I’m not a very religious person, and I’m certainly not about to align myself with any given religion, but I think what is mentioned in this quite two minute report about the Bible is something that has analogues to many other systems that are experiencing change. Szwedowska “warns” that this version of the Bible is only one individual’s interpretation of the document, causing me to think… isn’t any given edition one “entities” version/interpretation of the document? It’s not like there is an officially sanctioned version that has been crowd sourced and bound for use is there? It seems that the change that the people who object to this are having problems with is the presentation and interpretation of information that was common an familiar in another form. The Bible as a document has been changed many times from gilded pages scribed by monks to black and white editions that are available on the iSlate platform. Through each of these transitions, the core message has been delivered by the text, and there has been some augmentation provided by the decoration on the page. This is the first time that the decoration of the page seems to have really taken center stage.
Manga uses art as one of the major content vectors and as a unique art form, it has certain strengths and weaknesses and lends itself to stories in different ways. This version has been criticized for being too violent by some but some (Manga Life) say that this is the first time that the comicification of the Bible has been done right:
As a child that was raised Lutheran, I was exposed to some truly awful Christian comics. They were poorly written affairs with bad dialog and no sense of humor, pacing, and no knowledge of what youths like to read whatsoever. The comics preached and left the reader feeling depressed. Every so often, such as in the case with the comic book adaptation of Hal Lindsey’s hallucinogenic, paranoid apocalyptic bestseller of the 1970s, The Late, Great Planet Earth, they could even traumatize.
So far, the Manga Bible doesn’t do any of that. Instead, it tells a complicated story as simply and as optimistically as possible and with as little preaching as a religious comic can get away with. It didn’t have that slimy feeling that usually comes when a religion starts using a form of entertainment for propaganda purposes, which already puts it miles ahead of most Christian forms of “entertainment.”
So what are the other communications that cause grief? Well any that are moving into a new media with the assumptions that they can use the production sensibilities of the old media and still succeed. They fail to realize how those who succeed with new media forms are those that invest into the new form while taking the best or relevant elements from the old format. Regardless if this change is moving a course from f2f to online, or if it is moving school communications from a flyer to an RSS feed. Moving into the new media space is going to require effort and resources to deal with the elements that are at the core of it’s abilities.
So what is the bottom line of this post? If you are going to change the way you communicate, you have to know your audience and you have to embrace the strengths of the new technology by bringing forward only those elements that are essential from the previous format. There will always be those who will use the metrics of the previous form to judge the new form, but those critiques are likely from slow or non adopters who are not the target audience. With each new format, there is a new audience and those are the people who’s feedback should be valued. Teachers and communicators of all stripes will have heard this many times before, but is seems that it is worth repeating, even if it is ad nauseum.
Leave a Reply