I am working on a book review and as I work on the book review doing research on a final paper for history of media.

The paper is a contrast and compare thing. I'm going to look at Bible and tract societies in the antebellum United States and compare their work and the work of their colporteurs, peddlars who distributed religious tracts, with present -day online communities of faith in the USA.

The basic idea of the Bible societies was to have something called a general supply: a bible supplied "without note or comment" to every household in America. The key here is without note or comment. This distribution scheme was non-denominational Christianity, the Bible was supposed to speak for itself, in order to hasten the arrival of millenial kingdom of god in America, but not for any sectarian conflicts, political concerns, or individualist theological ideas.

The book I am reading is called "Faith in Reading" and it's a historical analysis and political economy of the 3 main societies from the founding of their antedescents in the 17th century to the end of antebellum America and the beginning of the civil war.

What's fascinating, is in the epilogue to the book the author explains that the 3 main groups still exist and many have transferred their activities to the internet including one project to develop an Open Scripture Information Standard (OSIS)

What is OSIS?

The purpose of the OSIS initiative (Open Scripture Information Standard) is to research, identify and develop the organizational, process and technical basis that will produce markup standards for biblical and related texts. This is critical so that we can have interoperability across computer hardware and software for publication, linking, reference and accessibility. The goal is to provide open standards for the use and benefit of publishers, software manufacturers, Bible Societies, scholars and anyone else interested in biblical and related texts. OSIS will facilitate easy storage and retrieval, indexing and cross-referencing of raw text and the rendering of scripture and related text into many formats, including print, HTML, PDAs, cell phones, etc.

The Bible for computers without note or comment.

What's the excitement you ask? well, the more time I spend in academia (2 months and counting now) the more I am excited by two questions.

1/ Where are there examples of paradoxical uses of canonical ideologies, and what can they teach us (well me, actually, but in academia it's always suposed to be the universal we) about the canons in question. and;

2/ Where, how, why, do morals and ethical frameworks exist in media, as product, as message, as evaluative framework? This last is vague I know, but basically what are the ethics of information, beyond simple privacy or integrity etc...How does society use communication technology to communicate morals or to make active moral decisions (the 100 dollar laptop, free bibles et al).How does the use of technology itself translate into ethical codification? Over time, and in context.

I know I have to work on that last one a bit.. I am feeling it's pain that collection of awkward sentences.

bible societies, and any sort of spiritual faith in technology seem to be rich terrain for looking for such paradoxes and moral questions. which is why I think this first book review/paper is a great starting place.

Bible publishing societies were paradoxical communities. They took full advantage of technological progress in the field of communications, regarding technology as the advancement of the lords work on earth, while at the same time, deploring many of the secular products (such as novels) of that very technology as the work of the devil. They chose to meet the secularizing challenge of nascent western market forces, saying; "If the devil works fast, let us work faster", however, they used the market and mass system not for profit, but for charitable giving at a mass scale. As they undertook these ethically-based activities, they purposefully ignored some the major moral/spiritual concerns of the time; a political system that was negotiating the conflicting values of spirituality and secularism, and the need to make an informed moral decision about the States uses of slavery for financial gain.

See, exciting stuff.