Unmixing Technology's Message
Telford Work, Religious Studies
Westmont College, May 16, 2006
The Storied Nature of Technology and Everything Else
- Narratives are traditions, mythologies, religions, worldviews.
- We don't choose traditions; traditions choose and shape us.
- When narratives conflict, fragmented lives, incoherence, and conversion result.
- This setting is an arena for the gospel story to unfold.
Government, Gimmicks, Geeks, Gnosticism, Greed: Recent Technological Narratives
- Dancing on ARPA's Grave: The Internet is a Cold War relic.
- The ARPANet is designed to survive a nuclear war.
- Eighties counternarrative: Teens hack NORAD and save the world (WarGames).
- Nineties counternarrative: The end of the Cold War beats swords into plowshares (well, stock shares).
- Millennial counternarrative: The Internet as the beast (Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, Y2K apocalyptic).
- 9/11 counternarrative: The Internet as terrorist playground (hidden Al-Qaida communiques).
- War on Terror reassertion: IT reinvents warfare by networking and empowering troops.
- e-democracy: The Internet is a democratic institution.
- ARPA turns computers from calculators into communicators.
- Al Gore's "information superhighway": Citizen contributions feed the needs of a democracy and a global village.
- Interest groups lobby on the net (Sierra Club, militias, etc.).
- Nineties left-wing counternarrative: The Internet creates an information elite and marginalizes the poor.
- Nineties right-wing counternarrative: The Internet is a tool of the people in black helicopters.
- Authoritarian counternarrative: High technology is a tool of imperialist, fascist, socialist, and corporatist tyranny.
- Libertarian/populist 9/11 counternarrative: Webloggers, warbloggers, and antiwarbloggers humble the information elite
and renarrate the War on Terror.
- Technology for technology's sake: Computer programming is an end in itself.
- Legolanguage: Computers' unreal epistemology (Douglas Coupland's "Toys That Bind").
- The all-important "cool factor", the beauty of elegant code, and the quest for "killer applications" drive computer aesthetics.
- Computers' popularity gives new hope and hipness to social outcasts.
- Low-tech counternarrative: Computers inadvertently enslave the world (Terminator 2, The Matrix).
- 9/11 counternarratives: Technology against technology (box cutters),
technology against technology-against-technology (daisy cutters).
- Social accelerator: High tech fast-forwards us into the future.
- Moderate: Technology as a labor-saving device (word processing, search engines, databases).
- Middle America throws computers into school systems so kids won't "fall behind".
- Moderate counternarrative: Why are we so busy? Technologies are labor creating devices.
- Radical: IT is a megatrend creating and reinforcing multiple generation gaps and initiating social revolutions (Visicalc, Tienanmen Square, Bill Gates' Business @ the Speed of Thought, Michael Lewis' The New New Thing).
- Radical counternarrative: Does it lead anywhere? (Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil).
- Eschatological: Technology is ushering in a new age (Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization, Raymond Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology).
- Virtual world: The technology of disembodiment.
- Electronics lets us escape, assume, and discover identity (William Gibson's Neuromancer, You've Got Mail).
- Computer use is self-expression (web pages, applications, games, MySpace, Facebook)
- Voyeurs and exhibitionists take to the net (JenniCam, Madonna).
- Cybersex offers free love after STDs.
- Nowhere Do You Want to Go Today? Surfers travel the world without actually standing up.
- Chatrooms, listservs, user groups, webrings create virtual community — or no community at all.
- Christian counternarrative: Incarnational Christians reject Internet Gnosticism (Graham Ward and the Radical Orthodoxy project; Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons).
- New Age counternarrative: Is the real world virtual too? The Matrix critiques Internet Gnosticism (or does it?).
- Who wants to be a millionaire? The Internet's many economic subcultures.
- ".com" catches on in the mid-'90s.
- Big e-business: IBM is Big Brother (Apple's 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh ad), AT&T the "Death Star".
- Entrepreneurs become Internet millionaires by 30!
- Winners take all (Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, Jim Clark; Pirates of Silicon Valley).
