Amazon and Google (Alphabet) had combined marketing expenditures worldwide in 2019 of over 37 billion. BILLION. This matters because I as a Western modern American Christian might have a blind spot for the technologies marketed to us daily, which, to be clear, isn’t the worst thing in the world. I own a lot of Apple products, so what? The danger, of course, is less that I use their device (although that has its own dangers) and more that I adopt the beliefs, views, values of the IT giants and the economic ideals that gave birth to them. As Carr would recognize, what is the intellectual ethic being transmitted to me by the use of this tool? This blind spot is increasingly an untenable space for the church to reside in and one that is deforming our communities and dehumanizing those we say we desire to discover their full humanity in the way of Jesus. So, a little critical thought given to digital technology as “just a tool” would at least think through the following four assumptions:
- The assumption that you can be present without physical presence.
- The assumption that digital technology has similar value for causing and cultivating transformation as it does in communicating information.
- The assumption that you can baptize any assumption or cognitive framework.
- The assumption that the myth of progress is straight up truth.
Assumptions: Present without physical presence
So let’s start with the first assumption, the assumption that you can be present without physical presence. First, I would say that this is an explicit assumption most technological devices or companies adhere to currently, promising presence without physical presence. To get to the heart of the matter (see what I did there…) accepting this assumption and living it out reduces our human experience and promotes disembodiment and dislocation. __________________________Jesus.became.incarnate.in.a.human.body.___________________________God convincingly validated being an embodied creature, first by creating humanity in that vein (I promise I won’t stop…) and second by assuming flesh in the incarnation. To be present in this world, means in some sense, to be there in a body (not created by you), located in a temporal spatial sense. Technology often, perhaps necessarily, treats this basic created reality as limitations to be “free” from. But your body and living in an integrous embodied way – matters to God. God created you, meaning at the very least, your body. Digital technology operating with this assumption in the midst of COVID-19 may be a fine stop-gap measure, but it is not a tool that can sustainably promote ordinary embodied human existence. To be present, to your pain, to your children, to your family, to an enemy, to a spouse, to yourself, means we bear the awesome weight of reality in the crucible of our own body – not mediated by the pixels on a screen. Digital technology reinforces through the operative assumptions a mindset of body as limitation to be overcome rather than body as gift with limitations to be embraced to reach full maturity. (This conversation could go on much longer and I will continue it in future posts. *See Dorothy Sayers or Craig Gay for more specific work on how the incarnation specifically relates to our technological society.)
Assumptions: Value for Transformation?
The second assumption is that digital technology has similar value for causing and cultivating transformation as it does in communicating information. But is digital technology equally valuable for the processes of communicating information as for causing or cultivating transformation? Good question, which again hopefully directs you to the understanding of what genuinely Christian ends (purposes/telos) are. DT is an amazing tool and reflective of our human creativity imaging God as Creator. Modern machine technology has produced incredible advances and wonders in a variety of life arenas particularly medically, militarily, and agriculturally, among others. These advances and wonders are often heralded to the neglect of the immense pain, suffering and oppression that happened and continues to this day which makes one wonder about the trade-off costs and who is really benefitting from all these advances…To be direct, all these advances produce other problems and consequences. Technology, though, did not create the human capacity for good or evil – we created technology with the resources God graciously gave us. Technology has extended many of our human capacities, which seems to have extended as well the impact of our good… and our evil. However, the point I want to make here is that technology on its own has little formative value in shaping character or wisdom positively. A more precise way of saying this would be to say that the formative value of DT is neutral at best and more often than not contra to the formation of character or wisdom. In particular, DT is expressly created to be intuitive, easy, convenient, and above all, efficient. If its not, we upgrade to the next best app or product that promises a frictionless or less-frictioned existence. As a society this lack of friction conspires with convenience to create an environment that cannot support the development of character or wisdom. Or at best, creates an alternative world of ease, convenience, and personas that promise a soft, machine enabled escape from the hard, human world of embodied existence.
Rather than innovating more technological measures, what if churches imagined and innovated around how to form persons of wisdom and character in the midst of our current cultural moment? What if the level of our incarnated engagement was a measurement, not simply 3 second engagement online. What if responsibility and restraint characterized our use of this powerful tool as leaders? What if innovation followed interrogation? What if we envisioned a way of life together that is more compelling than convenient, more inspiring than easy, more wise than trendy, more organic than engineered, and moving unswervingly toward the formation of virtue and character? What if the Gospel is not reducible to a consumptive streamable commodity, even with our best intentions?
To put it simply, DT can do some things really well – but not all things, and maybe not the most important things. Digital technology is a great tool or medium for information. It promises to extend our capacity for communication and information storage, access, and sharing. It is an incredible platform which can be used to promote truth, advocate on behalf of justice and equality, and used to communicate basic information about the Gospel. Perhaps even more powerfully, it is a tool to share incredible stories making meaning of our past, present, future in light of our common humanity. All that said, these tools can absolutely function to reduce the very capacity they promise to extend. Twitter for example is an incredibly powerful platform. Yet it’s widespread use, at least anecdotally, does not seem to have helped our society communicate in meaningful ways about the most important issues we face in our common humanity. The tool/medium influences not just what we post, but how we think about information and social interaction in our society. However, it seems that churches can absolutely use these platforms and do so to share information. That is the world we live in and often it can be an incredible tool to connect people and communicate information. However, it is another thing altogether to outsource embodied spiritual formation in the way of Jesus to our digital technology simply because it is so good at extending our capacity to communicate information.
This expectation that meaningful transformation can happen through the means of an online experience/digital technology is perplexing to me. Transformation is our end/telos, so that part I love! However, my basic assumption is that transformation happens in analog relationships (**check out Analog Church by Jay Kim) like Jesus with the 12 disciples. Buildings can help or hinder as a tool toward transformation, but it at least assumes physical presence and proximate space. Digital technology on the other hand propagates a disembodied way of being in the world, which wars against the end we employ it toward, transformation. Information is a necessary building block of transformation, but is not sufficient for transformation. Can information be shared that initiates and even catalyzes transformation? Absolutely. But the Gospel cannot be reduced simply to information especially as mediated via bits and bytes. This raises the important question of how you view the Gospel and what it basically is? A second question, related to the first, is, what does it mean to BE the church, the body of Christ? Not what does it mean to come to church, watch church, or stream church, but BE the body of Christ. In my opinion, normative for Christians should be an embodied way of BEing the church which could (and I think should) propose responsible limits to our use of technology. These limits need to be rooted in what it means to be human as understood through an exploration of key Christian doctrines of Creation, Fall, Incarnation, and Redemption.
To Be Human 