Blog about Dawn

I have been pleasantly surprised by how much interest has been generated by last week’s announcement in the blog that Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum was hosting a special event focused on Evangelicals and the media. So, I wanted to be sure to let you know that the webcast version of the event is now available.

Some people have asked why our program would help to host such an event. There are a number of reasons why media scholars should care more about the use of media by this particular population:

1. This event brought together representatives of two of the largest and most influential media ministries operating today — Charles Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. While they often operate in a world apart from mainstream commercial media, their work has enormous reach. For example, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, has sold more than 20 million copies, making it the bestselling nonfiction hardback book in history, though many of those copies sold through Wall-Mart or Christian bookstores
which do not necessarily register in the tabulations of the New York Times best-seller list. Similarly the Dobson organization has run a major media empire since the late 1970s.

2. As Diane Winston explained during her opening remarks at the Forum, Evangelical Christians have been key innovators in their use of emerging media technologies, tapping every available channel in their effort to spread the Gospel around the world. I often tell students that the history of new media has been shaped again and again by four key innovative groups — evangelists, pornographers, advertisers, and politicians, each of whom is constantly looking for new ways to interface with their public.

3. Anyone who wants to understand how niche media works in this country needs to understand what’s going on in Christian media. It’s hard to call Christians a subculture when most studies suggest that the vast majority of Americans claim some religious faith and most claim to belong to some mainstream Christian denomination. Yet, because the most hardcore members of these groups feel alienated from much of commercial popular culture, they have created their own alternative cultural sphere — producing their own television programs, films,
music, games, magazines, comics, you name it. We can learn a lot by studying the strategies by which this alternative popular culture is produced, distributed, and consumed, often depending heavily on viral marketing to get the word out without having to rely on mainstream media channels.

4. While we often talk about “conservative Christians” as if the evangelical movement spoke with one voice, the term evangelical actually describes a range of different religious, cultural, and political perspectives, as was clear as we begin to see the contrast of perspectives between the two media ministers who spoke on this panel. One important educational function an event like this can play is helping people to recognize and understand the diversity of the
evangelical movement and thus push past some of our stereotypes. Getting ready for this event, I shared with my students a broad range of Christian-produced media from the rather hardcore music videos of Carman to news reports on Rick Warren’s conversations with Barack Obama. Some of what we watched — including some materials from Dobson promoting abstinence education — upset some of my students, while other materials fit more comfortably within the consensus of the class. (We often justify showing other controversial content on the grounds that we want to “challenge” our student’s preconceptions. Well, maybe it is time we challenged our student’s preconceptions about “crazy Christians.”) My students learned something by simply observing the personal style, the language, the tone, even the delivery of the speakers, as well as listening to the ways they answered questions from the audience.

5. Academic institutions may have an important role to play in supporting and sustaining conversations between conservatives and liberals in the face of the growing divisiveness of American politics. I am eager to use some of the programming we do through CMS to bring together people who may come from fundamentally different ideological perspectives in a context where we can have a civil conversation designed to help us understand what others believe and why they believe it. I was personally very pleased with the tone of the conversation — the questions from the floor were smart and respectful and the speakers saw this as an occasion to encourage reflection and dialog rather than as a chance to prostheltize to our community. Indeed, I think in this context, the speakers were more frank in addressing core concerns than they would have in a more confrontational context, allowing us to get a better glimpse into how they think about and deploy media.

I should acknowledge that Timothy Stoneman, currently a visiting scholar in the Science, Technology, and Society program was the person who first proposed this session and assisted in recruiting the speakers. He is doing interesting work about the use of radio by evangelical missionaries, a project which sheds light on a somewhat earlier chapter in the history of Christian media.

By the way, we’ve gotten questions about whether our sessions with Jim Ross and Mick Foley, recent guests to the CMS program from World Wrestling Entertainment, will be available via podcast. We have fallen a little behind putting up the podcasts on the web due to a range of other activities but these events were recorded and I will let readers know when they go up on our site.

Meanwhile, if Christian media is not interesting to you, might I suggest checking out the podcast of advertising guru Alan Moore’s recent talk at the CMS program. Moore’s work will be familiar to readers of this blog through an interview I did with him earlier this year.

