If you are reading this article on the Bible Society Australia / Eternity News website, don’t assume everyone else is too. In our global media age, the same ‘content’ turns up in many mediums (or should I say, media). The same piece of creative work can be published online—instantly giving it a global potential audience. It will be quoted in tweets and on Facebook, even read out loud by auto-reader apps on smartphones and tablets.

In 1964, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan told us that “the medium is the message”, and this prescient insight has become even more significant and complex since the internet revolution. The way you receive information has some impact on what it means to you. The simplest way to grasp this is to think of a favourite book that has been turned into a movie (as I write, Baz Luhrmann’s film adapation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby, is hitting the screen). Everyone has an opinion on whether the book or the movie is better, whether one was ‘faithful’ to the other, and whether they ‘changed the story’. The two different media—books and films—generate different meanings and experiences, because they are surrounded by different social conditions (e.g. communal theatres versus alone in the armchair, over two hours or ten hours) and appeal to different senses.

This is very important when we consider Bible engagement. The different Bible media will generate different meanings and experiences of Scripture for the reader. If you read one of Paul’s letters, you are very likely to experience different emphases and understanding than if you hear it read aloud. If you sing a psalm, the experience is quite different to reading it silently to yourself. This variety is not a bad thing, but it does warrant reflection.

I am often told that people worry that the digital age is turning Bible reading into ‘data gathering’. The very fact that we can click on links to more information while we are reading the Bible on our smartphones can encourage us to treat Bible reading like a scavenger hunt. We zip back and forth checking out different references and themes, getting increasingly distracted from the text itself. Others are concerned that receiving messages through a screen is less cognitively effective than from a page, but it’s a little early to pass judgement on that because the social psychologists are still looking into it.

Many people fear our obsession with the ‘visual’ is overwhelming our capacity for the ‘rational’. This academic concern meets the real world when a youth group leader feels he can’t get the kids interested in Bible study unless there is a funky video involved. Some decades ago, French Catholic sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote that the ‘word’ was being humiliated by the power of the image, and this would lead to idolatry. It’s a persuasive argument, but there must be a way to harness the image’s power in service of the message; the medium need not overwhelm the message.

Not all language groups have the privilege of receiving the Bible in different media. But those of us who do need to be thoughtful about developing the best media for particular kinds of Bible engagement. For a short devotional focus on a few verses or reading short-form genres such as poetry and proverbs, mobile devices seem to work incredibly well (as witnessed by the success of Bible Society’s ‘Live Light in 25 Words’ campaign).

For deep study of biblical languages, computer-based learning seems to be invaluable. I’m still pondering what the best medium is for receiving apocalyptic literature. With its visual symbolism and episodic events, could it be the graphic novel?

But for treating the Bible as prose—histories, narratives, gospels, letters—I can’t help feeling that the good old printed book has a lot of life left in it.

For the experience of moving from the beginning to the end of a story, for following an unfolding argument, and for not getting distracted but immersing yourself fully in the world of the text for a significant period of time, I think we’ll be grabbing our ‘hard copies’ from the shelf for a while yet.

Greg Clarke is CEO of Bible Society Australia