Neil Postman, that is.
I've been meaning to read his book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business", which gives a critique of media and television and their extensive negative influences on our society.
In the meantime, I've read a key Neil Postman idea from the pen of Marva Dawn (probably my very favourite author along with J I Packer) - an idea called the Low Information-Action Ratio (LIAR).
[Quote from Marva Dawn, Preludes to Discovery, in 'The Unnecessary Pastor', p38]
This Low Information Action Ratio (LIAR) is caused by our society's plethora of contextless information. The result of our bombardment with too much data is paralysis - we are not able to, or become not willing to, act on what we hear and see. In fact, television has trained us NOT to act on what we learn. thus, the ratio of action to the amount of information received spirals continually lower...it makes LIARS of us to read the scriptures and not act on God's commands, to hear sermons and not put them into practice.
1 comment:
Very good point. This situation also wouldn't be helped by our timidity in regards to concrete application of scripture. People are already finding it difficult to put what they hear into practice, and our biblical theological approach can sometimes scare us off definitive application for fear of "moralising" or making the wrong conclusion from the passage. We're often fantastic at exegeting the passage, but not so good at the "go and do likewise".
There's a kids' book called "Webster the Preacher Duck" that talks about this, too... :)
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