19 February 2011

Technology

I have a fraught relationship with technology. Part of me appreciates it for its utility--the massive amounts of information it places at our fingertips, the resources for communication available through it, the ease with which it allows us to navigate previously difficult and/or time-consuming life functions. Conversely, part of me hates the alternatives of each of these aforementioned benefits: the deluge of information makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, I have seen relationships ruined by couples reigniting old flames through social networking tools, and it has furthered my generation’s psychological tendency to only value the easily attained and instantly gratified pleasures of this life.

Two completely unrelated events, both in terms of magnitude and importance, have spurred me to think a lot about technology recently. The first event is the subject of this post. The second will come next.

The first of these events was spilling water on my laptop a few weeks ago (if it needed explanation this is the event of lesser import). My beloved HP was ruined and we are a computerless family. We borrow one from our pastor now, but for two whole weeks (how long this seems without technology) we had no computer, no television. And it was awesome. There was no compulsive checking of e-mail and facebook, no lure of old seasons of 30 Rock on Netflix, no internet-based sudoku websites (seriously, addictive). I read more, wrote stuff out by hand (even letters to friends), and enjoyed more conversations with people. I got bored. Do you realize how hard won the achievement of boredom is these days? You never have to be bored anymore. I have a Netflix queue with over 30 movies waiting to be watched at my leisure. Pitchfork.com is filled with new “it” bands for me to listen to. Youtube has videos of monkeys… monkeys! Boredom is so rare and so oppressive to the modern twentysomething that we have no idea how to react when it comes. You know what I did? I went and talked to people, face to face. I thought of and prayed for people I hadn’t thought about for months.  Occasionally, I even sat around bored and decided I needed a hobby other than reading (welcome back to my life, running and basketball). It was incredibly liberating.

I have struggled, since getting a computer back, at maintaining these better alternatives. It is much more difficult to make the decision to not watch a video on Netflix when you have a computer already logged in to Netflix than it is when you don’t have a computer. But here is what I have to be careful about, and I feel that many other  anti-technology (Luddites is the historical/snobbish term for this) advocates need to be careful about this as well: the tendency to assign agency to amoral technological artifacts. Or, in other words, blaming technology for being undisciplined in the way we spend our time as if the technology has some sort of mastery over an individual by virtue of its existence. Facebook is neither inherently good nor inherently evil--it is what we use it for. If we use it to stay in touch with far off friends and family and post pictures of our family vacations and we check it rarely and without compulsion, facebook is fine, good even. But, if we use it to chat with ex-girlfriends or boyfriends when we are married or we can’t resist the temptation to login to the point that it prevents us from accomplishing diligently the tasks set before us and we spend all day scanning its pages looking up the inconsequential minutiae of other’s lives, then facebook is a bad thing. We are the ones who give it whatever power it has. There are other websites which are inherently bad, but we do injustice to claim that all websites are that way.

The key then for me is not simply cutting myself off from technology in some sort of monastic asceticism, but confronting my own desire to be entertained cheaply (technology fulfills this basic desire very well) rather than doing the harder work of studying, engaging in conversation, or exercising, etc. If you are an essentialist, like I am, you believe that every person is born with a basic human nature that we are basically stuck with and it has consisted of basically the same sorts of tendencies, proclivities, dispositions, attitudes, excesses, in a word, problems, since the dawn of man and will continue relatively unabated until the end of this whole thing. Therefore, as Uncle Ellis told Ed Tom Bell, “What you got ain’t nothin’ new.” People have always sought indolence over hard work; ease over difficulty; entertainment over intense mental concentration. What is different about our era is that we have more leisure time on average than any society has ever had before, and we have more egalitarian access to cheap entertainment.

A student in my Renaissance course was talking about how easy it was for Erasmus of Rotterdam to be as prolific in his writing and reading as he was because, and I quote, “he didn’t have anything better to do, like watch TV.” My professor asked the student to qualify the word “better” in his comment. After a moment’s reflection, the student returned, “Ok, easier.” In our house church meeting a few weeks ago we were talking about a passage where Jesus leaves the disciples and prays throughout the entire night. Jokingly, but halfway serious as well, a girl said that it was easy for Jesus, not only because he was God in the flesh, but because he had nothing else better/easier to do.

To me this is crazy (though I believe it a good deal of the time). Imagining it was any easier to pray through the night without youtube denies the basic pull of human nature. Likewise, imagining intense study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew was any easier in the days of dimly lit studies and handwritten treatises is insane. If the tools with which to learn were any accurate barometer, we would be far more learned today than our ancestors ever managed to be. I have the Greek New Testament a click away right now, and another click would get me a translation into English vernacular. It is always hard to be disciplined, it always goes against human nature to choose work and diligence and difficulty over the easy road. Let us not be glib, we simultaneously live in a unique age and an age just like all others.

Sidenote: I have all too often seen the people who abstain from facebook or some other web phenomenon claiming some measure of self-righteousness for their bold forbearance, as if refraining from an innocuous website is a measure of righteousness. They make a personal decision, based on individual preference or conviction, and then when others do not make the same move, they pretend to be better than them for acting on a personal conviction. This is a dangerous thing. I had a friend one time who decided it was always wrong to go even a single mile per hour over the speed limit. I, and others, were otherwise convicted and he would get irate when we got places faster than him. If you make a personal decision, based on personal conviction not spelled out explicitly by Scripture, do not absolutize this decision. Do not set yourself up above others for doing something that is not in any way praiseworthy.

Ideally, I will pursue things that override my desire for cheap entertainment and ease. People do this all of the time. Even today. Their lives have an ambition, though. A goal. They have a plan and they want to see that plan accomplished. It is hard to sacrifice the fleeting pleasures of entertainment for the lasting fulfillment of hard work, discipline, and a devoted life. But to imagine satisfaction comes any other way is a denial of the idea that we were perhaps created to be something more than consumers whose one ambition is to be entertained. But the choice is our own, we are not bound by technology unless we fetter ourselves.

No comments:

Post a Comment