What is a tool? According to Wikipedia (truth incarnate), “A tool is an object used to extend the ability of an individual to modify features of the surrounding environment.” Humans, of course, are not the only animals able to use tools (use might be a strong word for what some of us do with tools), but we are the only species able to use tools to create other tools. The capacity to create tools and use them to shape the world – literally shaped, reshaped, and formed society as we know it today. In many ways, human history is a history of the tools we have created, adopted, used, and then discarded for a new tool along the way. I immediately think of the history of weapons and the various ways these tools have reshaped hunting, warfare, or society through their availability and use. Tools extend our capacities to shape the world – like a spear or hammer.
Technology as a tool has some unique characteristics. Andy Crouch, writing in Tech-Wise Family, thinks what makes technology as tool NEW is two things: 1) it works and 2) it is everywhere. To take the latter first, “tools in human history were limited. They were in specific places” or arenas. In other words, most tools were limited to a certain context or place, like a hoe for your garden. Today tech is increasingly and quickly filling every arena of life or reshaping that arena of life to fit into the tech world. (More on that from Jacque Ellul) Second, tools helped humans work, but now tech largely works on its own. Tools took skill and practice while technology’s almost divine promise is ease & convenience of use. It also simply works on its own – think of a robotic vacuum.
This “easy everywhere” is characteristic of modern technology and separates it from the nature of previous simple or even complex tools. Much could be said from Crouch’s work (it is great), but it is enough to note now while digital technology resembles tools in important ways – it also has some unique characteristics that set it apart. This liminal space of difference is often overlooked as the Church navigates through our cultural moment of media saturation, device proliferation, and Covid-19. Legitimately, the Church has seen technology as a tool to help bridge this current challenge. Just as legitimately, continued adoption and usage of digital tech in the church needs attention, interrogation, and collective imagination for a responsible ethic with digital technology. And if not, we will undoubtedly create a new “discipleship challenge” at least as large as our current uncritical embrace of a “digital solution.” So, next post we will start an interrogation.
To Be Human 