the tindog coffeehouse

I’m blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. Dyer began the book by trying to put technology in its proper perspective. Technology, he argues, isn’t neutral. As it changes over time, we change with it. What we view as new and futuristic today becomes normal (or “mythic”) to future generations, to the point where we no longer even think of it as technology.

Imagination.

In Chapter 2, he builds upon this point by looking at exactly what technology is, defining it in terms of a narrative:

Though we might not realize it, we compose these mininarratives whenever we encounter even the simplest gadget. If we happen to see a shovel, our minds can easily imagine the act of digging a hole, visualizing how the ground will look after we’re finished. This small effort of the imagination has a clear movement from beginning (the world before the shovel) to middle (the act of digging) to end (the world with a new hole)—the basic arc of any story. …

Technology, then, is the bridge from this world to the imagined one.

I couldn’t help but to think about author Donald Miller here. In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Miller defines a story as “a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.” In Dyer’s narrative, then, we use technology as a tool to overcome a conflict (i.e. lack of a solution) in order to get what we want or need.

If I need to get to work, at the beginning of that narrative, I don’t have any way of doing so. I can imagine a number of ways to overcome that conflict–walking, riding a bike, horse and buggy–but none of those methods will get me to work safely and on time. Finally, I consider a car and question whether that’ll do the trick, which I realize it will. The car acts as a tool or bridge to help me overcome my conflict and get from the beginning of the story (a world in which I don’t have any way to get from home to work) to the end (the world in which that’s now possible).

With that in mind, it seems logical, then, that the Church would want to fully embrace technology. If it’s a bridge that can help it overcome conflict to meet its needs (reaching the world for Christ), then that’s a good thing, right? It is, and we’ve seen numerous ways in which the Church is using technology to do just that. But the problem comes when technology is no longer the means to an end but the end itself.

How many Apple fanboys rushed out to buy the iPad when it came out, not because they needed it, not because it was a tool that helped them overcome some unconquered conflict in order to get what they really wanted, but simply because it was cool? It was from Apple, after all, so it was instantly considered magical. Never mind that there were other existing devices that did the same thing. There were other e-readers out there (not to mention paper-bound books), iPhones that ran the same apps, laptops and desktops that could browse the Internet. The iPad provided no real new functionality whatsoever, but as soon as Steve Jobs revealed it, they decided they couldn’t live without it. He could’ve charged them a thousand bucks for an “iEtch-A-Sketch”, and they would’ve been just as happy.

As Dyer mentions, when we use technology, we not only transform the world around us but are transformed ourselves. And technology, especially the Internet, has a capacity to dramatically transform us. When we do a search on Google or browse our Twitter feeds or check up on our Facebook friends, our brains release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the reward center of the brain. And we can easily become addicted to it, just as people can get addicted to sex, gambling, or shopping.

But it’s not just the dopamine rush we have to worry about. As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows, the very way we think is being changed by the Internet. From The Guardian:

“It’s a basic principle that the brain is very sensitive to any kind of stimulation, and from moment to moment, there is a very complex cascade of neurochemical electrical consequences to every form of stimulation. If you have repeated stimuli, your neural circuits will be excited. But if you neglect other stimuli, other neural circuits will be weakened.” This is the nub of Carr’s argument: that the online world so taxes the parts of the brain that deal with fleeting and temporary stuff that deep thinking becomes increasingly impossible. As he sees it: “Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow.

[Psychiatrist Dr. Gary] Small is only too aware of what too much time spent online can do to other mental processes. Among the young people he calls digital natives (a term first coined by the US writer and educationalist Marc Prensky), he has repeatedly seen a lack of human contact skills – “maintaining eye contact, or noticing non-verbal cues in a conversation”. …

He also fears that texting and instant messaging may already be dampening human creativity, because “we’re not thinking outside the box, by ourselves – we’re constantly vetting all our new ideas with our friends.” He warns that multitasking – surely the internet’s essential modus operandi – is “not an efficient way to do things: we make far more errors, and there’s a tendency to do things faster, but sloppier.”

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with using the Internet or tweeting or buying an iPad for that matter. They can be very effective tools to help us overcome conflict and fulfill a pressing need. But as a Church, we have to be careful that the medium itself doesn’t become the message. Equipping your church staff with iPads is fine if it meets a specific need, but we shouldn’t buy everyone iPads just because we want to be “relevant”. As Dyer says,

If God is our savior and he wins in the end, does technology even matter? Obviously, we should use technology for good and not for evil, but does anything more need to be said? If it is true that technology has the capacity to shape the world that God made, as well as shape our bodies, minds, and souls, then it seems we should care deeply about our tools. Moreover, if technology plays some role in the story of God redeeming his people, we should care all the more.

Previously:
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 1: Perspective
Church dot com
Proof that in social networks, smaller is actually better
‘How Apple Plays Upon Our Insecurities’