Slipstream - Leaders - in - formation

Hidden Pixels 

I instinctively grabbed for the dashboard. The car was careening toward a sudden U-turn curve in the track. I glanced at the driver, expecting him to hit the brakes and avert catastrophe. Instead, he yawned. The car rocketed into the corner as my heart leapt to my throat. Breathing is overrated. The car glided smoothly in and out of the turn as if it had prepared its entire life for that moment. Afterward, the driver apologized for not going faster.

This was part of my "research" for the new ad account I was working on - Porsche cars. The people at Porsche had taken us to a racetrack to develop and appreciation for their product, and apart from nearly soiling my drawers, it worked.

My role as an advertising account planner was to serve as a kind of "consumer anthropologist." That's the sanitized description. More accurately, my task was to hijack your imagination, brand your brain with our logo, and then feed you opinions you thought were your own.

You're welcome.

Much of what I did involved unearthing private, exploitable data from consumers' lives - what we called "The Leverageable Insight." An effective ad tries to tap viewers' most intense and emotional experiences, the trigger for all consumer impulses. My job was to save people from feeling impotent, unattractive, or powerless by offering them a Porsche, which promised to fix those problems.

I'm a slow learner. It took me a few years to realize that I was actually promoting a counterfeit gospel. Before you start judging, ou should know I never offered cheap grace - the gospel according to Porsche will set you back between $80,000 and $150,000, depending on how much salvation you need.

Shortly after my awakening, I committed career suicide; I turned my back on a lucrative and enjoyable career and entered seminary. Four years later I accepted a call to serve as the pastor of a church. The emotional and spiritual whiplash was as bad as it sounds, yet the experience led me home.

The conversion began as a result of my own ambition. In an effort to sharpen my ability to manipulate the masses while I was in advertising, I stumbled upon a thinker who had been considered irrelevant for decades. He was an obscure literary professor who studied media and communication in contemporary culture. During the 1960s, his prescient cultural predictions earned him a place on the covers of Newsweek and Life; it was said his "theory of communication offers nothing less than an explanation of all human culture, past, present, and future." The New York Herald Tribune breathlessly declared that he was the "most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud and Pavlov." His name was Marshall McLuhan, and chances are he's the most important thinker you've never heard of.

I began to read McLuhan's Understanding Media, which took a wrecking ball to my worldview and became a penetrating alarm that woke me from slumber. I was given a vision of what my profession was doing - and undoing - in our culture, and it wasn't pretty. As I continued reading, I learned something even more important: McLuhan's insights about human culture and communication had profound implications for the Christian Faith.

Christianity is fundamentally a communication event. The religion is predicated on God revealing himself to humanity. God has a habit of letting his people know something about his thoughts, feelings, and intentions. God wants to communicate with us, and his media are many: angels, burning bushes, stone tablets, scrolls, donkeys, prophets, mighty voices, still whispers, and shapes traced in the dirt. Any serious study of God is a study of communication, and any effort to understand God is shaped by our understanding - or misunderstanding - of the media and technology we use to communicate.

This book explores the hidden power of media and technology as a way to understand who we are, who we think God is, and how God's unchanging message has changed, is changing, and will change. It's about the way God communicates with us and the way we communicate God to the world. Mostly, though, it's about training our eyes to see things we usually overlook.

Like tiny pixels of light, for example.

Every day we are entranced by a mosaic of flickering pixels. These little dots of light are practically invisible, so minisculre that we often ignore them.

Nevertheless, they change us.

Flickering pixels compose the screens of life, from televisions to cell phones to computers. These screens, regardless of their content, change our brains, alter our lives, and shape our faith, all without our permission or knowledge.

These pixels are only one example of the technologies that shape us. There are more - many more. It is only by shifting our attention that we are able to see them, and in so doing learn to use them rather than be used by them.

Shane Hipps is pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church, a growing, urban, Anabaptist congregation. Shane is a dynamic communicator, author, and sought after speaker.

Taken from Flickering Pixels by SHANE HIPPS. Copyright © 2009 by Shane Hipps. Used by permission of Zondervan.