The Medium, the Message, and You
December 2023: A letter for people who want to communicate their own hearts.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
First, a quick note: The Atlantic has a beta feature for “gifting” articles right now, where I can share specific articles with people who aren’t subscribed to that publication and give them short-term access. What I do not know yet is whether that link is tied to the IP address of the person opening it, or to browser cookies, or if multiple people can use the same gifted link. So I’ve “gifted” the Atlantic links in this email, and it’s possible only the first to click on each one will get to receive that gift. Merry Christmas to all you non-Atlantic-subscribers! The links do expire within a fairly short period, so read what you want quickly.
Now to my letter: I hit a point somewhere in the last couple of years where I turned off predictive text on my iPhone. The little word suggestions that appear above the digital keyboard were starting to put words in my mouth.
At first, it seemed helpful, suggesting the types of words I typically used and reducing how much thumb-typing was necessary. iOS quickly learned to suggest “y’all”, my preferred plural “you” in American English (as opposed to the ambiguous “you” or the ear-grating “youse guys”).
Yet over time, I noticed that sometimes I’d have a word in mind, and my iPhone would suggest something different, but close enough that it didn’t feel worth it for me to type what I wanted with my thumbs, so I’d tap the suggestion and move on.
Eventually, the divide between my thoughts and the iPhone’s suggestions caused me to grow uncomfortable. My messages were now not just my thoughts, but mine combined with what iOS thought my thoughts might be, one word choice at a time. The difference was subtle, but I decided I no longer wished to abdicate control of my words to Siri, and I turned it off.
As I remember it, it took a little while before I was used to the old training-wheels-free approach to text messaging again, because my brain had begun adapting to this cyborg method.
ChatGPT turned a year old last month. And I keep returning to the phrase, “the medium is the message.” I see it everywhere. I’m starting to believe it.
“The medium is the message”
What does that phrase mean?
I majored in digital media at the University of Central Florida, and one of the earliest classes in the major was an introductory, “foundations of” type of class, most of which I’ve forgotten. What I do remember is being handed the aphorism, “the medium is the message,” and what an important idea that is in the realm of digital media.
The phrase is from a book titled Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan (apparently available to read for free at the Internet Archive or, depending on your local library, the Libby App).
McLuhan was a communications theorist and professor in Canada, and the main idea of this phrase was, as Britannica puts it, “the potent influence of television, computers, and other electronic disseminators of information in shaping styles of thinking and thought.” (“Marshall McLuhan”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 19 October 2023.)
Essentially, the media through which a message is communicated matters at least as much as the message itself. You implicitly understand this when you’re horrified that someone communicated important information via text message rather than calling or meeting up.
I think I wanted to believe the aphorism, since it was offered to me as a foundational truth for my major, but the message is the message, and the medium is just the car it’s delivered in. I knew the medium was important—at that time, I was planning to work in story-focused video games—but to equate it with the message seemed absurd.
It’s been more than 15 years since I took that class. I am a person interested and invested in communication of all sorts, and “the medium is the message” has continued to haunt me. I see it quoted or alluded to all the time lately, and I’m not sure if it’s always been there, or if recent technological developments have brought it back up, or if I’m more likely to see it quoted in the publications I read these days.
I saw it last month when The Atlantic’s senior editor for books, Gal Beckerman, wrote about Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and how it changed the way he sees the world. He brought up McLuhan’s phrase, and the way social media contributes to politics-as-entertainment and the problems that go with it (“A Book That Was Like Putting on ‘a New Set of Glasses’”, 3 November 2023).
“Postman,” writes Beckerman, “saw great peril in the degradation of discourse as society moved from print, a medium that demanded reasoned argument, toward one overwhelmed by what we would today call optics.”
I appreciate comic books, video games, novels, movies, TV shows, nonfiction books, and well-researched articles, and the way each one communicates is different. It’s absurd to pretend otherwise.
