Guidelines for Interactions with Media

Whenever I logged into the intranet at my last job, the main page had a link called, “Guidelines for Interactions with the Media,” or something to that effect. They were concerned that we lowly factory workers, on being confronted by the next great American news reporter, would soon reveal a slew of company secrets and say nasty things about executives. Therefore, we were told to recite a 100-word description of our operation and direct all questions to a manager.

The Worldly Hydra

I am thinking that is a good title for this post, which will hopefully give me a chance to restart my charge into the world of Video Games. The “media” I have in view are not the Cronkite wannabes that populate 6 o'clock newscasts, but rather the varied heads of the worldly hydra which poke into our homes every day. These heads are prominently represented in my circles by:

• Blogs
• Foxnews
• Movies
• Books
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Sermon Downloads
• TV series
• Planet Earth
• and Video Games.

I suppose that to call these things “heads of the worldly hydra” is a little intense. I will admit that the “world” here is not the evil world of Satan's designing, but merely the world outside the Christian family, containing positive and negative influences all around. So, the hydra in this metaphor is not to be viewed too harshly. He's just a hydra, doing his thing. Some of his heads are speaking nonsense and lies and filth, some proclaim the truth, and all of them need to be engaged by an active Christian mind in order to make the interaction with the hydra worthwhile.

Cutting off Heads

To abuse the metaphor a step farther, I will say that cutting off the hydra's heads is a mistake of mythic proportions. Though an individual Christian could possibly cut himself off from the rest of the world for a time, each time he cut a head off, he would have new ones to deal with. Not only is it virtually impossible for an individual to keep his life media-free, but this hydra will still be hanging around when the next generation of that individual's family are growing up, and they will have no ability to interact cordially with him. Succeeding generations will be forced to choose between the Herculean task of head-chopping, or just taking everything that the media-heads say without engaging their minds in their listening. It does not take long in a Christian community to see this trend, as a couple of separationist Christians rear a litter of worldlings with no ability or desire to critically engage the media surrounding them, but who rather become more un-Christian than a child brought up in a pagan home.

Critically Engaging Media

I have some hope that this is not a typical Christian home. I was not brought up chopping off hydra-heads. Neither was my wife, though our parents were all more or less separatistic at times during our upbringing. Still, we were taught to critically engage both new and old voices speaking to us through various media. Therefore, I am endeavoring to teach my daughter Harriet (and any other little folks God may give) to use her little noggin when she interacts with the hydra. We will not be screening everything in our house according to some arbitrary standard (e.g. “no Rated-R movies” - as if the movie raters have any clue what my kids should watch...), but we will be trying to give her an ability to exercise her mind. Of course, there ought to be some guidelines when approaching such a powerful beast, and I hope here to begin to establish a few.

So, we will seek some Guidelines for Interactions with Media.