Showing posts with label Douglas Rushkoff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Douglas Rushkoff. Show all posts

Friday, December 2, 2011

Media, the Gutter, and the Bible


The Bible actually may have been written in the wrong medium. I'm saying this as a media theorist - a guy who has written books and novels, taught university classes, and made documentaries about the impact of new technology on the way we relate to stories. And particularly those stories we happen to really believe in.
If anything, working in what is still the rather new space of networked computers has taught me that our relationship to narratives is stuck in a dangerous place. Sure, we watch TV and imagine ourselves as characters, but we have lost access to the gaps in stories, the places where temporality, interpretation and sequence are up for grabs. We just get lost in the seamless reality and get taken along for a ride.
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Business people, religious people, educators, and publishers are all equally threatened and confounded by the idea that real stuff is actually occurring in the gaps between the moments that pass for history.
And that's when I discovered the prefect place to tell what I've come to believe is the real story of the Bible: comics.
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For by insisting that we "believe" the Bible happened at some moment in distant history, the keepers of religion prevent us from realizing that the Bible is happening right now, in every moment. The narrative and its power transcend time...
- Douglas Rushkoff in Testament #1

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Negotiator

Abram: And if I found forty among them? Would you still sweep away the innocent with the guilty?
Woman 1: Again, talking with his lord, God.
Woman 2: It is a great man who can appease the gods.
Woman 1: Abram doesn't appease. He negotiates.
Abram: What if I found ten innocents? Just ten worthy men?
Would you still burn the whole of Gomorrah to the ground?
 - Testament #2
by Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp

Come to think of it, Moses was pretty good at this, too. And now I want to see a cop show (or cop comic book!) where Abraham and Moses are transported through time to the present and team up as the world's best hostage negotiators.