Nick Ripatrazone’s latest book on Marshall McLuhan, Digital Communion, arrived in my mailbox the day I presented a play about Marshall McLuhan at a conference on the Catholic imagination in Dallas, Tex. A fitting coincidence, if such things exist.
I started writing the play as a part of the Church Communications Ecology program on the McGrath Institute for Church Life on the University of Notre Dame. This system brought together around 30 communications professionals to read, learn and create projects to assist the church communicate its message in a digital age. “Communications professionals” was a broadly defined term. Our cohort consisted of faculty professors, highschool teachers, writers, digital media entrepreneurs, seminarians and two artists (myself considered one of them).
We met via Zoom for 2 months in the beginning of 2022 to debate a wide selection of readings. We read theology from Bonaventure and Romano Guardini, in addition to from ecological thinkers like Rachel Carson. We pondered Andy Warhol’s imagination and learned the communication theory behind Fred Rogers’s television neighborhood. We watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside,” discussed the phenomenon of Wordle on our class message boards and consumed media theorists Walter Ong, S.J., and Marshall McLuhan.
Within the Sixties, McLuhan already saw the web on the horizon when the remaining of the world was falling in love with broadcast television.
Nick Ripatrazone, creator of Digital Communion,visited considered one of these Zoom classes. In our class, he spoke about his latest book and shared its thesis: “McLuhan’s Catholicism will not be a footnote but moderately a foundation of his media theories.” For a thinker like McLuhan, who will not be as widely celebrated as other Twentieth-century American Catholic thinkers, this easy thesis is a surprisingly radical latest paradigm.
Born in Alberta, Canada, in 1911, McLuhan converted to Catholicism in 1937 while at Cambridge writing his dissertation. He became a professor at St. Michael’s College in Toronto, and his first books, The Mechanical Bride (1951) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)skyrocketed him to public mental fame in the tv age.
Ripatrazone’s Digital Communion opens with a pericope describing the primary televised papal Mass in the US—in Yankee Stadium on Oct. 4, 1965—a story that introduces the dramatic tensions between technology and faith. And maybe a story that shows the Catholic Church is unprepared, because it was with the appearance of the printing press, for the seismic shifts a latest medium like television will cause.
After this opening anecdote, the book cuts to McLuhan’s appointment to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. McLuhan, Ripatrazone argues in multiple chapters, was perhaps ahead of his time. Within the Sixties, McLuhan already saw the web on the horizon when the remaining of the world was falling in love with broadcast television. Now that we’re streaming television shows within the palm of our hand across the clock, we’re ready for McLuhan’s prophecies of the digital age.
Ripatrazone’s style on this spiritual biography and light-weight theological exegesis of McLuhan’s thought echoes McLuhan’s own mosaic style. The creator fills the pages with McLuhan’s own words, which is straightforward to do since McLuhan is an infectious coiner of aphorisms. McLuhan’s idiosyncratic formulations are all the time striking and original, making it difficult to withstand quoting him verbatim.
Ripatrazone dives into McLuhan’s singularly personal life, phrasing and his core beliefs, excavating the Catholic thread running through each. He tells the story of McLuhan’s conversion at Cambridge. McLuhan’s love of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce led him to Catholicism and inspired his media theory. Ripatrazone also delves into McLuhan’s skepticism of Gutenberg and his printing press, the shrinking and uniting effects of print and digital media and the concept of the worldwide village.
Print itself is a more mechanical intervention than perhaps we digital natives realize. We’re so used to virtual environments that communication outside of screens seems more natural and organic. But, McLuhan notes, Gutenberg’s printing press was the primary media invention to make the world small.
Print itself is a more mechanical intervention than perhaps we digital natives realize. But, McLuhan notes, Gutenberg’s printing press was the primary media invention to make the world small.
Gutenberg’s print alphabet, McLuhan believed, contributed to the Reformation. The repeated type, printed over and all over again, with no individuality, more quickly produced than a manuscript, creates an industrialization of information and an individualized access to it. It divides the world into small, accessible corners. McLuhan sees print as an individualizing and fragmentary medium. And the digital world, for McLuhan, brings us back into communion.
Which brings us to the concept of the worldwide village, the situation we discover ourselves in today. We discover communion made difficult, satirically, by the hyper-connectivity of the web. We’re too wildly plugged into “slightly little bit of all the pieces all the time,” as Bo Burnham describes the web. Patricia Lockwood dubs the World Wide Web: “The portal you enter only whenever you needed to be in all places.” And for those who are in all places, you’re, in fact, nowhere.
We cannot escape our surroundings—we live in a specific climate zone, in a specific state, in a specific city, in a specific neighborhood. And digital media is a component of that environment—the worldwide village crashing into our city street.
