A crazy guy once said, "the Medium is the Message." I never understood that until Shane Hipps preached a sermon about it out at Mars Hill Bible Church last Sunday. I highly recommend giving it a listen.
Shane Hipps was an advertiser for Porsche and now is a Mennonite Pastor. He talks about how the Medium of a message is intimately connected to the Message itself and if the medium changes the message changes. He showed how Jesus recognized this. This is a concept I had to chew on for a while but it is extremely important for artists to have thought through.
What does my medium communicate? God chose a burning bush, stone tablets, Bahlem's ass. What does a burning bush say? Maybe, "I can't be contained." What do stone tablet's communicate? Maybe, "this is serious?" And Jesus was God's word become flesh. Jesus was the perfect Medium to communicate God's message. What does this communicate about God?
We all use different mediums to communicate all the time. It would be good to think about what our medium is communicating since that message is more powerful and sustaining then anything our medium carries.
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Jon Collins uses the medium of video to squeak out a living and is blogging at www.jonpdx.com
2 comments:
rad! that's a new and powerful thought for me, going to be chewing on that one for awhile (how does the way we communicate via particular mediums impact the actual nature of the message itself?)
My favorite sound byte from the sermon - mediated communication. I'll think about that every time I pick up the phone - or leave a comment on a blog.
Craig
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