This document discusses how different technologies have shaped how people engage with and understand the Bible over history. It outlines how communication transitioned from oral to written to printed to digital formats. Each new medium extended certain aspects of sharing information but also made other methods obsolete and changed how people related to the content. The document warns that digital technologies today risk reducing deep engagement with scripture and encourages minimizing distractions to encourage reading and discussing the Bible in community without technological aids.

1. How Bible Technology
Shapes Our Faith

2. Before you skewer me :)

4. Director of Web Development at Dallas Seminary

6. http://bible.johndyer.name/

7. • Technology and Society
• Mediums and Messages
• Bible and Technology

8. Good
Bad
Neutral
“It’s just how you use it”

9. Phone = neutral
Call your friend = Good
Call in bomb threat = Bad

10. How many phone numbers do you know by memory?

11. Phone = morally neutral
Phone ≠ effectively neutral

12. • Know fewer numbers
– Effect on the mind
• Constantly accessible
– Effects on relationships

13. Cars = neutral
Drive to church = Good
Drive over a person = Bad

14. Car ≠ neutral
• Blacksmiths
• Requires roads & laws
• Connects/separates

15. It’s just how you use it
Actually, it’s that we use it
Technology is not neutral

16. Every medium has the capacity to
communicate regardless of its
content.

17. I am awesum at PowerPoint

18. Humble yourself before the
Lord and don’t bring
attention to yourself.

19. • Genre
– Poetry, Narrative, Apocalypse, etc.
• Medium
– Talking Donkey
– Burning Bush
– God in the Flesh

20. • What does __ extend?
• What does __ make obsolete?
• What does __ retrieve?
• What does __ reverse into?

21. 2000 B.C. to A.D. 2000 in 25 minutes

22. Oral Written Printed Digitized
Adam-1500BC 1500BC-AD1500 AD1500-AD1980 AD1980-present

23. Oral
The community is the device

24. Written
• More consistent
• Costly
– Communal

25. Written

26. Written
man 男
woman 女

27. Written
• From 1500B.C. to A.D.1500
– Preaching
– Hearing
– Memorizing
• Images and Icons

28. Print
• Exactness
• Mass Distribution
• Reference/Footnotes
• Chapter and Verse
Numbers

29. Print
• Extends: communication,
storage
• Obsoletes: communal/written
knowledge, church authority
• Retrieves: access to truth
• Reverses Into: individualism

30. Print
• Authority shifted from the
Church to the individual
• Personal Bible study, individual
faith
• Faith is logical, not emotional
• Think in verses, not books

31. Print Digital
• Photograph
• Computer/Internet

32. Print Digital
The boys are hungry

33. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinajoebrianwillie/851443071/

34. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramdiboy/3299674549/

35. • Fast
• Passive
• Trivial/Entertaining
• Story vs. logic

36. Digital
• Information/Scanning
• Multi-tasking
• Decontextual Language

37. Digital
I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of
overwhelming rapidity of information — and
especially of stressful information — is in fact
affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper
thinking. I still believe that sitting down and
reading a book is the best way to really learn
something. And I worry that we’re losing that.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt

38. Digital
• Increased Access
• Cheap/Free
• Links to other
information

39. Digital
• Bible as information
• Bible as search
– John 3:16
– Romans 5:8
• Tools can reverse into
crutches, stifle learning

40. • Reject “The mediums change, but
the message is the same.”
• Read scripture aloud, in community,
without PowerPoint
• Reduce information, read and
memorize large chunks

41. • Reduce multi-tasking
• Create alternate experiences of
the Bible
• Offer recommendations, not
data dumps
• Minimize helps

42. Email: johndyer@gmail.com
Code: johndyer.name
Theo/Tech: donteatthefruit.com