But we will select to have interaction with questions of how we are going to engage with our surroundings: What sort of global villager will we be? What form of neighbor? How will we look after the world around us? How can we interact with the devices which can be our media in our own terms, not within the terms they set, which, as McLuhan says, turn us into “servo-mechanisms.”
Many artists and other malcontents (like myself) who pick up on the poison in our surroundings see the content or individual technologies because the villains. McLuhan has jogged my memory, as Ripatrazone does, that the trouble of digital communion and liturgy within the digital age will not be a lot a fault of an iPhone or a Zoom screen or a camera observing Mass, but it surely is environmental. The digital world creates an environment that forms us into habits of being: inattention, distraction, scrolling. But we will resist those environmental habits and reactions.
In reality, perhaps it’s the task of the artist, McLuhan suggests, to attract attention to our surroundings, to the bottom of our being-together, and the habits it forms. “The current is all the time invisible since it’s environmental and saturates the entire field of attention so overwhelmingly,” wrote McLuhan, “thus everyone however the artist, the person of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day.” The artist, McLuhan suggests, is the member of society who clearly sees the current, not the past.
Perhaps it’s the task of the artist, McLuhan suggests, to attract attention to our surroundings, to the bottom of our being-together, and the habits it forms.
The play I presented in Dallas, “Is the Web in Color?” tells the story of a girl with Alzheimer’s disease who befriends a young journalist. A girl who holds the past in her body finds the current slipping away from her grasp. Her memory loss means the one reality for her will soon be the memories stored in her head. Borne back ceaselessly into the past has a violently literal meaning.
With theological and poetic interjections by Michael Murphy of the Hank Center for the Catholic Mental Heritage at Loyola Chicago University and McLuhan-esque riffs by Brett Robinson, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life, we created a dialogue of sorts between the characters of the play and the ideas contained throughout the story of Nancy’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.
The lady, Nancy, meets a young man—a paradigmatic zoomer—whose journalistic job it’s to record the memories of a collective body, a public. His industry is dying, as the web is slowly killing local journalism as we once knew it. Does the web force us to live prior to now, like Nancy? Is it the preserved instantaneous, insignificant moments like having oatmeal for lunch, a latte featuring a heart made from foam, or drinks with the women in Cabo that live endlessly on a timeline? Are we stuck prior to now or in the current? “The current / is just too much for the senses,” writes the poet Robert Frost, “too present to assume.” Such a sentiment may be said of the World Wide Web.
The gift of the artist, McLuhan said, is to attract a latest awareness or attention to something in an environment. “The artist’s role will not be to emphasize himself or his own standpoint, but to let things sing and talk, to release the forms inside them,” said McLuhan in a 1959 talk over with seminarians.
The artist—not less than the playwright—creates art that demands the participation of the audience. Unlike a television segment, a play is something created with the audience viewing it: their temperament, their reactions, their questions. It’s a true liturgical act of participation, something the tv age never quite captured.
Despite the connectivity of the digital age, we discover ourselves increasingly alone. A play is considered one of those rare liturgies that helps us make meaning together. A play, like a print book about McLuhan, just like the prophetic, pencil-wielding professor himself, is probably an artifact and medium of culture that may and can persist. Since it accommodates in itself something essential to our human nature.
How will we enflesh God in a latest age, in a latest environment, when our understanding of language, communication and reality has been transformed?
Nature finds a way of sneaking into our perfectly curated environments. We discover friction even when the digital environment is designed to be frictionless. We grow impatient when the web is frozen, when Facebook’s servers go down, when Instagram can’t load and when our iPhone screen gets cracked. We discover our global village will not be an isolated community but a part of a creation, a part of a cosmos.
Although McLuhan agreed together with his Jesuit influences that God is in all things, including the electronic light of the web, he also understood that a society who had fundamentally remade its media had shaken its metaphors for our mediated God. Letters aren’t any longer ink but pixelation, books aren’t any longer calfskin but PDFs. If Christ is the logos, the Word, how will we imagine Christ now that words themselves have modified their form?
So here is the query McLuhan sets for Catholics within the twenty first century: How will we enflesh God in a latest age, in a latest environment, when our understanding of language, communication and reality has been transformed? And, although the technological changes of the past century feel latest, that query is as old because the apostles.
Perhaps we will follow the wisdom of McLuhan, who, moderately than moralizing about changes, thought it profound enough to watch them. And commentary begins with our attention. Our attention: Where will we put that every day? And what’s going to we see once we attend not simply to the digital world but to the whole world around us: lovely, radiating, immune to our scrolling fingers? Perhaps we will then begin to see more clearly who we are once we are consumed within the glowing digital globe we hold in our hands.