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Degree: Ph.D.
Format: HTML
Description:
In 1993, Thomas Boomershine, a biblical scholar and media critic published an essay that introduced a new "paradigm" for the composition and (scholarly) reception of ancient Christian tradition in an electronic age. This dissertation represents an expansion and critique of Boomershine's essay. In the end, it moves well beyond his vision by radically decentering the book (including the bible), recognizing the microprocessor as the medium, appropriating "post-literary" (hypertextual) theory, and treating cyberspace as the forum for intellectual activity in an electronic age.
As an electronic dissertation, this study/site challenges media critics to stop limiting their otherwise insightful communications about electronic media to non-electronic-media forms and genres. Ronald Roschke has recently argued that "[t]he evolution of electronic media radically challenges our understanding of text and textuality and demands from us a rethinking of what a text is." I would go further. Electronic media challenges much more than our thinking (about "text"). It challenges established institutional protocols and communications practices that, by and large, exist as corollaries to pre-electronic technologies and modes of discourse.
URL: http://www.chorus.cycor.ca/blayone/dissertation/home.html