Review: The New Media Frontier

The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting for Christ is the first work that I’ve read to take a detailed look at how the emerging world of cyberspace is affecting the way we Christians commonly think about connecting people together. This work illustrates how several institutions are affected by these various new media. The book divides into two parts: the platform and the content (these are my terms).

The first section covers the essential elements of the growing media presence online. It provides several reflections on the consequences of media migrating from print to pixels. Helpfully, this section doesn't simply take up pom poms and cheerlead this new reality, but it also explores some of the very difficult implications of these new media for Believers. It concludes with two chapters on the nuts and bolts of the new media: blogs, podcasting, vlogging (video blogging) etc.

The second section of the book takes a magnifying glass to several different areas of these media and explores how they are shaped by some of the top practitioners in the field. So Fred Sanders looks at what changes that the internet will bring to higher education, Scott Ott to Journalism, Roger Overton to Apologetics, and Mark Roberts to Pastoring.

Some chapters simply take the existing topic and translate it into cyberspace. Other sections, like the one on Bioethics by Joe Carter and Matthew Eppinette go beyond simply looking at how Bioethics are affected by the media and include an excellent survey of the topic itself that their work could be used in a classroom setting. It could be stolen by some unscrupulous professor and foisted off as their own material. Not that anyone would actually do that.

Conclusions from the book:

As one might expect, each of the authors takes a position that the new media have emerged to stay. There will be no turning back the clock. Those who ignore this new media will increasingly find themselves marginalized from contemporary community. The benefits of the new media are a wider circle of contacts and a greater opportunity to provide megaphones for individuals and organizations.

But the authors pretty consistently argued that the wide opportunities carry a significant cost: while these various media allow more and more people to be reached than ever before, their impact is proportionately smaller than ever before. For all their breadth, the new media sacrifice depth.

Additionally, these new methods of communication add to rather than remove barriers between actual humans. Human interaction is always mediated through electronics. Anyone who has perused the comments of a blog often see how the commentators can misunderstand one another.

But the authors of The New Media Frontier know these shortcomings of their approach. And since these media are here to stay, they engage proactively, and constructively with them. Anyone wishing to seriously harness these new media for the good of the church and the good of the Kingdom of God, should be familiar with this work.

Full Dsiclosure: One of my good friends wrote a couple of chapters of this book and provided me with the review copy, which no doubt affected my glowing review. A little.