Even God Himself appears to be deliberate in His choice to speak through a person, a dream, an angel, the written word, a set of experiences, or a donkey.
The medium is its own kind of message. The medium through which a message is communicated greatly affects our ability to receive the content of the message itself.
The same year I was taking that introductory digital media class, Nicholas Carr, now best known for his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, wrote an article in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic called, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He presented the Internet as a medium, however broad that sounds, and described the effect it has on the way we think and communicate. The whole article is worth reading if this topic interests you at all, but I bring it up now because of this excerpt about the time Friedrich Nietzsche got a typewriter:
“Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
“But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. ‘Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,’ the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his ‘“thoughts” in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.’
“‘You are right,’ Nietzsche replied, ‘our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’ Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose ‘changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.’”
The idea of medium-as-message is not merely about the medium in which people receive the message. It also relates to the medium by which people create the message, as illustrated in Nietzsche’s correspondence with his friend.
Predictive text and large language models (like the models that power ChatGPT) provide words for you. What changes in the message when someone uses these to create it? And does it matter?
In August of this year, Beckerman contributed to a conversation in The Atlantic’s daily newsletter in which they discussed the issue of AI and large language models training on real writers’ works (“The Book-Piracy Problem”, The Atlantic, 23 August 2023). Among other things, he said this:
“[…] part of the satisfaction of reading a novel is one’s own communion with another human being’s mind. I feel satisfied when I sense that a book is the creative output of another human mind that to some degree is built the way mine is. At least for literary fiction or nonfiction at the highest level, I think part of the enjoyment of reading and engaging with books is knowing that other people made them.”
If you read my June post, which focused on AI and visual art, you know I agree with Beckerman here. I think it does matter, at least for works that matter, whether a human is the creator of a piece of writing or art.
For those of us who believe in God and the ongoing work of His Holy Spirit, the conversation goes beyond disconnecting the human from the work.
Dr. James Emery White, pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, wrote a blog post called “ChatGPT and the Church” (Church & Culture Blog, 15 June 2023) that addresses this in the context of writing a sermon:
“It’s not just wordsmithing—it’s an activity of the Holy Spirit in the life of the person speaking, and the life of the person receiving the message. So while ChatGPT may be able to do many things to serve the church, we must remember that there is one thing it will never be able to do: Be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
He’s right, though I suppose there could be a very specific miracle like the writing on the wall in the Book of Daniel.
As I’ve said before, we are more than AI in animal skin; we have the “Imago Dei”, the image of God, because He made us that way. I don’t want to delegate my human communication to a wordsmithing machine. And the more the communication matters, the less I want to delegate it.
I’m not really addressing very simple forms of communication here, like using ChatGPT to make a readable work email (e.g., Ryan Bradley, “A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job”, The Atlantic, 27 February 2023).
I’ve seen various articles talking about people partnering with AI. The line begins to blur as people work hard at choosing the AI output that best expresses the things they’re bad at expressing. I use a thesaurus so I can choose from a group of similar words; in certain limited use cases, predictive text can serve as a tool in a similar way.
In fact, after I realized this comparison on my own, I found a Wired article that gives a list of ways to use ChatGPT as a writer, including as a thesaurus: David Nield, “5 Ways ChatGPT Can Improve, Not Replace, Your Writing”, Wired, 23 July 2023. I have yet to try even one of these, but if an AI can cut down on something like tedious character-name research or hunting for the word on the tip of my tongue, I may eventually find myself using it as a tool, in a limited way.
I don’t particularly want to be the AI-alarm-sounding person the way Carr has become the Internet-alarm-sounding person. I don’t want to die on this hill. Perhaps I once would have been the person decrying spell check.
As I write this letter, I only want to ask a question: Are you communicating what you want to communicate? Are you communicating as the human you are, and if you’re a Christian, are you listening to the Holy Spirit?
Now that ChatGPT is a year old, and generative AI is everywhere, it’s past time to consider how the medium affects our message.
