Chapter 14 is covered by Craig LittleJohn as part of our Group Blogging Project discussing the book Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps. If you need a quick overview to what Flickering Pixels is about, please go here.

I don’t like Shane Hipps.

Not the “I don’t like him” in the way that I would not talk to him at a party. Nor in the way that I would spread gossip about his personal life. I don’t like Shane Hipps because he makes my brain hurt. Which is interesting, because Chapter 14 of Flickering Pixels is all about our brain, and the way it works.

In this chapter Shane talks about the differences between our right and left hemispheres of our brain. He uses the story of The Prodigal Son in Luke 15 as a metaphor about how the different part of our brains work. The left brain (the older brother) is the “critical reasoning, logic, order, and abstract thinking” side of the brain. As the right brain (the younger brother) is the “power of intuition, emotion, holistic perception and pattern recognition” side of the brain”.

His obrservation is that when the printing press came to be in 1400′s that the left brain flourished. Suddenly the “older brother” dominated all thinking and made the “younger brother” his slave. This brought forth a new age of reasoning, debating and the ability to “test” truth claims. And for the next 400 years the “older brother” ruled the roost… with no new forms of communication being created.

Shane sees the invention of the photograph as the homecoming of the “younger brother”. Once again, suddenly the right brain is allowed and encouraged to flourish. Shane sees the “digital age” as a place where the right brain is not only encouraged to come home and party (like the younger brother), but is also endanger of making the older brother his slave. He also credits the current lack of “biblical literacy” as a unsurprising result of the digital age, and the right brain flourishing.

More thoughts after the jump:

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