D.A. Carson has a wonderfully thoughtful and well-written editorial in this month’s Themelios web magazine. It’s not particularly long and it will be a provocative way to think about this week’s open mic question, so go read it and come back.
The Question is: How would you evaluate the overall effect of technology on your development as a serious, balanced, useful disciple of Jesus?
Carson makes the points many of us could make from our own experience: technology fascinates, entertains, amuses, captivates and addicts. We gain information, access and speed, but we gain access to universes of useless and less than useful information. We occupy our minds at a high rate of speed, and we reflect less and less. We read more online and we read less of what we ought to read. We stay in touch and we say less and less. We acquire more and more gadgets and we don’t know where to stop. We see our children down the same path and call it normal.
Is it normal? And is all of this helping us become what we say we want to become?
Is Carson on target or is it just Luddite ranting?
What do YOU say? (Keep comments to a reasonable length and PLEASE don’t go overboard with your detailed history of gadget acquisition. Thanks.)
Cey,
I want to clarify my points.
First I have to agree with many that the Internet, just like any technology or any tool can be used for great good . . . or great harm. The same laptop and high speed Internet connection that someone used late at night to download disgusting images of child porn can be used the next day (by someone differently I assume) to do research about the evils of exploitation of women and children in Zimbabwe. . . with a hope of giving money, time and prayer to do something to stop it.
One positive way, I was alluding to, in how technology can be used for reform is exposing oppressed people to freedom (or exposing free people to the evils of oppression . . . which otherwise would have been hidden). Before technology this was done through books, scrolls, secret notes and eye witnesses.
You say, Repressive governments around the world merely suppress the internet as well in their countries. While that is true in part, that is certainly not an absolute. There is no paper-shield that prevents the Chinese from interacting with free people through technology, though they may try.
This photo; http://image72.webshots.com/172/3/79/8/2874379080103598246uznsbT_fs.jpg
is myself and a friend on the top of a building in Islamabad, Pakistan a couple of years ago. We are connected to the Internet via two small note books . . . one a notebook computer and one a small satellite Internet receiver. While Islamabad is relatively free, what is interesting, two days later we were surfing the uncensored WWW from deep within NW Pakistan, in a pro-Taliban region.
While the locals can not afford the technology, which we had . . . virtually every village has satellite dishes for uncensored TV. There they watch CNN . . . but they can also (unfortunately) watch the Playboy channel . . . or worse, Daystar. (rolled eyes here)
I am very familiar with how missionaries must work in “closed†countries as I was one in a Moslem country. While we did not have Internet when I was there . . . I have many friends who still reside in Moslem countries. They do have to take caution (so not to get kicked out) but I’ve also corresponded directly with Moslems, who seemed to feel comfortable in discussing their (not so Muslim) ideas.
The last point . . . good heavens, of course modern (digital) technology had nothing to do with the religious freedoms which we enjoy here. You are most correct to point back to prior historical developments. All that I was saying, if the tools of digital technology had be available to them, and if they chose to use it for good . . . reform could have come at a faster pace and earlier. On the same hand, if the printing press had never been invented, the reform would have come at a slower pace and later in history.
Like the Chinese, or the Taliban, Rome may have wanted to monitor the interactions (via Internet) of the early reform thinkers . . . they could not have had a impenetrable electronic wall.
This may have been mentioned already, but a question that sticks out to me right away after reading the post is:
Doesn’t question the moral rightness of technology pose a false dichotomy between the message and the medium?
While I for one can see that a church reverting to pre-dital printed bulletins would not necessarily loose any spirituality thereby, I still am inclined to percieve both mediums as conveying the same life changing message. The medium therefore becomes mostly irrelevant or amoral in and of itself. The internet being used for pornography doesn’t make the internet necessarily bad. Pornography is bad, regardless of how it is used.
It seems that asking this question is similar to the question of whether or not modern music is evil or fit to be used in the church for the worship of God. Has rock’n'roll been used for many an evil? Yes! But so have you and I. I believe the God I worship specializes in redeeming what has fallen and using for good what others intend for evil.
Consequently technology in and of itself is incapable of having a positive or negative moral or spiritual effect on a person apart from the intended use.
Does anybody else see it this way? Or am I missing something pretty important here…
Hey! check out how Newspring’s youth ministry is using today’s culture as tool to make His name famous – bradcooper.us post from December 17