mere consumption also is a signifier of in-groupness such that it acts as a cultural bonding agent. But because of how it’s structured, this also makes that culture sensitive to any changes that happen in communication networks and strategies that increase access on the publishing or consumption side, so sensitive in fact that small changes in access to consuming or creation can tear at its very fabric.
My touchstone is the first Gutenberg press from the 15th century. The historical backdrop is that before the press came along, books were incredibly expensive to acquire and thus a luxury good, but also the ability to produce them was so scarce due to low literacy rates that the ability to read and write served as a type of market control on what got made. So the Catholic Church, being basically the only major educator of its time in medieval Europe, controlled the book trade and thus knowledge distribution itself in profound ways. It profited from the hand-copied works by being the only real game in town for people who wanted a book, and it also was able to use its monopolistic power to make sure only the “right” books got produced. In this case, the Scriptures and associated approved works.
The printing press was a complicated device, yet a simple example of a single invention that destroyed whole swaths of institutional power. The power to produce a book was no longer scarce, and with that went both the Church’s profit center and control over what books got made. Within 50 years we saw a schism in the Church and a Reformation. Within 100 years, the beginnings of changes that challenged the entire economic structure in Europe.
A tool that changed the public’s relationship to information disrupted society and its power structures. Sound familiar?
Others have written about the broader social changes, so I’m not going to retread that ground during this scholarly turn. Instead I’m wanting to go more specific, to return to the case study that started it all. The Catholic Church hated Gutenberg’s press. Haaaaated it. How do you hate an invention? You do when the invention itself isn’t the problem so much as the status quo that gets changed, and the former elites who see their power lessened. It’s a communication technology story as old as time. From Johannes Trithemius' De Laude Scriptorum (“In Praise Of Scribes”):
He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of holy Scripture. He sees only what is and contributes nothing to the edification of future generations.
Trithemius was writing in 1492, some 25 years before Martin Luther kicked off a Protestant Reformation that was built partly because the public had greater access to the scriptures and had a newfound ability to question Church teachings. By 1492, some 50 years after Gutenberg printed his first Bible, Trithemius was seeing the spread of printed books all over Europe. Trithemius was seeing his world come apart - his life’s calling was wrapped up in his value as a hand-copier of the Scriptures. To see an industry be destroyed was to see his purpose destroyed.
Trithemius and the Church first tried demonization of the press to discourage its use, but eventually adapted. Trithemius himself realized to get his message out required speed and scale, so he used a printer to circulate mass copies of De Laude Scriptorum. The Church found a market for printed indulgences that, relative to selling a few hand-printed Bibles per year, starts to look like the forerunner to long-tail economics. Power adapts in an attempt to survive.
The Gutenberg moment is a story of disruption by upstarts and how status quo power evolves. As I mentioned, others out there have documented some of the larger changes brought by self-publishing. I want to come back to the beginning, to the uprising happening in Christian fundamentalism, as a window on understanding what is going on. That is, this closed publishing system I referenced earlier is undergoing a new schism that feels to me like Luther nailing his famous 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517.
I’ve been clipping examples for a few years now of blogging rings, podcast networks, social network relationships, self-publishing moments and video broadcasting that represents a puncture of the Christian fundamentalism media bubble in the U.S. It is largely hidden from mainstream public view, but it is visible in these once-insular spaces.
A good recent example is here. Beth Moore, who has a giant publishing presence within Evangelical Christianity, has drawn controversy over the years because her presence is a threat to the fundamentalist belief that women cannot be teachers in the church. That particular example is about a firestorm she raised on Church Twitter for a fairly lighthearted and innocuous statement about having a crush on Jesus. Again, not a very visible example to the public at large, but if you know you know. Moore is but one example of people who by the mere act of publishing are challenging longstanding power structures in U.S. Evangelicalism.
At core is access to publishing, in that the people doing this work would’ve had a devil of a time (if you’ll pardon the cheeky reference worthy of Trithemius himself) publishing in the former world. But just as Gutenberg’s press opened up publishing access it also opened up markets. Social networks are the grease on the wheel in that it has changed distribution such that this work is reaching people who wouldn’t have been exposed to it in the former insular world of Christian publishing. It’s not just the ability to make, but also the ability to distribute, to change minds and (in the view of the status quo) corrupt minds with new ideas.
Both publishing and distribution were individually subject to monopolies in the non-digital era of media, and technology has collapsed them into something resembling a single process and much less subject to power chokepoints.
What comes with this is change, and soul searching that should happen in a community when people are suddenly able to hear from people once silenced. Voices and perspectives from people who were once at the Church’s margins suddenly have traction and audience. It changes minds at times and causes intense reactions more often than that. And this is my optimism and pessimism both at work. The post-Gutenberg moment brought us reformation, but also violent conflict between Protestant and Catholic, but then also Enlightenment. What’s happening within Christian publishing in the U.S. raises in me a similar type of hope for the cycle of reformation and enlightenment, but I’m mindful that it’s coming against a backdrop of political conflict that already is playing out in society and has been at times violent. It is a story of hopeful possibility, and with some warning bells that should tell us we need to caretake this moment and cultivate it well.
So I’m working on a few things. Documenting this Gutenberg change moment, trying to map the boundaries of a transformation that could be a new reformation. I’ll be writing bits and pieces of this for public consumption along the way as I generate words for scholarly audiences. Public scholarship remains near and dear to my most core area of publishing interest (I do not fit well in the academy in that sense), and so writing some of the interesting stuff out for public consumption is a major goal of mine this fall. You’ll hear from me from time to time on this subject, and as usual on a few others unrelated to this project. I hope you’ll find it interesting, and please reach out with anything you want to remark about.
Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. Find him on Twitter at @jeremylittau.