Whatever media you use to communicate your mind, your heart, you to other humans, whether it’s AI-drafted paragraphs or emoji or .gifs or handwritten letters, what are you communicating with your choice?
Transcendent and Immanent: Jesus Christ
We celebrate a much more important birthday than ChatGPT’s this month. There’s no particular reason to think the date of Jesus Christ’s literal birth was in December, but the short days of winter serve as an apt season in which to celebrate the Good News, the Light in the Darkness, God With Us.
In Jesus, we see that God is immanent. He is called “Immanuel”, meaning God with us. He is immediate, close to us, and not just when He walked in the flesh on the earth but also as “Christ in us” as believers. He is right here, close to the brokenhearted and to those who rejoice, at every moment.
In Jesus we also see God’s transcendence. He is exalted above all things. King of kings, Lord of lords, and holy—set apart.
And He has called us to be holy, and in His nearness enables us to be holy.
To focus on the transcendence to the point of forgetting compassion, or to focus on the immanence to the point of ignoring holiness, is a major error, leaving only a smaller fragment of Who He presented Himself as.
We have great joy thanks to both the transcendence and the immanence of Jesus the Christ, at Christmas and year-round.
See both aspects together in these excerpts from the Gospel of John:
John 1:1-3, 14, 18 (ESV):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. […]
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. […]
No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
If you’re reading this and you’re not currently a Christian, today is the time to receive the best good news: Jesus did, in fact, live on Earth, and He lived a perfect life and died in our place, and rose again to life three days later. He paid for our sins and frees us from slavery to sin. He is the only way to God and to eternal life.
The guilt you feel over your errors is answered here; the hopelessness in the face of a chaotic world is answered here; the anxiety about what happens when you die on this earth is answered in Him.
If you don’t know Christ yet and want to, or have some questions, you can reply to this email, email directly at rae (at) raebotsford.com, or reach out to a Christian you know.
If you’re not ready to reach out to someone, I suggest you start with John Piper’s message, “What Must I Believe to Be Saved?”
If you’ve recently decided to follow Jesus but are unsure what the next step is, I think I can recommend Dr. James Emery White’s book, After “I Believe”. I have not yet read it, but I’ve been following his blog for years and I find him to be solid, compassionate, a good communicator, and rather thorough about biblical truth.
If you don’t know how to find a church, you might start with online services at Mecklenburg Community Church (physically in Charlotte, NC), where Dr. White serves as senior pastor. You can join online as you seek a good church where you reside. They have a full online campus with services on Sundays and Tuesdays, and it looks like they have extra services planned for tomorrow, Saturday, Dec. 23 because of the Christmas season.
If you are seeking a church where you live: Based on personal experience, I can suggest Indy Vineyard Church in Indianapolis, IN, or Lifepoint in Palm Bay, FL, if you’re local to one of those. And as mentioned above, Meck has a physical campus in Charlotte, NC. No local church is perfect; in my own experience, these three I’ve mentioned are good.
Christmas Eve can be a good time to visit a church if you’re anxious about it, since most places are extra ready for strangers and Christmas Eve services tend to be particularly joyful.
Writing Updates
For this Substack, my goal was to write once a month through 2023, and I’ve succeeded!
For 2024, I’m giving myself the option to be less strict about when the posts go out, or whether. This year I wrote some great pieces, but during months where I didn’t have as much to say, I still felt the need to send something. Sometimes a roundup of other people’s writing, art, etc. is exactly the thing to send out, but other months, I might want a break (if I’m traveling, sick, or otherwise busy). I’m already planning a shorter post for January for that reason.
If you want to know more about what to expect from this free Substack publication in 2024, see my recently updated About page.
Besides this Substack, I worked a little bit on my novel this month, and made a little progress.
That’s it for December! I hope you have a very merry Christmas, and a lovely New Year. If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
May the light of Christ shine in your darkness this season.
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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