The backwards effect of technology

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. - Aldous Huxley


I have been on Facebook for several years now, and it has served a great purpose in connecting me with my friends and family in ways that otherwise not be possible. Technology like a good knife cuts both ways. It can be bad or good. Clearly stated, technology is never intrinsically evil but a neutral means that can be used towards a good or evil end. For example: go surf the internet, you can find plenty of porn or solid biblical preaching.

Yet when the information highway becomes a community things can get a little tricky. Technology may not be intrinsically evil but it is intrinsically deceptive. It can act as a replacement for reality. The Swiss novelist, Max Frisch gives an insightful, tongue in cheek, definition of technology that gets at this problem. "Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." [1] We can use it as a replacement for a reality. Reality does not have a delete button Facebook does. Philosopher Lewis Mumford writes about a dangerous presupposition that enables such deception.

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences

Having said that, I think it is necessary to be vigilant and reflective about the virtual world. A good practical discipline is asking penetrating questions about ourselves in relation to our usage of teck, like Facebook. One question I use to regularly examine myself is: “Am I interacting with people on Facebook but not in real life?” In other words, there is a real danger in thinking that a virtual community is real community. It is not. We can make it a substitution for flesh and blood community where life is shared. Human interaction is more than information and sentiment which is the existent of experience in a virtual world. As of yet you can't pray in real time with someone, and feel a reassuring and comforting hand on your back.

So - ask yourself good questions, keep posting your Status update (when my wife was in the hospital, it was the way i kept people in the loop on how to pray for us). Also don't forget to log off and go see a friend, go make friends because friending someone is not the same.

End notes

[1] Frisch's idea of technological omnipotence is also insightful. It is the human belief that everything is possible and technology will allow humans to control everything. A type of god complex that permeates modern society

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad