The subject of technology and how it relates to the Church certainly isn’t new, and there are a ton of different books and blogs and so on out there that have their own spin on it. The reason for that, I think, is because technology is a moving target. It’s constantly changing, and therefore how we think about it, how we approach it, and ultimately how we use it changes as well.

Technology, we said, is “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes.” It’s a means to an end, a bridge from one world to a better one, allowing us to overcome some sort of problem to accomplish a goal we couldn’t have on our own. Defining it further, we broke it down into four separate layers: technology as hardware, technology as manufacturing, technology as methodology, and technology as social usage. The first two layers, we concluded, are inherently neutral; a shovel is just a shovel. However, the knowledge used to create those tools and how the tools are used are most definitely not neutral; how we approach those various tools is determined by our own internal values but also has the ability to reshape those values over time.

We said that people inevitably think of technology in terms of either instrumentalism (the idea that tools are neutral and therefore interchangeable) or determinism (the idea that technology is an “unstoppable power” that “operates independently of human choices”). Depending on where people fall along that spectrum, a certain amount of conflict can arise. Typically the newer the technology, the more varied opinions there are of it and therefore more disagreement with how exactly it should be used. And sometimes even the mere presence of a new technology can act as a disruptive force that can create conflict.

And one of the most disruptive technologies in all of human history is that of the Internet.

Virtualization.

There are obvious pitfalls for Christians living in the Internet age. While we have greater access to information than ever before, that information is not always beneficial to us, and the way we process it profoundly impacts the way we function offline. We’re gradually losing our ability to distinguish between knowledge and information, and with the ever-increasing tidal wave of stimuli we encounter on a daily basis, our ability to make wise decisions is becoming impaired. Also, many of us have mastered the art of scanning text but find it harder and harder to read with great depth. And with constant access to all our various Internet-connected gadgets, disconnecting is sometimes next to impossible.

But even beyond the physiological aspects, the Internet has a number of social implications. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter affect how we see ourselves and how others view us. As Dyer states:

[A] Facebook profile transforms your identity into one that fits within its framework. When we use an online service like Facebook, we are, in effect, taking our identity and pushing it through that medium. Like meat put through a sausage grinder, what comes out on the other end is both like and unlike what we started with.

As we continue to fill out our profiles, add pictures, quotes, and favorite music, we are creating an identity that is closer to the “real” us and yet still not truly us. We then use that identity to interact with other people who have gone through a similar identity-shaping process.

The result is a distorted view of ourselves and the world around us, which can have serious social repercussions. It’s been said that we tend to compare our insides with other people’s outsides. If that’s true, then with social networking, we’re comparing our insides to a highly filtered, selective view of other people’s outsides. If we lost by comparison before, then there’s absolutely no hope for us now.

It’s also way to easy to get caught up in the metrics of the Internet: how many Facebook friends we have, how many Twitter followers, how many blog subscribers, and on and on. As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes the worst offenders of this are Christians themselves, who take every opportunity to promote themselves, repeatedly tweet their latest blog post, and build their “personal brand”, somehow forgetting that it’s not their own identity that’s important but that of their Savior.

But does that mean that the Internet and social media are completely without merit? Certainly not. While online connections through Facebook, Twitter, and email do not in and of themselves constitute “community”, they can certainly enhance it and make it stronger. But the line between the corrupting nature of technology and the redeeming nature of it isn’t always clear. To know which tools to use and how best to use them, we need some sort of framework.

Recommendations.

Dyer concludes his book with a set of recommendations for how we as Christians should approach technology:

• Valuation – Continually returning to the Scriptures to find our Christian values and identity. Is this tool or app or service in line with what we say we believe?
• Experimentation – Trying it out to see how it works. Only through using it will we begin to understand its “technology as usage”.
• Limitation – Placing appropriate boundaries on it. We saw in Chapter 10 how dangerous it is to overdepend on technology, believing it can solve all our problems. Every technology comes with an opportunity cost.
• Togetherness – Using the technology as part of a genuine community, not in place of it. Instead of making it all about extending our personal brand, it should be about bringing the body of Christ closer together as a family.
• Cultivation – Supporting those who are leading the way so that we can continue our mission of cultivating God’s creation.

We started out this process by asking how the Church should relate to technology. Should it blindly embrace it in order to appear more relatable and relevant? Or should we reject it because of its ability to amplify our innate selfish, sinful nature? Or is the answer somewhere in between, accepting it in some cases while rejecting it in others?

