the tindog coffeehouse

The Internet is a funny thing. For all its apparent permanance, it’s often times a very transient thing. Technology changes. The way people access the Internet today is drastically different than the way they did a few years ago and is lightyears ahead of the days of dial-up. And the way we interact with the Internet is different, too. The first time I launched a website on this domain, way back in 1998, it was as a “home page”, which is to say a static HTML page (built with FrontPage 98) that had a few images and some text but nothing in the way of dynamically-changing content.

Today we not only expect dynamic content but social interaction as well. Every news article and blog post is followed by a comments section. Readers are prompted to like, tweet, and share it. It’s more than just about generating pageviews, it’s about cultivating a following.

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This is Part 11 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. (Thankfully for you, it’s also my last.)

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.

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This is Part 10 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 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?

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As you probably know by now, I’ve been blogging my way through John Dyer’s From the Garden to the City, a book about the redeeming and corrupting powers of technology and how that impacts the Christian Church. Of course, when we talk about technology in that context, we tend to assume that means the Internet and social networking, but other than the physical mediums of our modern-day telecommunications, we tend to forget that none of that is really new. In fact, the social media of today bears a striking resemblance to the social networks of 16th century Europe, which allowed Martin Luther’s charges against the Catholic Church to spread like wildfire.

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:

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This is Part 8 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

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.

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I’m currently blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A few days ago, I covered most of Chapter 7, titled “Redemption”. But there was one section I didn’t get to, which dealt with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

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.

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