- Microserfs work for robber barons (Douglas Coupland's Microserfs).
- Microsoft millionaires, IPOs and venture capitalists, day traders ride the bubble.
- Blue-chip success: Traditional businesses streamline (GE's destroyourbusiness.com).
- Consumer counternarrative: If you can't own, then buy — or sell (amazon.com, eBay.com).
- Establishment counternarrative: U.S. v. Microsoft
reasserts rules from the old economy.
- Labor counternarrative: Silicon Valley's vanishing working class, America's vanishing Main Streets, and global outsourcing are market failures; neo-agrarian localism
is an opportunity.
- Hacker counternarrative: The open-source movement (Linux, Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar) gives developing countries cheap alternative technology.
- Millennial counternarrative: The bubble bursts ... then Google hits $475.
The Moral of the Story
- 'Technology' is both myth-making and myth-laden (meaning theory-laden, story-laden).
- Technology is not a "given" but emerges in specific communities and ways of life.
- Technology is never neutral but takes on the morality of its narrative.
- Technology is never a story in itself.
- Computer culture is just as fragmented, hotly contested, and ambiguous as all American culture.
- Computer cultures have absorbed, focused, and intensified America's competing narratives.
- The Gospel is marginal to contemporary high tech mythologies.
- So one does not simply say "yes" or "no" to high-tech.
- Nor is a dialectical ("yes and no") or via media approach meaningful without specific criteria for judgment.
- Rather than offering such criteria, conventional ethics' presentation of competing ethical theories tends to lay out contradictory options and introduce insoluble dilemmas, practically granting ultimate choice to the ethicist ('decisionism').
- The narrative cultural location of various practices and the narrative shape of Christian life and tradition recommends gospel-narrative analysis and transformation.
The Fruits Test: Making Sense of Our Practices
- Context: Both unreached and truly new cultures are missiological frontiers.
- The originally Palestinian Gospel still speaks into pagan Roman culture, and every other.
- The good news reveals the telos of cosmic, global, cultural, familial, and personal histories and judges departures from that goal as sin.
- Rule: "Nothing is unclean in itself" (Rom. 14:14; cf. Mark 7:1-23).
- The good news renarrates, condemns, affirms, redeems, and transforms cultural practices.
- Christianity's dominantly 'haggadic' (narrative) reasoning contrasts with the predominantly 'halakhic' character of Jewish and Muslim deliberation (Acts 15 in Acts).
- A case study from a Christian rabbi: sacrificed meat, yes; idols, no (Rom. 14:1-15:13).
- Resources: Providence equips us to live faithfully in our present circumstances with ...
- the Church — featuring others with spiritual gifts of discernment,
- living faith that sees circumstances realistically and hopefully, and
- Christian virtue that embodies wisdom.
- saints whose stories describe successful negotiations of ambiguous environments:
- Christians have tended to be early adopters (Koine Greek, Roman transport, the codex).
- Christians have steadfastly refused certain cultural practices but consistently (if not always immediately) embraced new technology.
- Wesleyans stand out among contemporary Christians for their technological adaptiveness ... and growth.
- The best responses to the culturally and technologically unfamiliar have been rooted in hope rather than pragmatism, utilitarianism, optimism, or pessimism.
- Test: Can you "happily" (J.L. Austin) describe a way of life in terms of these stories?
- The work and character of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
- The promises, Gospel, and law of God?
- The Kingdom and righteousness of God to which Jesus calls us?
- The "economy" (story) of God's old and new creation in Israel, Jesus, and Church?
- Criteria: Happy endings glorify God, edify the Church, and proclaim the Gospel.
- Confessions from my own career:
- pedagogy: personal and departmental websites, on-line syllabi, and listservs;
- entertainment: avoidance of computer games (and uneasiness about my kids' gaming);
- news: fondness for surfing weblogs and on-line journals (and sometimes wasting time);
- tentmaking: clinical software that keeps people healthy; and
- witness: starting a blog, then letting it sit.