I said at one point that the “in between” answer was somewhat of a non-answer. But I don’t think it is. We’ve seen how God can work through technology for redeeming purposes even when we’re all too willing to do the opposite. So to reject it — if that were even possible — would be to deny God’s grace and providence. But to embrace it without discernment would be to reject His wisdom and command to cultivate the earth. The answer, then, is to approach technology intentionally, basing its methodology and usage on our biblical values and not the other way around.

Technology is constantly changing. The tools and techniques that I use day in and day out today will not be the same ones my children use. But that doesn’t mean we have to automatically throw them out. While these tools can be used for rebellion, building man-made cities in the wilderness as a way to separate ourselves from our Creator, they can also be used for redemption, extending God’s Kingdom and His plans for those He created.

We’ve been given the tools. What we do with them 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
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 4: Definition
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 5: Rebellion
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 6: Approach
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption (cont’d)
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 8: Mediums
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 9: Restoration
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 10: Technicism

In Chapter 9, we talked about the idea of restoration, how God will one day restore mankind to its original sinless condition. The book of Revelation foretells the end of the world but it also presents us with a picture of a new city in heaven, one that is eternal and free of the defects of our existing man-made versions.

That restoration will happen at some point, but what happens until then? If technology is “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”, what happens when it fails? What happens when the transformation brought about by human activity is not exactly the kind of transformation we were hoping for? In Chapter 9, we said that every technology has a trade-off of some kind, an opportunity cost. What happens when those costs spiral out of control?

Technicism.

We tend to believe that virtually any problem can be solved with enough technology. Nutrition, health care, transportation, affordable housing, energy, education, communication: all areas in which we believe technology can make our lives better. And it does. Over the past couple of centuries, we’ve been able to live longer, healthier lives with a much greater standard of living. Many of the diseases that once took millions of lives annually are either now eradicated or easily treatable. We’re able to live and work more comfortably and have a lot more spare time on our hands. The cost of goods and services is amazingly low and even those in the lowest economic sector can typically afford items unobtainable by previous generations. We have instant access to every imaginable source of information via the Internet and routinely share our experiences globally with people we’ve never even met. Stephen Monsma refers to this idea that technology can solve all our problems as “technicism”, and he argues that it’s become a “kind of unspoken religion for the secular world”.

Driving this ideology is what Albert Borgmann calls the “device paradigm”:

For Borgmann, a “device” is not just a mechanical or electronic gadget. Instead, he uses the word “device” to refer to a tool whose function takes a long, difficult process for a human and makes it available at the press of a button or the flip of a switch. For example, 150 years ago heating a home required going outside, finding trees, cutting them down, chopping the wood, bringing the wood inside, and starting a fire in the fireplace. This process would take significant time, and keeping the fire going would require skill and practice. But today, the commodity of heat is available at the press of a button through a device. Most of us don’t think about where it comes from or how it works, because even a child can operate a thermostat.

Of course, Borgmann would say that this readily available heat is a good thing that often saves lives. But he points out that the device is also doing something that we don’t notice—it is hiding the process of making heat. We press a button and heat comes out, but we don’t know what goes on inside our walls or underneath our houses, and we no longer go about the practice of making heat ourselves.

As we move to more advanced technology, we learn how to do more, better, faster, easier. But in the process we forget how to do the basics. Few of us have ever had to grow our own vegetables and slaughter our own animals for food; instead we just grab what we need (already prepackaged) from the grocery store or buy it already cooked at a restaurant. And even if we still know how to do something, we often don’t want to because it’s too inefficient or time-consuming. There’s a saying in the software development community, “AI is the UI.” That is, artificial intelligence (often in the form of voice recognition) is fast becoming just as important as the graphical user interface when designing new technology. Whereas people were once thrilled to be able to trade in a once arduous manual process for one that could be accomplished with a couple of buttons, they now want to trade those buttons in, expecting technology to just work with as little input as possible.

That’s not to say technology doesn’t provide benefits. It absolutely does. But the more we have of it, the more we become dependent on it. Take away Google, and I can still find a telephone listing in the yellow pages. But my kids have probably never even seen a phone book. Sit me down in front a card catalog, and I could find eventually find the book I was looking for. But my kids would have no idea where to begin. And the same is true for my parents and me. My stepdad used to change his own oil and fix the engine in his truck. I can change a flat tire and check the oil, but most car repairs are way beyond me.

Overdependence on technology is a serious problem. Take away telecommunications, electricity, food processing and distribution, health care, and clean tap water at a local level for a short amount of time, and everyone else can pick up the slack and help provide and rebuild. Take them away at a national level, and you plunge the country and perhaps most of the world into chaos.

