Last week, Larry Hollon wrote a post (How New Media Are Changing Me) that asks the kinds of things I have been trying to find in my sifting through the content of various church related writers, bloggers,  and others seeking to help us all get a handle on what social media does for us as a church,  and what,  it does TO us , if you will.  There is way too little of the latter,  and I am glad to see such things being considered by at least one other in the business of church communications.  I’ve known Larry for about 6 years,  and conversed with him in person and “virtually”,  and so I already knew he thought about such things,  and has posted about that from time to time. 

Larry describes how he now consumes news and books electronically.  I’ll have to do one of these surveys/observations of my habits in a blog post. 

But I was struck most by this point: 

It’s clear any new medium changes how we access information, use it, store it and, perhaps, even how we act upon it.

And then I left this comment:

I also see this,  and in particular,  I want to look into questions like the last one,  to get at how some of these digitized habits change much more about us than the medium on which they are delivered.  It gets at what McLuhan was onto when he said "the medium is the message".  I think of this whenever I hear people say that mediums are neutral (which I hear a lot of people say these days as the new "social media" are discussed in relation to the church).  I’m not so sure that the neutrality extends to subtle changes in how we process information,  and in how we treat it (and act upon it,  as you ask).  Print certainly was and is a medium that people consider "neutral",  and yet there are all those studies that explore how print changed the nature of how "authority" is perceived and received,  such as the move from an culture dominated by oral transmission of story to a print-oriented transmission of "facts and information",  which gives text what seems to be an inflated status as some sort of arbiter of "solid truth" or some such thing.

Anyway,  I will be pointing to this post of yours when I do my little personal survey,  and probably draw from this comment of mine into a related blog post on my blog.  But thanks for raising up these issues.  It’s the kind of stuff of which I don’t see enough in all the discussions about Social Media.