I might write an article around this later, but for now I just want to quote this imagination-challenging article from Greg Wright on ThinkChristian.com:

(My summary: Priests giddy to promote Rocky movie? Yes, they want what Hollywood has: attention. Is Hollywood the only way? Google sorts valuable from scrap. Can the Church be the world’s chosen search engine? How can Scripture be seen as more than just scrap?)

In a July 28 Globe and Mail feature article, Erin Anderssen commented on Hollywood’s surging dalliance with the Christian market. One of the lead angles in her story was last fall’s Rocky Balboa publicity campaign, for which Christian media-personalities and high-profile ministers were targeted for sit-downs and conference calls with Sylvester Stallone. “On the [film’s promotional] website, several clergy—including a nun—also give star-struck video testimonials to the merits of the Rocky movies,” Anderssen wrote—and then followed up with quotes from yours truly.

“They actually sound like they’re giddy little school kids because they get to talk to Sylvester Stallone,” acknowledges Greg Wright… “It’s not that there’s really any strong spiritual message in the film. It’s the fact that they’re getting to talk to people they wouldn’t ordinarily get to talk to….” …

… Can’t the Christian community see that it’s being used by Hollywood? … Yes, … and we go along with it all because we, like everyone else in our culture, are absolutely fascinated by the power wielded by Hollywood. But what’s undergirding that fascination today, more so than, say, fifty years ago?

The rise of the information age has played an enormous factor in our collective thinking. In 1971, at the dawn of Computer Science as a institutionalized field of study, one founding father of the discipline, Herbert Simon, observed that “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

So for those familiar with a supply-and-demand system of economics, the implication—from the early 1970s on—follows pretty directly: raw information itself becomes pretty cheap and meaningless; what becomes highly sought after and valuable is that wee bit of information which actually generates attention. And in the last thirty years, competition for our attention has ratcheted up incredibly, as has the amount of money people are willing to pay to get our attention.

This is a trend toward what is now called “the Attention Economy,” a formal economic and social theory articulated by Davenport and Beck in 2001—based on Simon’s prophetic observation and the explosion of the Internet at the end of the last century.

I first heard about the concept from a friend who attended a tech conference in Seattle which operated on the principle. Rather than the usual detailed program of workshop topics with scheduled presenters, start times, stop times, and locations, this conference operated purely on the principles of Attention Economy: anyone could lead a workshop, so long as you found a place to hang your shingle and managed to hold the attention of whatever audience happened to be passing by!

Madison Avenue’s application of the principle is not nearly so democratic. Think of the soaring cost of advertising during halftime of the Superbowl….

[There are thousands of search engines,] but Google gets used—and has become a verb—because it managed to build a search engine that actually yields relevant results: it weeds out the things you don’t want to pay attention to, and connects you most quickly to the things you care about.

…

So yes—the pastors and editors who gathered for a conference call with Sylvester Stallone last fall sounded like a bunch of giddy little school kids. Is that terribly surprising? Less than twelve months prior, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—another film promoted by Motive Entertainment, the same company pitching Rocky Balboa—was generating $745 million in worldwide boxoffice receipts.

And how much attention does that boxoffice take represent? About the equivalent of the $745 million that the entire religious book market generated in 2006. What market-minded pastor wouldn’t want to piggy-back on that kind of influence?

Want to win friends and influence the lost? Get on board the Attention Economy train, folks. … Get your ad placed during halftime of the Superbowl. Shake hands with Sly. …

The alternative, apparently, is getting lost in the shuffle.

Or is it? There’s no question that the dynamics of the Attention Economy are real, and that Christians in our culture are as subject to those dynamics as anyone else. But Madison Avenue’s, the NFL’s, and Hollywood’s tactics aren’t the only models out there.

There’s Google’s approach, too. How might the Church do a better job of weeding out the fluff—such as, dare I say it, face time with Sly—and delivering meaningful content? How can the Church become our culture’s preferred search engine? How do we—how can God and His Spirit, through us—transform Scripture from just another perceived worthless scrap of information into something that truly influences the world for good?

by Greg Wright on ThinkChristian.com

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