And it’s not just technology. We’ve built our society on a house of cards technologically, politically, economically, and environmentally. And while global trade has in once sense made us more resilient, it’s also made us more interdependent; when one of those nations fails, it could easily take down all of us. Ironically, for all of our incredible technological advances, today we’re far more vulnerable than the Mayans, Incans, and Romans, all of whom had incredibly advanced empires before collapsing in the blink of an eye.

Borgmann argues that instead of throwing out technology en masse, we need to first figure out what our values are and then intentionally use technology according those values. Of course, that’s easier said than done. As we become more and more dependent on technology, it becomes harder to objectively evaluate it. At some point the “technology as methodology” and “technology as usage” don’t even matter; we just need the thing to work.

What we need, then, is some kind of framework with which we can know which tools to use and how best to use them. And that will come tomorrow with my final blog of the book.

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
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 6: Approach
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption (cont’d)
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 8: Mediums
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 9: Restoration

From the moment in October 1517 when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, his anti-Catholic protests began spreading at a rate that even took Luther by surprise. The Economist takes a look at why this happened and finds that just like with the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement of today, technology was at the heart of it:

The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than an “audience”, since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany. …

As with “Likes” and retweets today, the number of [pamphlet] reprints serves as an indicator of a given item’s popularity. Luther’s pamphlets were the most sought after; a contemporary remarked that they “were not so much sold as seized”. His first pamphlet written in German, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, was reprinted 14 times in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each time. Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6m-7m pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther’s. …

Amid the barrage of pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts, public opinion was clearly moving in Luther’s favour. “Idle chatter and inappropriate books” were corrupting the people, fretted one bishop. “Daily there is a veritable downpour of Lutheran tracts in German and Latin…nothing is sold here except the tracts of Luther,” lamented Aleander, Leo X’s envoy to Germany, in 1521. Most of the 60 or so clerics who rallied to the pope’s defence did so in academic and impenetrable Latin, the traditional language of theology, rather than in German. Where Luther’s works spread like wildfire, their pamphlets fizzled.

The amazing thing about this is that if Luther had come along just 100 years earlier, the Protestant Reformation may not have been possible at all. The printing press wasn’t invented by Johannes Gutenberg until 1440, meaning the pamphlets that sold by the thousands in Germany wouldn’t have been invented either. The spread of ideas would’ve happened at a much slower pace and probably wouldn’t have extended much further than Wittenberg itself before being crushed by the Catholic Church.

Previously:
History of the Internet (infographic)
Welcome to the future
Church dot com

By now we’ve seen numerous examples both the redeeming and corrupting potential of technology and how that relates to us as Christians. We’ve seen how God first commanded us to “cultivate” His creation in the Garden of Eden and how even after Adam and Eve sinned and were expelled from the Garden, God continued to use technology to further His plans, from Noah’s Ark to the Ten Commandment to the Ark of the Covenant. And yet, there’s no question technology can be extremely destructive, allowing mankind to separate ourselves from our Creator as an act of rebellion.

So it’s not just redemption we need, it’s restoration. We don’t just need another coat of paint to cover up the flaws and defects of this city we’ve built, it needs to be demolished and replaced with a whole new one that’s perfect.

Restoration.

“Every good technology,” Dyer says, “comes with a trade-off of some kind. Newer tools bring us benefits, but those benefits come with a cost.” In economics terms, that’s called an opportunity cost. When we chose one thing, we miss out on whatever benefits the alternative would offer. If we choose to have our cake, we can’t have the satisfaction of eating it. But if we choose to eat the cake, then it’s gone forever. When it comes to technology, sometimes those opportunity costs are quite staggering. As Dyer points out, sometimes there can be economic consequences when newer technology displaces people who make their living working with the now-obsolete versions. Sometimes there can be physical consequences. For example, driving has largely replaced walking and working at a computer has replaced a lot of manual labor, resulting in a much more sedentary lifestyle for people, which leads to numerous health problems. And sometimes new technology can have social consequences. Yes, we’re more connected than ever because of the Internet, but in a way we’re also more isolated than ever.

The problem is, no matter how good we are at making new tools, we’ll never be able to fix every problem in the world. We might eliminate one problem, but in the process we’ve created three more. So how can we “restore” the world? We can’t.

But God can.

