| Abstract [eng] |
Communication in philosophy is considered to be a feature of human existence and a fundamental mean of human relationship with the world. However, communication through the new digital media is generally surrounded by quite negative predictions in modern humanities. M. McLuhan‘s proposition „medium is the message“ could best describe the dominant opinion that media not only broadcasts information, but also forms our attitudes towards everything, so is not a purely neutral tool of communication. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, as an influential public institution, which considers evangelization its primary objective, calls for active use of new media, ignoring all McLuhan‘s alerts. This disagreement between McLuhan‘s and Church‘s attitudes towards the usage of media is the main problematic issue of this work. Despite the fact that McLuhan, as perhaps the most authoritative person in the field of media studies, has repeatedly expressed its disappointment of directives of the Catholic Church document „Communio et Progressio“, this paper seeks to prove the hypothesis that the positive attitude of the Church towards new media is not a result of a weak absorption of the nature of media. Since there have been no previous studies in this direction in Lithuania, namely M. McLuhan‘s idea that no one understood the nature of the media in Vatican II's meeting (McLuhan 1999: 136), led to a desire to explore the validity of such an approach. The object of the paper: problematic aspects of mediated communication of Catholic Church, raised in McLuhan‘s studies. Aim of the paper: to investigate the problematic aspects of mediated communication of Catholic Church, that are stated in McLuhan‘s studies. The main conclusions showed that McLuhan‘s media theory rooted in Christian theology, and the person of Christ is the most perfect expression of aphorism „medium is the message“. While McLuhan sees media as means to satisfy the imperfect human nature, Church‘s documents considers media to be an expression of creative human power. McLuhan argues that media is changing the authentic human relationship with reality and baisically creates it. The Church sees media as a way to represent reality. As extensions of man‘s body media makes people to assimilate with them,or worship them as their idols. The Church says that it is the media that serves man. For McLuhan the new media, which functions involving all the human senses, represents a stage of „salvation“ in human history. Church does not see this messianic dimension of media. McLuhan links electric technology with the collective consciousness, which is pushing individual identity to the periphery and creates moral liberalism. The involvement and increased concern in each other is seen to be close to the Christian objectives of communion and unity by the Church. M. McLuhan supports the Catholic Church‘s position that faith is a sign of God‘s grace, but his insights emphasizes independence of technologies from their developers and users. Meanwhile Catholic Church tends to emphasize the human factor in the assessment plane of audiovisual technology. |
