Literature Literature Distribution Literature Literature DistributionThe Internet is the world’s largest media distribution center. Entire libraries of books and magazines are available online for free. Pictures and audio recordings are available for free downloads. Printed materials and tapes can also be purchased over the Internet for shipment to your home or office.
Much of the information available on the Internet comes in various types of digital formats. By digital, we mean that the information is stored electronically in formats that are understandable to computers. Words, numbers, pictures and sounds can all be stored digitally and thus can be stored on, and retrieved from, computers.
Digital storage of words, numbers, pictures and sounds has many advantages over other methods of storage, such as the printed page. Obviously, digital storage allows the information to be obtained over the Internet. But there are other advantages as well.
First, digital storage allows computers to search and index the material. Let’s say that someone has the complete text, in a digital format, of John Calvin’s definitive book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Let’s also say that this person wanted to find out what Calvin had to say in this book about the Roman Catholic Church. Calvin wrote criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church in almost every chapter of his Institutes. Thus, finding every reference there to Catholicism could take days. But this situation changes if the text of the Institutes is stored digitally in a computer. If stored in a computer, it is very easy for someone to tell the computer to find every paragraph in the Institutes containing the word "Catholic," and the computer will find those paragraphs.
Second, information stored in digital formats allows the information to be encrypted. Encryption allows the information to be transmitted in ways that are unreadable except by the sender and the intended recipient. Business firms and governments often use encryption to transmit confidential information over the Internet. Encryption is of great value to Reformed instruction and evangelism, since it allows Reformed literature to be transmitted across international borders in forms that are unreadable to government censors.
The government of one Asian nation has gone to great lengths to censor information entering its territory through the Internet. The government of that nation has seen the need to connect every part of its territory to the Internet to promote economic growth. However, that nation's government is also worried about information and ideas entering its territory that it does not approve of. Consequently, that nation's government has hired many top computer scientists in an attempt to find ways to prevent "unauthorized" information from entering its territory.
One of the most popular computer programs used to encrypt digital information is a program developed in the United States called "Pretty Good Privacy," or "PGP." It is often used to encrypt electronic mail. This program is so good at encrypting messages that the United States government prohibits the export of the most powerful versions of this program. PGP can produce digital files that are encrypted so well that even high-speed government computers have trouble breaking the code.
Despite the United States government’s ban on the export of some versions of this program, the mathematical principles underlying it are well known. There is very little preventing computer programmers outside the United States from producing similar programs.
Sometimes the very fact that an encrypted message is being sent is enough to alert government censors that there is a message being transmitted that they need to stop. To get around this problem, there are ways to send encrypted messages in ways so that they don’t appear to be encrypted. And since these messages don’t appear encrypted, they don’t alert government censors. One way to do this is by embedding an encrypted message within a digital photograph. When a photograph is converted to a digital format, it is divided up into thousands, or even millions, of tiny colored dots. The digital form of that photograph thus contains information about each of these tiny dots, their exact location within that photograph, and the color of each dot.
Now suppose that every tenth (or twentieth, or fiftieth) dot in this digital photograph was changed so that instead of transmitting photographic information, it transmitted something else. Suppose that every tenth dot in this photograph was instead transmitting the letters that formed the text of an electronic mail message. If this digital photograph was displayed on a computer screen, it would still look like a normal photograph. But with the right kind of computer program, a computer could extract the text of the message from this encoded photograph, and reassemble the text of the original message.
And finally, the storage of text in digital formats allows it to be translated into other languages. Language translation software is available that allows text written in one language to be translated by computer into another language.
Language translation software was originally developed by governments to assist their foreign intelligence efforts. Many commercial language translation programs are now available that can translate books and messages from English into other languages, and vice versa. Since English is the world’s most widely used language, if a document is available in English on the Internet, a computer can translate it into almost any other language.
Few of the language translation programs currently available can be relied upon to produce completely accurate translations. In 1996, The Wall Street Journal printed an article telling of one reporter’s experiences with language translation software. The reporter tried using this software to translate some French-language Canadian news releases into English. The software translated references to Prime Minister Chretien as "the Christian Prime Minister." It also translated a reference to the Canadian foreign minister as "the alien Business minister of Canada."
Fortunately, language translation software is improving, and hopefully such glaring mistranslations will soon be a thing of the past.
Encryption software can permit people in lands where Christians are currently persecuted to obtain Reformed literature. Language translation software will soon be good enough to allow these same people to read Reformed literature in their own languages. Churches and other Christian organizations need to take advantage of these new possibilities for Reformed evangelism and education.
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