Isolate
Modern technology isolates us. Or so we are told. We have all read the stories counseling us to ditch our cell phones so that we can have real relationships with the people around us. We each have our anecdotes of tech isolation, such as a room full of people distracted by technology, when they should instead be having deep, meaningful conversations with each other. It seems like this problem gets worse over time as technology further invades our lives.
MIT professor Sherry Turkle documents perspective in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, bemoaning the poor substitute that Facebook interactions provide compared to face-to-face conversations. She laments the loss of freedom as social interactions are objectified. Does technology necessarily pull us apart and dampen the very characteristics that make us human?
By nature, humans are relational. We are created to live in fellowship -- in families, neighborhoods, churches, and regions. God calls us to live in harmonious community with our neighbors and to offer hospitality to the stranger. Theologian Colin Gunton goes so far as to say that this relational character is fundamental to our humanity. He notes that we are
“...social beings, so that of both God and man it must be said that they have their being in their personal relatedness: their free relation-in-otherness…. All things are what they are by being particulars constituted by many and various forms of relation. Relationality is thus the transcendental which allows us to learn something of what it is to say that all created people and things are marked by their coming from and returning to the God who is himself, in his essential and inmost being, a being of relation.”
(Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 229)
If inter-relatedness is key to the created order and inherent to our humanity, then we should indeed be concerned with Turkle’s thesis that technology draws us apart. If Turkle is right, then technology is a problem.
Is Technology the Problem?
Deciding whether technology is harmful is important. Technology is interwoven throughout our society and culture so deeply that it makes it rather difficult to untangle. In 1985, Al Wolters published a short but influential book called Creation Regained that clarifies two possibilities to consider. Wolters claims that “the task of the Christian is to discern structure and direction….structure denotes the ‘essence’ of a creaturely thing, the kind of creature it is by virtue of God's creational law. Direction, by contrast, refers to a sinful deviation from that structural ordinance and renewed conformity to it in Christ.” (Creation Regained, p. 72-73)
Wolters would have us look at every aspect of our world and apply this bifocal lens, identifying the underlying creational structure and also identifying the corruption of sin that turns that creational good towards evil. Structure is like a magnet that is naturally aligned to attract us to God and toward the good purposes of his creation; direction is the sin that pivots the magnet away from that alignment so that it repels us from the good we should do. The magnet is not the problem. The problem is the direction that we point it. Thus, our next question is whether technology is part of the creational structure or is the sinful misdirection of it.
Technology is the development of natural materials into tools. A hammer is an example of primitive technology that combines wood and iron into a tool that is useful for pounding nails. A smartphone is an example of modern technology that combines metal, glass, plastic, and a host of other materials into a tool that is useful for communicating by voice, email, video, messaging, and more.
From the beginning, the cultivation and formation of creation was part of God’s calling to us as his stewards (Genesis 1:28). Thus, technology is part of the creational order, part of the structure. Like the magnet, technology can be sinfully turned askew so that it is directed away from God’s intended purposes. As an inherent part of the good creation, technology cannot be inherently evil. However, it might be sinfully directed, and thus we must still consider whether Professor Turkle is right about the harmful effects of technology.
Facilitate
As a counterpoint to Turkle, meet Rutgers Professor Keith Hampton. Like Turkle, he is a professional observer of human nature in the context of technology. He is a people watcher. However, unlike most of us, who might sit at the mall or airport and idly watch people go by, he watches intently. Along with his students, he painstakingly analyzed segments of video recorded over several days at four public locations in New York City, such as the plaza and broad steps in front of the public library. Hampton wondered if technology has interfered with our ability to relate, so looking frame by frame in the video, he analyzed how people interacted with each other.
Of course, when you want to check whether something has changed, you need to have a basis for your comparison. Hampton carefully selected his four sites because he had video footage of the same spots from thirty years earlier. The NY Times reports on this study (Mark Oppenheimer, “Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All,” New York Times, Jan 17, 2014), which used 38 hours of detailed video recordings of several public spaces in New York in 2008 compared to 1975 (when a previous research project filmed the same locations). Hampton’s team analyzed the interactions of people, to see if the progressively more ubiquitous use of technology had changed human relational behavior over those three decades. For example, mobile phones were invented and had become quite common over this period. Had cellphones made humans more isolated and lonely? Did humans now tend to focus more on devices while ignoring other people? Hamptons’s research team found that this was not the case. People were noticeably more interactive with those around them in 2008 than in 1975.
The Hampton study has its limits. His team analyzed only a few locations during two specific periods of time. Although cellphones had become prevalent over the intervening time between the two samples, the first smartphones appeared in the early 2000s, with the first iPhone coming out in 2007, only a year before the second half of Hampton’s study. Further, it is not possible to do a controlled experiment so that over three decades we isolate changes to a single variable so that technology advances -- but nothing else. Thus, the Hampton experiment cannot give us a true analysis of variance to pin down which societal changes drove the increase in human interaction that he observed. During those decades there were also significant changes in broad sweeps of society, in education, politics, work, family life, and more. But surely technology was one of the most significant changes that also indirectly changed the nature of many other areas of society. Hampton’s study gives us at least some hint that technology is not inherently an isolator. Our need for relationships naturally leads us to adapt technology creatively so that it enhances our relationships.
When used appropriately, technology can be used to enhance our relationships with others, allowing our communication to span time and space. Before mobile phones, if you walked into the waiting room of a doctor’s office or the lobby of a hotel, you would also see a spectrum of human interaction. While you might spot clusters of people in conversation, you would also see others sitting alone reading a magazine or newspaper with little notice of those around them.
Today, newspapers do not seem like technology. But that is only because we have become so familiar with this tool that it no longer appears to be high-tech. Yet it is still tech, including some sophisticated and continent-spanning technologies. The thin paper requires constructing roads into the forest where the right timber is located, lumber harvesting with heavy equipment, long-haul shipping, pulping, and finishing with paper-making. The stories require communication from reporters in the field, word processing by editors, layout, typesetting, and final high-volume printing. As a society, we have gradually moved to online sources of news rather than print. This is not a move to more technology, however, but rather a move from one technology to another.
Whether old or new gadgets, sin can and does direct our technology away from the purposes for which it was ordained by the Creator. However, the structure is still there. A tool designed to communicate ideas has an inherent ability to enhance relationships. Whether reading a newspaper back in the day or viewing a social media post on a smartphone today, readers are not isolating themselves from humanity. On the contrary, they are connecting with the author of the article, reaching across time and space to relate to another person’s thoughts and ideas. While printed pages may seem like a one-way conversation, a book invites the reader to question the premise or extend the idea. A newspaper reader could write a letter to the editor to continue the conversation started in a controversial article. With today’s instant connections, the reader can react and interact with the author in near real-time.
Today, if you were sitting on the steps of the NYC library surrounded by other visitors, would it be better to have a video conference call with friends, to tell them about your pleasant vista and even show them? Would it be better to strike up a conversation with a stranger nearby, perhaps making a new friend? Better to sit alone in silent contemplation? Technology can play a part in some of these choices. If we individually and collectively discern wise uses of our gadgets, we can direct these creational structures to align with God’s will for us. By grace, we can recognize how sin bends our technology away from God. By grace we can act as God’s redemptive agents, choosing to use technology in ways that love God and neighbor.
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