Tools can be thought of in a limited way as our technologies, how humanity exerts and expresses its will over surroundings and circumstances. Nicholas Carr in his stellar work, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, helpfully examines the formative shape of our tools and I want to share briefly what I learned. He roughly divides human tools or technologies into four categories (following sociologists) 1) those extending physical strength – like the plow; 2) those extending the range or sensitivity of senses – like the microscope or geiger counter; 3) those allowing us to reshape nature and natural limitations – GMO corn, birth control, and a reservoir; 4) tools we use to extend or support mental powers like finding and classifying information, sharing knowledge, making calculations, expanding memory capacity, etc. – typewriter, map, book, school, library, computer, internet. Carr, borrowing a term from Jack Goody, calls this last category our “intellectual technologies.” (Carr, 44)
The specific premise Carr puts forward is that while all tools can influence thoughts or cognitive frameworks (he gives the example of the plow changing the farmers outlook and perspective on agriculture) “it is our intellectual technologies that have the greatest and most lasting power over what and how we think.” He continues, “Every intellectual technology…embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.”(Carr, 45) I believe this implicit ethic also carries assumptions of how the world should work, what a human is, and how those two relate. And if this is true, then responsible use would require us to think through not just the physical effects of looking at a computer screen all day (thanks my two years in IT) but also the intellectual ethic that my computer, device, internet might be streaming to me as well. But before we make that case, Carr highlights two examples of intellectual technologies and their incredible formative power in human society: the map and the clock.
Maps are a way of measuring intellectual maturation, the younger we are typically there is but the slightest resemblance between what is drawn and “reality.” As kids grow the “topographical similarity” grows and more realism evolves. Then beyond just using your senses one can use scientific tools to abstractly represent reality. As Carr says, a “visual realism that uses scientific calculations.” The change of maps as crude drawings on cave walls to 3D representations based on the minutest measurements shows the revolutionary change of recording experience IN space to abstraction OF space. This ability to interact more and more abstractly in one arena shaped and advanced the evolution of abstract thought in broader society. Carr’s argument is that the map did not just record how we viewed the world, but the progress of the map changed how we viewed and thought about the world – namely in more abstract terms.
“What the map did for space – translate a natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon – another technology, the mechanical clock, did for time. It revolutionized society’s relationship with time and increased the desire and need to measure.” (Carr, 41) Carr also argues the clock was at least partly responsible for the belief in an “independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” Cue the Enlightenment. The history recorded by Carr (and what he draws from Lewis Mumford) is valuable and worth a read. The key point here is these two intellectual technologies embodied an intellectual ethic. “A similar one, placing a new stress on measurement and abstraction, on perceiving and defining forms beyond those apparent to the senses.” (Carr, 45) These ethics are rarely observable by the inventors or early adopters – but are observed as the ethic integrates into society and displaces existing tools and their established ethics.
Carr believes that these intellectual ethics have the most formative power in society – beyond the invention or device itself. The ethic is the message a tool most powerfully transmits and enforces into the minds of users and culture at large. But what if we think we control our tools? And that really, well, they are just a tool and nothing more with little formative power. (Well, keep reading…)
Determinism vs Instrumentalism
This introduces an old tension that Carr highlights and I want to share briefly. Technological determinism argues technological progress is an autonomous force outside humanity’s control. Carr quotes Emerson, “Things are in the saddle/And ride mankind.” McLuhan portrayed this in grim prose writing, humans become little more than “the sex organs of the machine world.” (Have you ever watched the Matrix…?) Marx, Ellul, McLuhan populate the determinist position in varying degrees. On the flip side “instrumentalists believe technological tools to be neutral artifacts, entirely subservient to the wishes of the user.” Instruments in this sense are what humans use to advance OUR ends. Tools have no ends of their own. James Carey stated, “Technology is technology, it is a means for communication and transportation over space, nothing more.” (Carr, 46)
Both sides have important points in the debate. However, I lean very much to the determinist side. When taking a broader social or historical view, the determinist position gains credence. Has the progress of technology really been under our control? And even if control is in our hands, the unforeseen consequences and influences of these technologies cannot be accounted for within our stated ends. In other words, technology does absolutely extend human capacities toward human ends, but also powerfully reshapes that activity and meaning, perhaps even redefining what “human” ends can be. The point being, whether instrumentalist or determinist, the tools you use shape you. The tools you use, especially intellectual tools like digital technology, carry and transmit an ethic that is the most formative part of that tool’s formative value. This ethic can form our horizons of imagination, our patterns of thought and social interaction, and changes some of our most basic assumptions about humanity, creation, or even God. This ethic or matrix of assumptions any tool freights with it needs to be crucially interrogated. The tool itself might be amazing, but what intellectual ethic is it transmitting and what sort of ethic is it displacing? A special technological N95 mask may not be available to slow the spread of this transmittable ethic, but certainly a conversation that asks hard questions, seeks wisdom, and is committed to truly Christian ends can go a long way to protecting and pursuing the health of the church. This is the conversation I hope to engage and encourage.
In summary: to equate a building and digital tech as tools without evaluating the underlying ethic is perhaps too simplistic an equation.
*I seriously recommend reading The Shallows. Especially if you are currently engaged in ministry. Let me know your thoughts if you read the book!
To Be Human 