Dyer points to the life of Jesus to see how technology can be used by God to be restorative. Jesus was, after all, a carpenter, someone who used technology on a daily basis. But the two technologies that had the most impact were the cross and the tomb:

The gospel of John begins by telling us that the entire world and everything in it was created by the Son of God. God had again become immediate, walking among his creations. But then John tells us that Jesus “came unto his own but his own did not receive him.” In other words, the Creator was rejected by his own creation. This rejection reached its culmination in the cross when God’s highest creation used the creative powers he gave them to create a tool designed to put their Creator to death. In the cross, we find the Son of God rejected by the humans he created with his heavenly Father, and the Son of Man murdered by the tools he and his earthly father used. At Golgotha, Jesus hung naked and bloody from a tree that he had spoken into existence, but that humans had transformed into a tool of death. The cross, then, is a symbol of the distorted creation turning on its creator. That twisted tree represents the twisted us, a humanity transformed by sin and bent toward death.

Why, then, do we wear these grotesque distortions of sin around our necks? Why are they on top of our churches and in the background of our PowerPoint slides?

It is because Christ’s transformative power goes beyond wood and nails. He has declared that the cross is no longer a symbol of deformation but of the transformative work Christ accomplished for us. Whenever we attempt to transform the natural world for destructive purposes, the cross says that God can transform that evil and restore what was lost.

The tomb, too, has been transformed by Jesus from a symbol of death — when His body was laid in the grave reserved for Joseph of Arimathea — to a symbol of life — when Jesus was resurrected three days later.

Technology can “redeem” us or recover us. But it’s only through God that it can truly restore us, returning us to original condition, the state we were in before we sinned against Him. In the book of Revelation, we see that restoration take place. Our earthly cities are wiped out, replaced by a new one that is sinless and eternal. The new city in Revelation is the equivalent of the Garden in Genesis: a place where the Creator and His creation can have an eternal relationship with one another, where mankind worships God while working and cultivating his new home.

Dyer defines this process as the tetrad of technology:

• Creation (Reflection) – Using tools to make technology is a reflection of our Creator
• Fall (Rebellion) – Every technology has the potential to be used for sin. While the tools themselves are morally neutral, embedded in their design is “a tendency of usage from which a set of values emerge”
• Redemption – Tools can be used for redemptive purposes, although our ability to “redeem” is limited
• Restoration – Only God can fully restore mankind back to its original sinless state

The good news is that in time we’ll be completely restored. In the meantime, however, we have to realize the opportunity costs that come with every technology. Those costs can be intentional or unintentional, positive or negative, but they can’t be avoided. As a Church, then, Dyer says “we must discern when those tools are in conflict with the value system of the kingdom of God. Just as the promise of resurrection does not imply that we are free to neglect our souls and bodies, the promise to restore our tools does not give us license to create or use tools that abuse God’s creation and distort the kind of life he has commanded us to live.”

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
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 6: Approach
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption (cont’d)
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 8: Mediums

We’ve talked at length about both the “redeeming” and “corrupting” potential of technology and concluded that it’s not neutral; as it changes, we’re changed as well. How we view technology, then, becomes a critical question. Do we view it through the filter of instrumentalism, the idea that the tools themselves are neutral and it’s only the usage that’s not? Or do we approach it from the side of determinism, the belief that the progress of technology is an “unstoppable power” that “operates independently of human choices”?

For the Church, that’s not an easy question. Yet, if technology is defined as “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”, then it would seem as though the choice of which tools the Church uses is absolutely critical.

Mediums.

We started out this discussion with a central question: How does the Church respond to technological changes in society, particularly as it relates to the Internet and social media? Does it embrace this technology, seeing it as a way to relate to the world around us, or does it reject it because of its corruptive powers? Or perhaps it’s somewhere in between.

Clearly with any communication technology, the message is of upmost importance. And I think it’s fair to say that for the Church that message still is and should always be that of the Gospel. But it’s not just the words we say but how we say them that makes a difference. Therefore, we have to consider the medium.

The Internet and social media have created whole new mediums through which we can communicate, and although many churches have begun using social media to some degree or another, it hasn’t been without a struggle. Why is that?

Formality. Churches are traditionally traditional. They are often formal, rigid institutions that practice a formal, rigid ideology. And that formality doesn’t always work in a dynamic, always-connected, über-social culture like ours. As Dyer explains:

In general, more advanced communication technology requires fewer steps and, therefore, there are fewer social conventions required for its use. When there are more built-in social conventions around using a medium, we tend to treat it more formally and what we communicate tends to be more significant (as in writing a letter). Conversely, when a newer technology removes the need for these social conventions, it also removes the sense of formality (as in a text message).

