the tindog coffeehouse

This is Part 6 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

In Chapter 5, Dyer focused on the “corrupting” part, examining how both Adam and Eve and their son Cain used technology as a way to separate themselves from God. But as Dyer illustrated, technology (“the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”) isn’t necessarily bad. It existed before the Fall, and even after the Fall, God continued to equip his people with more of it. Technology, then, must be neutral. Right?

Well, no.

We concluded in Chapter 1 that technology is, in fact, not neutral; as it changes, we change along with it. How and exactly why we change is the focus of this chapter.

Approach.

Dyer begins the chapter with an example: Christians calling into a radio program to give their opinions on the moral value of technology. Some say it’s good, others say it’s bad, and the radio host concludes it’s neutral. Dyer states that as Christians, we tend to lump technology into the same ambiguous gray area where R-rated movies, tattoos, and politics often reside. We don’t have a clear, easy answer for it, so we leave it in a sort-of moral no-man’s land to be dealt with later. And that lack of definition creates a virtual minefield within the Church.

Dyer explains that people inevitably fall into one of two different philosophies with regards to technology: either instrumentalism (the idea that technology is inherently neutral and thus the tools are interchangeable) or technological determinism (the idea that technology is an “unstoppable power” that “operates independently of human choices”).

If we look at Stephen J. Kline’s four layers of technology (as described in Chapter 4), the first two layers (technology as hardware and technology as manufacturing) seem to back up the notion of inherent neutrality. But the last two layers (technology as methodology and technology as social usage) heavily favor determinism. The result is a middle ground in which we say that the tools themselves are morally neutral but how we use them is not. This idea is true to an extent, however as Dyer states:

The longer a tool has been around and the more often we use it, the more ingrained and culturally acceptable its tendencies become. Individuals are still free to discard it or use it in some way other than its original design, but the tool has a specific tendency that will usually prevail among the masses. …

Neil Postman used to say, “Technology is ecological, not additive,” by which he meant that introducing a new technology into society also changed the makeup of the technological ecosystem.

If technology is a tool to help us overcome a problem, bridging a gap between this world and a better one, the presence of a given piece of technology determines how we approach the problem to begin with. Different tools may help us to solve the same problem, but we pick and choose which tools to use based on their implied value. For example, the other night my 8-year-old daughter had to use a dictionary for a homework assignment. I could’ve easily sat her down at my computer and gone to dictionary.com, but instead I dusted off the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary on the bookshelf and told her to use that to find her words. Watching her fumble around trying to find the word “flash” was interesting to say the least. It’s obvious to me that “flash” comes between “field” and “float”, but she had no concept of that. She would flip around randomly until she landed on F and then go page-by-page until she found her word. The two tools — the traditional book-style dictionary that I grew up with and the web-based version that she’s growing up with — both do the same job; in essence, they’re interchangeable (and therefore neutral). But clearly the traditional version is less valuable to her, and that implied value affects how she approaches the problem.

It’s the classic Observer Effect. The mere presence of technology is enough to affect our behavior, our choices, and even our expectations. I see this every day in my IT job. Desktops and laptops are both personal computers, but laptops allow for more flexibility and are thus more highly valued. But recently the trend has been to move away from laptops and toward iPads. The introduction of iPads didn’t make the employees use them — they still have a choice — but their mere existence drew them in their direction and thus changed the technological ecosystem. Even if an employee doesn’t have an iPad, if they place a high enough value on it as a tool, they’ll devalue their other alternatives and in time will come to conclude that it’s the only option that will work. Merely by introducing the iPad into the ecosystem (even if it’s not necessarily a realistic choice), the employees’ behavior has changed. The means have affected the ends.

For the Church, this has enormous consequences. Dyer uses the example of how increased mobility due to the automobile not only changed where people go to church but the size of the churches as well. When you introduce the Internet and social networking, things change even more drastically. Facebook, Twitter, email, texting, etc. can be great tools to help churches build community and reach out to the rest of the world, but that same technology risks isolating the congregation by allowing people to sit at home and “do church” online.

Ultimately, in between instrumentalism and determinism is the question of how technology will be used (Kline’s “technology as social usage”), and I think this is why the Church has such a hard time classifying it. On one end of the spectrum is the idea that tools have no bearing whatsoever on our behavior or choices. On the other is the idea that it completely determines our behavior without allowing us any discretion. Obviously, neither idea is 100% correct. Where we place a particular piece of technology on the spectrum, then, is the real question, and it varies from person to person. One person may be very comfortable with Facebook and place it more toward the instrumentalism end (seeing it as just another tool to communicate), while someone who is uncomfortable with it may place it toward the determinism end (seeing it as negatively influencing our society). And that difference creates conflict.

As the technology becomes more widely accepted and normalized (“mythic”), those differences shrink and the conflict tends to subside. But even when there is no conflict, where we place an item on the spectrum influences and defines our values. And we apply those values to how we approach the Church, how we approach each other, and how we approach God.

Therefore, as a Church we can’t leave technology sitting in a gray area. We can’t simply ignore it, which as we’ve seen is impossible anyway. But we shouldn’t overvalue it either, leaning too much on it at the expense of human relationships.

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
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 4: Definition
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 5: Rebellion