the tindog coffeehouse

This is Part 4 of my chapter-by-chapter walk through From the Garden to the City by John Dyer.

We started out talking about how technology isn’t neutral, how it not only changes the world around us, but changes us as well. And we started to see how we approach technology as a sort-of mini-narrative, allowing us to bridge the gap between our current world and a better one. We then looked at Genesis and how technology really began in the Garden of Eden when God told Adam to cultivate and till the garden, taking God’s initial creation and making something new out of it. But what exactly is technology anyway? Is it the tools used to cultivate the garden, the product of that cultivation, or the know-how that guided the process along?

It seems odd that a book subtitled “The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology” would wait until Chapter 4 to define what the author means by “technology”. But better late than never, I suppose. As we’ll see, however, the definition isn’t as clear-cut as we think it is.

Definition.

Dyer begins the chapter with a history lesson, tracing the origins of the word “technology” back to its Greek roots: téchnē, which means “craft, skill, or art,” and logía, which means the study of a subject. For the Greeks, it meant the skill used to make things, whether it’s an aqueduct or a painting. That definition lasted until the time of the Renaissance in the 16th and 17th centuries and rise of scientists such as Galileo and Copernicus and philosophers like Descartes, when it began to refer solely to the creation of mechanical objects (as opposed to the creation of fine art). With the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, the definition changed again, referring to the formal study of making things. It then changed again in the early 1900s to mean the tools used to make things. And by the end of the 20th century, it came to refer to the things made with those tools.

Confused yet?

Dyer then takes the definition further, explaining how philosopher Stephen J. Kline breaks technology down into four distinct layers:

1. Technology as Hardware – Basically any physical object that doesn’t occur naturally
2. Technology as Manufacturing – The tools and labor used to create those objects
3. Technology as Methodology – The knowledge required to create the objects
4. Technology as Social Usage – How the objects are used

When we say technology is neutral, what we really mean is that the objects and the tools used to create those objects are neutral. And that’s true. A shovel is just a shovel. But clearly that ignores the last two layers: the methodology of its creation and the way that creation is used. And that’s where it gets more complicated.

Our methodology affects how we approach even non-technical aspects of our world. Theologian Jacques Ellul, Dyer says, “worried that technology as methodology often shapes our emotional, spiritual, and relational worlds in ways that aren’t always compatible with our Christian faith.” Dyer points out how we as Christians often approach our Great Commission to spread the Gospel as some sort of mechanical process and how we constantly look for specific tools to help us complete that task more effectively, never realizing that it’s not a tool we need but a relationship.

Donald Miller wrote about this in Searching for God Knows What (which I’ve quoted before):

In a culture that worships science, relational propositions will always be left out of arguments attempting to surface truth. We believe, quite simply, that unless you can chart something, it doesn’t exist. And you can’t chart relationships. Furthermore, in our attempts to make relational propositions look like chartable realities, all beauty and mystery is lost. And so when times get hard, when reality knocks us on our butts, mathematical propositions are unable to comfort our failing hearts. How many people have walked away from faith because their systematic theology proved unable to answer the deep longings and questions of the soul? What we need here, truly, is faith in a Being, not a list of ideas.

But it’s not just our approach to the world around us that is the problem, it’s what we do with the technology we have. As technology changes, how we relate to others changes as well. For example, before the invention of the telegraph, people communicated over long distances by written letters. The process was slow and the style of writing was quite formal. The telegraph changed that, however, making instant communication possible and the style less eloquent and more utilitarian. Then came the telephone, and verbal communication became the norm. And then email with a whole different set of rules and etiquette. And that gave way to texting and social networking, each with its own set of conventions. The intent is the same as it’s always been — to communicate with another person — but the ways in which we do that have changed drastically, creating a host of unforeseen consequences, both good and bad.

Thus, technology, or at least the methodology and social usage of it, is most definitely not neutral. And that has enormous ramifications for the Church. That doesn’t mean that we should avoid technology (which of course is impossible anyway), but we have to make sure that we use it appropriately, understanding both the redeeming and corrupting elements of it.

Dyer concludes with a working definition of technology, which he expresses as “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes.” Exactly what those tools are, of course, will change over time. How we use them to transform God’s creation is up to us.

Previously:
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 1: Perspective
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 2: Imagination
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 3: Reflection