A Framework for Seeing Our World: the Millennium Matrix

A I prepare to write my book and update my curriculum for my summer course in online ministry, I have been catching up on some recommended reading (many of which I pulled from John Dyer’s excellent list of books). One of the books that has come highly recommended is The Millennium Matrix by M. Rex Miller.

The goal of this book is to provide a lens through which we can look to better understand how the changes in communications technologies have affected our culture in general and the Church specifically. Published in 2005, this book gives clear insights into why we do things a certain way and why those things are beginning to fail. In many ways, this book discusses the same issues that books like UnChristian and, even more so, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture do. And, like those books, it offers a plan for moving forward to address those issues. But I would have to say that, of the three, this book is the most comprehensive and detailed.

According to Miller, we have gone through four different eras in communications technologies, each era changing not only how we communicate but also how we relate to the world. The four eras are: oral (pre-history to 1500 AD), print (1500 – 1950), broadcast (1950 – 2010) and digital (2010 and beyond).  Miller sums up the four eras this way:

The oral world trusted in God’s hidden wonders: the coterminous reality of heaven and earth lay just beneath its ancient languages. The print world was confident in its ability to know, through reason, the what and why of the world. The broadcast world is interested in what we don’t know, as a flood of fresh images blurs our once fixed and stable thought boundaries. The work of the coming digital world – whose birth we are now witnessing – will be in synthesizing our past into our desired fuure, shaped and influenced by the integrated character of digital media.

The centerpiece of the book is an actual matrix that specifies the effects that each of these communications eras has had on five distinct facets of our culture: how we believe, how we know, how we live together, how we see beauty, and how we work and trade. The matrix breaks each of these five areas down and gives details on how they have changed as communications technologies change.  This matrix is quite detailed and really requires that you read the full book to get a good understanding of how these eras affected our world.

Once the matrix is laid out, the remainder of the book is Miller’s prescription for how the Church should respond in this new digital era, or as he calls it: this new convergent culture.  Of his many recommendations, I found these to be the most thoughtful:

I would like to point you to more web resources for this book, but frankly couldn’t find much. Miller’s web site (millenniummatrix.com) is down, though Google seems to still be sending people to it. I did find this Slideshare presentation that may help you understand more of what was in the book.

You can buy Millennium Matrix by M. Rex Miller from my Amazon store. Support my research!

Tags: m. rex miller, millennium matrix