A few years ago, Dr. Joel Ward, currently an Associate Professor in Geneva’s Communication Department, was talking with some colleagues from graduate school. It was a conversation filled with questions many of us have likely had. How do cell phones impact our families? Why are there more resources for moms but increasing reports of loneliness in motherhood? How do you parent well? While parenting as a topic of conversation may be common, what came next was not.
There is surprisingly little family communication scholarship that describes the “oughts,” or makes suggestions regarding the issues in parenting with new communication technologies. This conversation evolved into research, more conversations, more research, a book proposal, and eventually a publication that includes lots of research, but also suggestions. Communicating with Our Families: Technology as Continuity, Interruption, and Transformation features a wide variety of scholarship from multiple authors, including Dr. Ward, looking at the major issues impacting family communication with the influx of new communication technologies.
The text is broken into three main themes in the research: continuity, interruption, and transformation. Dr. Ward’s main area of contribution was in interruption. Some highlights from this section include inattentiveness due to increases in disruption from technology, family communication translating to professional communication, and the unintended consequences of the current disruption to modern family communication systems.
“We want people to think about the fact that digital communication is changing your family and the family structure, a God-ordained institution. I would like people to think about such implications when they introduce digital communication technology into their families.”
Dr. Ward went on to explain how often we can feel as though digital technology is neutral because it simulates in-person communication. The trick is that these simulated interactions, such as Facetime, make us feel similarly, but replicate genuine interactions.
“We want to prepare students for their life’s work here at Geneva. Our biggest success {from this research} is, if they should want to marry, to sustain and better that marriage and, if it produces children, that our students would know how to raise their children. Children are not just a procedural result of getting older.”
Seeing the significance of family communication, and viewing all communication as in Christian community, is vitally important. Dr. Ward views the importance of his research as drawn directly from Scripture. God is a family, calls us His family, and Scripture tells its story in the familial context.
This area of research is not only intriguing as a topic in Communication, or just an interesting area of study, but also has real-life applications. Here at Geneva, through faith and life integration in each of our classes, and our core curriculum, our desire is to situate faith, culture, and each student’s program into a larger context. What we learn in the classroom has an impact outside of the classroom. The reason we study communications, engineering, criminal justice, or any field is to fulfill our individual callings and contribute to the community around us in service to God and neighbor. We believe every student ought to study the what, the how, and the why within the context of Scripture in every area of study to best apply it to their lives and desired careers.
“In Communication or any area of study, we need to let go of the words of our discipline, see what Scripture says, then insert our discipline into the truth of Scripture.”
Our students were made with purpose and our faculty is committed to helping them find and live out that purpose.
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