The Graphic Edge

Cleaning out old stuff I found myself tossing out hundreds of overhead transparencies going back to the late 1980’s. The theological schools where I taught in Malaysia and Singapore were actually very early adapters of this technology. In the 1990’s I had already installed a color network printer at TTC in Singapore for transparencies. 

But in 2019 I find there is still resistance among my colleagues in the university to PowerPoint, with all its built-in charts, graphs, and smart art.  They  continue to believe (like a lot of pastors) that graphics somehow cheapen the intellectual content of their lectures. Let’s get real. 

Possibly the most important leap in pushing forward the intellectual development of humankind was the graphic. We moved from the first great leap - the concretization of ideas into words - to the second, the symbolic representation, in letters or pictographs, of those same ideas. Eventually we worked out all kinds of interesting symbols to help show more clearly the relationships between these ideas. Things like commas, semi-colons, colons, periods, hyphens, and capitalization. These allowed us to lay out more clearly our graphic representations of ideas on a page. 

And indeed the page, and eventually the book, became its own graphic representation of these ideas, placing those together that belonged together in a logical order. Paragraphs, chapter headings, footnotes, endnotes, appendices, bibliographies, page numbers and so on are nothing more than extended graphic representations of relationships between ideas. They are efforts to elucidate multi-dimensional relationships on flat paper. 

Yet we have university faculty that somehow believe that books are good while PowerPoint is bad. That sentences scribbled on whiteboards are somehow excellent ways to convey ideas but 3D charts and graphics are bad. Nonsense. And dangerous nonsense. Especially as we move into an age in which much more powerful graphic tools are quickly becoming available. 

Already I can place ideas in a four dimensional space through which a student can move and explore far more complex and interesting interrelationships than can be expressed in linear sentences arrayed across the pages of a book. Just this afternoon I created a series of maps on Google Earth, allowing a four dimensional representation of imperial relationships through time. Once I figure out how to do it (and it can be done) a student will be able to walk with me around the earth watching empires rise and fall and seeing graphical representations of all the causes and interrelationships.

There is no reason the same thing can't be done with theological ideas such as the atonement. Just imagine a four dimensional space in which we see atonement theories visually linked to each other in both time and in relation to their various cultural environments. While the cultural environments are linked to one another in the ceaseless transformations that occur on their borders and spread both inward and outward. That would be a teaching tool!

In short the flat representations of 3D graphics made readily available by presentation software are rapidly being eclipsed by virtual reality. The clunky hyperlinks of early web browsers are rapidly giving way to dynamic 360 degree online environments. PowerPoint is actually old school already. 

And this is simply a logical extension of the process of human intellectual development that began with the rise of speech. 

And while I’m just now working this out, there are those who have been doing it for a decade or more, and are doing it well. Their work doesn’t look like conventional history or theology or ethics because it comes in the form of “games.” But these games teach ideas and their interrelationships, which is non-different from my work as a teacher. The only difference is that they so more compellingly and to a far greater audience. These need to be the next generation of professors. 

Teachers, preachers, and scholars need to embrace this, particularly if they expect to be relevant 20 years from now. Linear representations of reality; natural, social, are metaphysical are known to be inadequate. In the future they will be far too slow and inefficient for minds trained with better tools. After all, who among today’s scholars would willingly revert to an oral culture?

And this has important consequences. Teachers and researchers will need to experiment in this newly available space. Truths will emerge that are not accessible through linear processes however much they emulate four dimensions through cross references. 

As importantly educational administrators need to create partnerships between scholars and VR creators and game designers to develop a new generation of tools that allow scholars to fully explore at least a four dimensional and higher thought-space graphically, as well as developing new forms of scholarly presentations of their ideas.

Humanity is about to leap into a new future. We need to quit scratching our sticks in the sand and complaining that youth just can’t read a clay tablet any more. (Watch this space for a 3D tour of Islamic imperial history. I"m going to figure it out)