Further complicating matters, different social platforms have different usage conventions. Twitter, for example, limits tweets to 140 characters, including hyperlinks. Then there are the “@” replies, retweets, and hashtags. And up until recently you had to host any photos on a separate service like Flickr or Instragram and use your own URL-shortener such as bit.ly. None of those conventions exist in Facebook, which explains why so many people who are extremely comfortable with Facebook still don’t “get” Twitter. In order to use it effectively, you have to speak its language.

And of course, that language is constantly changing. Twitter today looks nothing like it did three years ago, and three years from now it’ll be completely different than it is today. The same with Facebook, Google+, and every other platform out there. So it’s not just enough to learn the various social “languages” of the Internet, you have to be adapt as those languages evolve. My very first real Bible, for example, was a King James Version, a translation that’s been around for 400 years. It’s extremely formal, and frankly I’m not sure how anyone alive today can make heads or tails of it. Why? Because the English language has changed since then. A lot. Thankfully, today more modern translations like the NIV and NLT are available, but if those weren’t an option, I think a lot of Christians would have a really hard time understanding the Bible.

The Church, therefore, has to be able to adapt to the ever-changing, informal nature of the Internet, including the ever-changing social conventions of its different platforms, but it has to do so while still maintaining its core identity and ideology. It has to be current and relevant and modern without giving up 2,000 years of tradition. Simple, right?

Difficulty. The more labor-intensive and costly it is to communicate, the more weight those words will carry. I read somewhere that if you want to get a politician’s attention about an issue, there’s a certain hierarchy to contacting them. An in-person visit is the equivalent of so many written letters. A written letter is worth so many phone calls. A phone call is worth so many emails. And an email is worth so many Facebook posts/tweets/etc. The more time and effort something takes to communicate, the more costly it is and therefore the more valuable. If talk is cheap, then tweets are practically worthless.

The Church is used to dealing in slow, labor-intensive communication methods, and it often still has the mindset that that’s the only way to communicate. After all, this is God’s Word we’re talking about here. But we live in a society with a very short attention span and an expectation of immediacy and convenience. Those slower forms of communication are still more way more valuable, but the Church has to be able to communicate through the faster forms as well. All without sacrificing the value of the message.

Speed. But it’s not just enough to use faster and easier forms of communication such as email, text messaging, and Facebook, the words have to be timely. This is a particular problem with something like Twitter, which oftens moves at a far greater (often real-time) pace. This is what makes Twitter so effective at communicating breaking news such as an election, earthquake, or major sporting event. But that can be a major challenge for churches, who may not be used to moving at that kind of breakneck speed.

Dyer discusses the cultural divide being created by technology, the “conflict” or “dissonance” created when a new technology is introduced and early adopters begin shifting to it. Those who encounter a given technology later in life, he says, will tend to use it with a “thick accent”, just as a non-native speaker would speak a new language with a thick accent; they can speak it, but it’s obvious that it isn’t natural to them. Often in churches, it’s not the “technology natives” that are in charge of technology, it’s the older, wiser “non-natives”, the ones who either don’t speak the language at all or do so through an extremely heavy accent.

The result of all of this is that from the outside, the Church often appears like an older, “trying-too-hard-to-be-cool” dad who awkwardly throws around jargon he doesn’t understand to show you how hip he still is. And then we sit around and wonder why we’re losing an entire generation of young people. That’s not to say we should throw out 2,000 years of history and tradition just to be “relevant”, but if we’re supposed to adequately transform God’s creation for a greater practical purpose, at some point we have to acknowledge the value of the tools we’ve been given.

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
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 6: Approach
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption (cont’d)

Genesis 11 says that sometime after the Great Flood, the people of the world gathered in Babylonia and built a huge tower made with fire-hardened bricks.

Then they said, “Come, let’s build a great city for ourselves with a tower that reaches into the sky. This will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world.”

But the Lord came down to look at the city and the tower the people were building. “Look!” he said. “The people are united, and they all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them! Come, let’s go down and confuse the people with different languages. Then they won’t be able to understand each other.”

In that way, the Lord scattered them all over the world, and they stopped building the city.

Dyer makes a couple of different points about this story. First, he reminds us how powerful the technology of language is. As powerful as it is today, it was potentially even more so to the inhabitants of Babylonia, all of whom spoke the same language. By confusing people with different languages, God caused them to scatter to different lands, which not only stopped them from building the tower, it helped fulfill His command to “fill the earth”.

Second, Dyer explains how confusing them affected change by acting as a disruptive technology. While God could’ve simply leveled the tower, He instead changed an underlying technological component: their language. And in so doing, He changed their behavior.

[W]hat happened at Babel illustrates that when a technological change happens within a culture, that change in technology results in a change in the culture. Technology does not make people do anything, but it does alter the choices people have in front of them. God didn’t force the Babelites to move, but by changing their communication technology, he made it extremely difficult for them to choose to stay put.

