Technicism even has a concept of salvation and eternal life, which will occur when the post-singularity computers invent tools that enable all humans to live forever, ushering in the post-human era.
Instead of valuing the abstract and the theoretical-like text, an image represents a particular point in time. Instead of being cognitively oriented like books, images tend to evoke emotional responses. When we think about our current image-saturated culture, we find that people often care more about how they feel about something than whether it is logically correct or morally right.
skill of searching for and accessing information rather than acquiring information, committing it to memory, and allowing it to shape our minds and hearts. Tim Challies writes, “As we increasingly dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of information, we grow increasingly unable or unwilling to distinguish between knowledge and information.”2 If all we do is access information rather than acquire it, then our capacity for true wisdom is diminished.
when we spend all of our time scanning and accessing information, we often find ourselves suffering from “information overload.”
Scientists at Temple University have shown that when we surround ourselves with many different pieces of information, our prefrontal cortex (the part of our brain that makes decisions) simply shuts off. Information is often helpful in making good decisions, but “with too much information people’s decisions make less and less sense.”
Information overload may not just shut down decision-making — it may also inflate the pride people take in feeling “informed.” Access to knowledge becomes a form of power, where the appearance of making a well-researched decision matters more than the quality of the decision itself.worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information—and especially of stressful information—is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that.
Crisis periods (like a pandemic) amplify the cycle: stress drives people toward constant news consumption, which in turn degrades the deeper cognition needed to process what they are reading. The medium becomes both the symptom and the accelerant.The values of information access, speed, and interruption are not themselves morally wrong, but in a sinful world our tendency is toward complication, distraction, and chaos rather than simplicity, contemplation, and order.
Our question then should not be “Is it real?” because connecting online is just as “real” as talking on the phone or sending a letter. The better question is, what are the rules of the medium and what are the underlying messages and patterns that emerge from those rules?
74 percent of girls surveyed said that girls use social networking sites to seem “cooler than they really are.” Girls who said they have low self-esteem were more likely than other girls to portray themselves as “sexy” or “crazy” in their profile.
“Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.”
friends need to continually post things about themselves—what they are thinking, feeling, and doing—for their friends to read about. To maintain this pattern, we have to regularly think about what we’re thinking, feeling, and doing and then decide which of those things to communicate.
when we do community online we have to think about ourselves much more than when we do community offline.
Even when I merely log in to read what others have said, I am immediately confronted with a picture of myself. When we go online, we tend to think that we’re looking through a window into the lives of our friends, but, like an actual window, this one always shows us a reflection of ourselves before it shows us what’s inside.
Again, the statistics themselves are not sinful. The problem is that the more we use it, the more tempted we are to value what the technology values—numbers—over what the Scriptures would have us value.
joy is never complete until he is physically present with his community. And yet, aware of this problem, John used writing because he understood both its helpfulness and its problematic value system. From that perspective he was able to use technology in service of the embodied communal life that Christ taught him.
Our problem is not that technologically mediated relationships are unreal, nor is the problem that all online communication is self-focused and narcissistic. Rather, the danger is that just like the abundance of food causes us to mistake sweet food for nourishing food, and just like the abundance of information can drown out deep thinking, the abundance of virtual connection can drown out the kind of life-giving, table-oriented life that Jesus cultivated among his disciples.
The people on our phones are beautiful and interesting, and we can ignore them when they are not. However, the world in our pockets doesn’t give out rewards for faithfulness and long-suffering, only for the moment-by-moment interactions it requires, urging us to return and return again for a fleeting feeling of connection.
everything we do with our tools—scheduling appointments on our phones, heating up meals in the microwave, reading updates from friends and family on social networks—should all be directed toward enriching the few, precious face-to-face encounters we have in our busy world.
Although one does not necessarily have to use a technology to understand it, a good experiment can do something even more important—it can help a person from one techno-culture understand the people who live in another techno-culture.
In my profession, I’ve found it difficult to disconnect for several days at a time, so instead I try to make disconnection a regular part of every day. In the morning when I get up, I avoid checking email right away, and in the evening when I come home, I don’t use the computer until the kids are in bed.
An interesting example of making community-based technology decisions can be found in Eric Brende’s book Better Off in which he describes living for eighteen months in a small, technologically minimalist community very similar to an Amish village.
