PowerPoint (PPT), a powerful communications tool, can cause unintended communication problems:
- Oversimplifying analysis by reducing it to a set of bullet points, glossing over nuances and complexities
- Substituting a summary for genuine intellectual engagement
- Creating the illusion that a person can focus on more issues than in fact the person can handle
- Implying that the topic is linear, when some topics take vastly different forms, e.g., circular, random, or matrix
To what extent does PPT theology shortchange Christians and the Church? In a generation attuned to sound bites, thirty second commercials, and PPT presentations, the danger that our clergy, seminarians, and others never develop more than a superficial knowledge of the substance of Christianity is very real. If (As?) that happens, the Church will likely become more and more easily viewed as irrelevant to life’s deepest issues when in fact nothing else could be more relevant to those issues.
1 comments:
What we forget is that PPt is just the tool. And we can't blame the tool for what we do with it. It is what we do or do not do with it and the assumptions we make about what PPt does that create the communications problems.
I think the same applies when we talk about church and its place in our lives. So often we treat it as little more than a physical location for a social meeting between services, a place to listen to sermons that simply recite instead of inform or advocate, a place of maintenance instead of a means to effecting change to improve the whole person.
We can use a lot of tools (social networking, etc.) to bring God into people's lives. We need to know what we want or intend to achieve with such tools and the best ways to use them to ensure their effectiveness in making belief and faith and spirituality be part of who we are and not some separate and distinct piece of us.
Post a Comment