In Chapter 6, we talked about how merely the presence of a particular technology was enough to cause a behavioral change in society. By creating a web-based dictionary, for example, people come to value its convenience over the traditional book-style versions. Both tools do the same job, but they are not valued the same, and therefore people choose the one that has the greater value to them. The result is a shift from one technology to another. Initially only a few people will make that shift while others choose the more traditional option. But as more and more people make that transition, a certain amount of conflict is generated, a sort of societal dissonance. It’s only when enough people have made the transition to the newer tool does the conflict subside, and eventually there is so much agreement that the new tool is no longer even considered to be technology.

Interestingly, this idea of societal disruption caused by technological change is similar to Karl Marx’s “materialist” concept of history. Marx argued that how humans work on nature to produce the means of subsistence forms the foundation of any given society. All other non-economic components such as social classes, political structures, religion, etc. are built on top of that. When there is a shift in the “productive forces” (whether that’s a technical shift such as new tools, machinery, land, or infrastructure or a shift in labor), it upsets the balance of that society — sort of like playing a game of Jenga. The only way to realign that balance is for the underclass to “liberate” the old productive forces with new ones, thereby in essence creating a new tower upon which society will be built. While Marx argued that “liberation” often required revolution, he believed that it was an unavoidable consequence of technological change which itself is brought about by our own human nature:

Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction, e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language. …

Humans act upon the world, changing it and themselves; and in doing so they “make history”.

Going back to the Tower of Babel, we see how when the technology changed (in this case God changing their language), it affected the choices the people made. And those choices had a ripple effect throughout the society, eventually causing it to split into smaller ones.

Of course, the advent of a technology like the Internet would not necessarily cause a society to revolt, and obviously no one is suggesting that. But we can see how it can act as a disruptive force, creating a dissonance, not just within the world as a whole but within the Church itself. And the more disruptive the technology, the more conflict there will be. That’s why it’s so important for the Church to recognize both the corrupting and redeeming qualities of a given technology so that it can choose the right tool. As Dyer concludes:

Even today, technological change often results in a realignment of a society. When we introduce technological change in our families, jobs, or churches, we too will face a different set of choices, limitations, and abilities. Each new tool has a series of strengths and weaknesses and a unique set of values, and these factors work in concert to shape our world and influence our choices.

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
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 6: Approach
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption

When I was growing up, what we knew about each other wasn’t called data. It was called interaction, stories, and information. It came in the form of experience and shared events, gossip and oral history, and reports and report cards. Not every story told about us was unbiased, accurate, or even true. …

I had high hopes for Klout when it started, though I thought they were taking something close to impossible in trying to quantify influence. I was interested to see how they would approach it, hoping they might identify something useful toward sorting the gamers and spambots from the people who were making the social web work. Did I think they would identify true influence? Not really. But I thought they might find a stone of solid respect around engagement activity that was worth looking at. It seemed a big quest, but possible. …

[But] I became more aware that my data, your data, our stories are their product and they seemed to become less aware of the responsibility that might come with a offering product like that. …

In the process of opting out, I was faced with a list of options that asked why. I was looking for one that said “Changes in the algorithm” or “Too many changes.” I found it telling that the only choice I found that might describe my reason was “I don’t like my Klout Score.” That, of course, implies something that could be all about my ego and not in the least about their product.

It seems like there’s a new social network sprouting up every day, and each comes with its own numbers and metrics and ability to share that data to other social networks. And somewhere along the way, we’ve bought into this notion that all those numbers and metrics somehow mean something, that they define who we are, not just to strangers who “follow” us on the Internet but to ourselves. When I look at myself, do I see a devoted husband, follower of Christ, and loving father? Or do I see someone that has X number of Facebook friends, Y number of Twitter followers, and a Klout score of Z?

An app called Path recently relaunched, designed to be a “personal social network” in which you’re supposed to share literally everything (including when you go to sleep and when you wake up) with your most intimate circle of social network contacts. Oh, and it gives you the option to broadcast those entries to Facebook and Twitter as well since everyone else needs to know those things, too, right? And of course, Facebook recently bought check-in-turned-travel network Gowalla in order to enhance its Timeline feature so that users can document their entire lives (going back to when they were born!) on that network. Because apparently everyone on Facebook really needs to know what I was doing when I was 2. Can I just ask a dumb question here?

What the hell is wrong with people?

