Might not be a new era, but I think we have a new sort of folk...

I'm following a discussion of whether ours might be called a postmodern age or not. Whether the basic systems of belief and understanding are radically changing in our day I cannot conclusively say. I am suspicous of those who claim that the fall of the Berlin wall, or the implosion of high rise social housing experiments in St Louis brought about a paradigm shift in our consciousness. However, I am convinced that there are significant differences in the way folk are convinced today. The death of reading as a common cultural language is responsible for growing congnitive differences, differences in the way we think, and differences in the way we are convinced that some tradition or way of life is appropriate, true. My contention is not that particular theories or ideas are no longer true or relevant, but that the way we talk about them, the way we discuss them, the way we convince others about them must change. This notion was first exposed to me by Father Walter Ong (see Books and Culture July/August 2004 - not yet online) who exposed the differences in cultures and ideas as man became a writing creature, and then as he became a book culturs. His Orality and Literacy is a profound book, and worthy of any Christian who is worried about our culture. It was no great coincidence that the reformation followed Gutenberg, or that the first philosophers started working immediately after Homer - when the texts started being written down. These changes in technology broung significant changes in the way man thought and what cognitive tools he valued. I'm sure that after Homer wrote down the Illiad and the Oddessy - poems that had been memorized and recited through generations - his culture decried the loss of memory in language that would sound much like Niell Postman. So I wonder what changes in church will be following the multimedia - hypertext - decentralized technology that has emerged in the past 30 years. There have always been losses in tradition and skill experienced when technology changes - it is for us to work through them, understand what the changes are, and understand how our message and rhetoric changes in that light.