"empathy at a distance" the plight of the electronic nomad

"The forms of our media, regardless of their content, have the power to shape our minds and our messages."

Taken from "Our Nomadic Existence: How Electronic Culture Shapes Community" by Shane Hipps.

Hipps looks at Marshall McLuhan who argued that the message and medium are connected (more specifically that the medium is the message), contradicting the popularly accepted belief that it's not the method of getting the message (the medium) across that's important, it's the message itself. In church, it's said something like this:
“The methods change, but the message stays the same.”

Hipps looks at media and, as McLuhan did, poses questions rather than articulating answers about technologies affects on communities and individuals.....if you want to read the full article, let me know and i'll email it to you!

The effect is a paradoxical one. Electronic culture does opposite things at
the same time. If oral culture is tribal, and literate culture is individual,
then the phenomenon of the electronic age is marked by what I call the
tribe of individuals. We live in a confused state of being characterized
by a deep and growing desire for connection and community and the
ever-increasing experience of an electronic nomad. It’s the isolating
and thin existence of electronically wandering the globe, glancing off
one another, but never really connecting or encountering the other.

The paradoxes go on. If oral culture is empathic, and literate culture is
distant, the electronic age is marked by empathy at a distance. This is
a condition that emerges when our TVs and computer screens flood our
living rooms with images of planetary suffering: from September 11 to
the Tsunami to Darfur to all the other ongoing famine, genocide, wars,
and starvation in the world. While this allows us the opportunity to
extend compassion to these far-off places, it actually has the opposite
affect. There is an immediate outpouring of support followed by a
detached, clinical numbness.

The end result is apathy and inaction. This is not our fault; it’s not
because we are bad people. The human psyche isn’t designed to
withstand all the weight and trauma of global suffering without shutting
down. Numbness and exhaustion are natural reactions. This experience
of horror and empathy, followed by shutting down and feelings of
helplessness, is the condition of empathy at a distance. And it didn’t
exist prior to the electronic age. The reason this matters is that the
spiritual habit of empathy at a distance also finds its way into our local
communities. It becomes increasingly difficult to muster local activism
and genuine concern for others when global suffering has already
cauterized the nerves of compassion.

Shane Hipps is lead pastor of Trinity Mennonite Church – a missional, urban, Anabaptist congregation in Phoenix, Arizona. Before accepting a call as pastor, he was a strategic planner in
advertising where he worked on a multimillion dollar communications plan for Porsche. It was here that he gained his expertise in understanding media and culture. Shane is a sought after speaker, host of the “Third-Way Faith” podcast
on Leadershipbuzz.com and author of
The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture:
How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel
and Church.

Check out: Fermi Project

Closing thought:

"Science today has given us improved means to attain some of our damnable ends. That's not true of all science, that's not true of all of the means so do not take that as an extreme; but it is true that some of our technologies have made us more sophisticated in our evil.
Ravi Zacharias