I’m sorry, but as much as I like Twitter and have learned to tolerate Facebook, I can’t for the life of me figure out why I need to share every single thing that happens in my entire life with the Internet. Or why anyone would care in the first place. First of all, the lady that wrote the article is exactly right: our lives are not data. All those numbers you see everywhere? They mean absolutely nothing. So stop chasing after them.

Secondly, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to share certain experiences with other friends, and I think there’s a lot of value to be found with building connections with people on sites like Twitter. But it’s one thing to share a unique experience and quite another to tweet every frickin’ thing that happens in your life 24/7. I’ve used Foursquare in the past and actually recently considered starting to use it again, but honestly the whole idea creeps me out a little bit. When I was regularly using Gowalla and Foursquare, I did it for the game aspect, the virtual rewards in the form of pins and badges. But I hated the feeling that I was somehow obligated to check in everywhere I went just to keep adding to my numbers. Stop for gas? Check in. Go through the drive-thru? Check in. Go on a date with my wife? Check in. When do I stop posting about my life and actually start living it?

Klout is supposed to measure your online “influence”. In other words, how big your “personal brand” is and therefore how important you are, but frankly it’s just a bunch of crap. Yeah, I want people to like me, and yeah, I love feeling admired and respected for what I do. But those numbers and scores and metrics will never equal respect and admiration. Besides, whatever happened to John 3:30? ”He [Jesus] must become greater; I must become less.” I guess the Klout folks didn’t get that memo.

Again, there’s nothing wrong being on Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare or whatever. But there’s a difference between living life and tweeting about it. And the sooner we draw the distinction, the quicker we can go back to being friends, not just followers.

Previously:
Quitter
Proof that in social networks, smaller is actually better
Who are you following?
Beacon, privacy, and this blog

Up to this point, it seems like we’ve mostly focused on the corrupting potential of technology. Technology, after all, isn’t neutral. While the raw materials may be (Kline’s “technology as hardware” and “technology as manufacturing”), how they’re used certainly isn’t (“technology as methodology” and “technology as usage”). We saw in Chapter 5 how Adam and Eve used technology in the form of fig lives after sinning and how their son Cain used technology to build the first city. In each case, the point was to separate themselves from God, moving from interdependence to a state of independence.

If the story ended there, it would be easy to conclude, then, that technology is inherently a bad thing. But thankfully it doesn’t.

Redemption.

Before I go any further, I have to say I had a really hard time with this chapter. Not because I disagreed with it, but because of how it’s organized. In discussing the redemptive capacity of technology, Dyer draws on several examples from the Old Testament: Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the Ark of the Covenant, the Mosaic Law, and the Ten Commandments. All of them are great examples and really well illustrated. However, the section on the Tower of Babel feels very out of place from the rest of the chapter. It almost feels like it belongs more in the “Rebellion” chapter or possibly even as its own chapter. And there were some things I wanted to say about that section but couldn’t figure out how to fit it with everything else, so I may actually come back to it in a separate post.

Anyway…

In illustrating these various examples of redemptive technologies, we see how God chooses to use them to further His plans. God didn’t have to flood the earth, but He chose to, and more importantly chose to save Noah and his family by way of an ark. But He didn’t just tell Noah to build a big boat, He gave him very specific instructions for how to build it. And God was very specific again when it came to the Ark of the Covenant, the Temple, and the Mosaic Law. He didn’t just give His people “technology as hardware” or “technology as manufacturing”, He gave them “technology as methodology” and “technology as usage” as well, leaving nothing to chance.

What’s even more interesting is how God often uses “bleeding edge” technology in ways we wouldn’t expect. Going back to the Garden, God’s gift to Adam and Eve of animal skins to use as clothing was more advanced than anything that had been invented by mankind up to that point. The blueprints given to Noah for the Ark were more detailed than anything he could’ve come up with on his own. And Dyer points out that even the use of a written phonetic language on the tablets of the Ten Commandments was extremely advanced for that time, with the first phonetic alphabet appearing between the nineteenth and fifteenth centuries B.C. and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea around 1444 B.C.

Certainly, the examples of “redemptive” technology don’t end there. Just think about relatively modern inventions such as the flush toilet, vaccinations, pasteurization, antibiotics, and mosquito netting. We may not consider those things to be “technology”, but they are, and they save countless lives throughout the world every day. Before modern toilets and sewer systems, cholera and other diseases ran rampant in cities. Vaccinations have virtually eradicated diseases such as smallpox, polio, and measles. And something as simple as mosquito netting for people living in Africa can significantly reduce their chance of contracting malaria.

