On July 7th I screened Thus Spoke The Spectacle at Denver Seminary in Littleton, Colorado:

As you can see from the subtitle, a central focus of my presentation was a discussion of the ways in which the ubiquitous elements of spectacle society, our media and technology, tend to obscure, subvert, usurp, and co-opt the genuine human impulse toward the sacred. This is a conversation Mike and I have been having in relation to our show for years, and one that has begun to take shape more tangibly in our post-performance and post-screening discussions - particularly at our Media Ecology Association screening last summer in Santa Clara and performance last month at the Jesuit school St. Louis University.

I therefore welcomed the opportunity to present TSTS at Denver Seminary, brought about by an invitation from philosopher, professor and preacher Douglas Groothuis. Doug and I share many common influences such as Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul, and Lewis Mumford, and our strains of media critique overlap significantly although we don't agree on (nor did we expect to) every aspect of the political ramifications of our analyses. Doug's thoughtful insights following the screening, as well as the thoughtful questions and feedback of his students and other attendees, made the presentation especially gratifying.

As an added bonus Doug gave me one of his many books, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism, which I'm finding illuminating and enjoyable. I think that Doug's explanation of postmodernism, and the contrast between its notion of "truth" (quotations insisted upon by the postmodernists themselves) and the traditional conception of Truth, can be valuable to Christians and non-Christians alike. I owe Quote of the Day #47 to Doug's reference to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and am especially looking forward to the appendix with the Postman-esque title "Television: Agent of Truth Decay".

For more on Doug's philosophy and views, see his blog The Constructive Curmudgeon. It's "curmudgeonly" in the best sense of the word.

Thus Spoke The Spectacle led off the Media Conversations conference at Pratt Institute on Thursday June 4. Thanks to organizers David Walczyk and Lance Strate for inviting us to participate.

Here's the flyer for the event. Notice how grandpa's into books, mom and dad dig TV, the child is hooked on computers, and the dog is dreaming of Twitter... I began with some brief comments laying out our current thinking on "radical media literacy." In a nutshell, we at TSTS believe that media literacy needs to extend beyond its traditional framework into more activist, political territory, and to be viewed in the context of the creation, exercise and perpetuation of power. Our goal is for our videos, website, screenings and performances to open up space for this kind of dialogue.

I noted that radical media literacy is nothing new, as it's the form of media analysis practiced by social critics ranging from Henry David Thoreau to Noam Chomsky. However, as many at the conference lamented, media literacy has been watered down and used as a blanket term covering everything from teaching people how to make Powerpoint presentations to landing journalism jobs to recognizing "quality" and "trustworthy" media sources such as the NY Times (ha!) as opposed to "unverified," "unreliable" sources such as blogs and wikis (the latter effort sponsored, as you'd probably guess, by the dying print publishing industry itself).

I argued that the skill of decoding media messages and motivations should be applied in the context of understanding and confronting the authority of the Spectacle. The need for a deeper media literacy was echoed by David Walczyk, and I think somewhat by Tom de Zengotita in his address, although unfortunately he didn't see my presentation so couldn't make the connection between our analyses. My sense is that some of the audience members did, though.

Following my introduction I screened and discussed:

More to come on the rest of the conference. . .