A number of things have conspired to keep me from the blog lately. The biggest obstacle has been the appalling connection that I have with my Vodafone card. To be fair to Vodafone, they have been trying but it is simply awful. I am working on getting DSL and expect to be connected in a week or so, and this will make life so much better. Another obstacle to my writing has been a much happier one. My daughter came home about two weeks ago for a holiday before she heads off to help excavate a site in southeastern Turkey and then heads straight into her first year of the PhD program in anthropology at New York University. It’s wonderful having her home. She gets a real kick out of the animals here at the farm and has been religiously going out to the rabbits to cuddle the baby bunnies into cooperation. Before arriving, she sent me a list of foods that she’d been missing in New York, so we have been arranging all her favourites, such as koshari, a mix of lentils, pasta, rice, chickpeas, tomato sauce, fried onions, and a vinegar/garlic sauce.

The first week that she was here we had utterly abominable weather with highs in the mid 40’s. One day we took off and headed to Carrefour, supposedly to shop for things that Yas might need, but actually just to waste time in an airconditioned space until dusk. Not too surprisingly, we ended up at one point in the toy section where we checked out what was new in dolls. Barbie dolls were introduced when I was a little girl, and I was as likely to use them as pistols (aiming from the feet) as I was to play dolls with them, but my daughter actually liked them. Now some of the dolls available here are some interesting variations on the Barbie theme. Fulah looks a lot like Barbie, but her proportions are a bit more realistic and she comes with a head scarf. On the other hand, some of her outfits are pretty racy for what people might think that a veiled woman would wear. Another doll was simply frightening. She’s supposed to be a belly dancer and the carton explains that her hands, head and hips can move rhythmically…the mind simply boggles. I didn’t actually see many little girls demanding her immediately, although the store was full of families with children. Carrefour is sort of a French Walmart, and they have a number of major outlets here. They carry everything from food to major appliances, with clothing, books, and strange signs to tell you what everything isn’t. We wandered the aisle with a friend and her eight year old son, watching families of some of the visiting Gulf Arabs stocking up on household needs for their summer holidays. Even with our heat, Cairo beats the Gulf cold.

We’ve spent some time catching up with some of Yas’ friends between dental appointments and doctor appointments. A lunch with one of her high school buddies at a fish restaurant overlooking the Nile was the occasion for an hour or so of gossip to review who was going to school where, working where, and who was either engaged or married. Oddly enough, marriage is still pretty far from the minds of most of the Egyptian from her graduating class in Cairo, while quite a few of the American kids have made the plunge. While crossing the bridge over the Nile we encountered a truck of camels on their way somewhere and I was able to get a photo that I’d always wanted of a truck full of camels. The camels seemed quite unconcerned about their travels and persisted in engaging in mock battles as the truck made its way through traffic.
One of the nice things about a child who studies something that I’m interested is the fact that we have plenty to do together that interests both of us, no matter how odd it may seem to other people. While driving in the desert the other day looking for interesting stones for my rock garden, we found an area where the Antiquities department has been dumping debris from excavations. Most of the debris consists of ancient mud bricks, chunks of old pottery, sand, gravel and such. But surprisingly, we also noticed some very old cloth sticking out of the sand in one pile. When we examined the cloth we realised that it was, in fact, an object wrapped in ancient linen. Carefully unwrapped, the item was revealed to be the crushed mummy of an infant. Not much was left that could be identified other than a tiny mandible and leg bone. We left the wrappings and bone shards in the desert with the other discarded objects.

Today was a lovely day so we decided to visit Memphis, once the capital of pharoanic Egypt, but now an area that is part of one of the neighbouring villages. The last time we’d visited the museum at Memphis was when the kids were still in primary school. We checked out the tacky tourist trash that was being sold, chatted with the sellers who got a kick out of some locals visiting the site, and most importantly got some seeds from a wonderful tree that was shading the garden there, an acacia whose delicate flowers give a sweet scent. We brought a number of pods home to be planted on the farm. Much better than a rather cheesy set of stone pyramids.

copyright 2007 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani

Welcome to Merchantcow.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!