But it’s not just the “technology as hardware” that can save people’s lives, it’s what we do with it. Over the Thanksgiving break our church went into the Terry Park neighborhood of north Fort Worth and spent four days fixing up people’s homes: replacing roofs, installing new windows and air conditioning units, repairing holes, putting in new insulation and walls, fixing electrical issues, painting, and doing yard work. Again, we don’t necessarily think of those things as technology, but they perfectly fit our definition of it as “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”. And it’s clear those practical purposes were redemptive ones, meeting the needs of our neighbors and showing God’s love in a tangible way to them.

But here’s my gripe. Yes, God uses these technologies to further His kingdom. Yes, technology can have a “redemptive capacity”. But the problem is, it’s far too easy as 21st-century Christians to believe that it’s technology in and of itself that is doing the redeeming. Instead of seeing those things as a means to an end, we see them as the end itself. We think that as a Church, we just need another website, another Twitter feed, another Facebook page, another video or app or book. If our church isn’t growing enough, maybe we need more multimedia in our worship services or our staff needs to go to another conference. Whatever the next thing is, that’s what we need. That’s what’ll save the world. I had a friend years ago who was a general contractor, and one day in Sunday school he kept repeating that he needed some kind of tool, some thing to help him be a better Christian. In a world where “there’s an app for that”, we’ve fallen for the lie that technology will fix everything.

But that’s not what the Bible says. In Dyer’s examples, God used technology as a means to His end, a bridge from one world to another. But it wasn’t the technology itself that saved His people, it was God working through that technology that saved them. When we chase after technology just for the sake of it — whether it’s “redemptive” or not — we miss the point. In Exodus 25:40, God tells Moses:

“Be sure that you make everything according to the pattern I have shown you here on the mountain.”

God wanted Moses to make, to create, to do technology, but it was only by following His blueprints that those things had any real power. In the same way, we as Christians should remember that although technology can be a good thing, although it can save lives and help us be salt and light to a world in desperate need of it, it’s only when we follow God’s plans that it can truly be called redemptive.

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
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 6: Approach

And I’d just like to point out that I called it back in September. Well, sorta.

When Gowalla relaunched as “Gowalla 4.0″ in September, it eliminated the gamification aspects of the service (the pins, stamps, and items) and even the whole check-in concept itself. Users would instead “create stories” and tag people in their stories and browse and share travel guides. The UI was gorgeous as always, but there was no longer any real incentive to use it.

As I wrote:

I’ve had some time to think about it since then, and it occurred to me that in the process of becoming unlike Foursquare, Gowalla has become a sort of stripped down version of Facebook. Of course, Facebook doesn’t have the travel guides that Gowalla does, but the user activity is much the same. I’m creating a story (status update) about some place I’ve gone, not for virtual rewards but for the sheer socialness of it. Stories are meant to be social objects complete with photos, comments, tagging of friends, and sharing beyond a user’s private profile. Sounds a lot like Facebook, no? …

Of course, you can port your Gowalla stories to Facebook or Twitter or even to Foursquare, but I guess it comes back to incentive. If the social value of my Gowalla stories is primarily only when they’re tweeted or posted to Facebook, then why create them in the first place when I can just go straight to Facebook and post them there?

So, while I didn’t directly predict that Facebook would buy Gowalla, I did explain that Gowalla had morphed into its own version of Facebook. Really, the acquisition is just a technicality.

What does that mean exactly for the two companies? Will we see Gowalla’s travel guides adopted by Facebook, maybe even some of its UI elements (stamps, etc.)? I honestly don’t know. I think it’s a good move for Facebook, though. Clearly their Timeline concept was very similar to Gowalla’s stories concept, and both are battling in the location-based-service arena against check-in juggernaut Foursquare, deal site Groupon, the still-unpredictable Google+, and even upstart Path. There’s no question Facebook wants to be the social network that everyone uses to check-in with and share their experiences, but so far that piece of the puzzle has been somewhat elusive for them. Their Timeline feature has stalled, only rolling out to developers who go out of their way to get it. And while you can check-in with Facebook’s mobile app, it’s not a core component like it is in Foursquare’s, and it doesn’t have the “discovery” aspect to it that Gowalla and Foursquare promote.

The biggest irony in this, though, is that the news of the acquisition comes exactly one day after I deleted my Gowalla account. I had stopped using it in September, and of the people I was friends with on the site, only a couple still used it, and even that was sparse. I saw several of them move to Foursquare, but ironically I actually started using Facebook more.

I guess I saw it coming.

Previously:
Gowalla and the death of the check-in
Gowalla: Going out with a thud
I can’t even pretend to care about Facebook anymore

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