The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion

by Tim Challies

Many of our new media technologies are designed for speed and urgency, not for thoughtful reflection and undistracted conversation. They are designed, not to encourage depth in existing relationships, but to widen our network and our ability to say less that is of real substance. Quick and impulsive replies dominate the landscape; thoughtful, longer replies seem out of place and unnecessary.

There was a time when people who wanted to encounter the words of God would need to rely on the expertise of an oral poet, a person whose task it was to memorize and recite the Scriptures. But when humans transitioned to a written culture (and eventually a print culture), suddenly every person could read the Bible on his own, and the poet became superfluous, unnecessary. The change in media brought about a vast shift—not only by giving more people an opportunity to encounter more of God’s words, but in the very way that people understood the purpose and meaning of these words. The poet disappeared. And so did all of the ideas and ways of interpreting that were part and parcel of communication via the spoken word. It cost us a certain element of richness, a depth that is available in face-to-face, immediate conversation.

could this be a major contributor to the whole creation/evolution divide?

The truth is that text rarely, if ever, can equal the richness of a face-to-face conversation. It’s static, disembodied. It does not convey hand gestures, verbal tone, inflection, or facial expressions, things we are taught from birth to encode and decode. Indeed, these are some of the first things children learn when speaking; even before they can form words, they mimic the cadences and tones of speech they have heard. They gesture. We learn to communicate with our bodies.

this is what james k.a. smith would call a cultural liturgy.

And this is just the body. Text, until this point, has also had a kind of body: the page. Formal letters came on heavy paper stock; notes dashed off while traveling came on the stationery of hotels; postcards forced correspondents to become prose poets to close the gap between what was on the card and what they were writing; telegrams with a black rim were to be dreaded. Electronic messages are completely devoid of this sensuality; they all arrive in the same format. They have no messenger bringing them there, as an interpreter. As a result, the tone of e-mails is misunderstood more than half of the time, compared to just a quarter of the time over the phone and even less often face-to-face.6

Through it all, the self threatens to become disconnected, disengaged from the body. We become digitally disincarnated, people who can live and be online, present only in a virtual, mediated sense. Increasingly who we are is no longer the person people meet face-to-face, but the mediated identity we have created. At first, we merely extended a sense of self into cyberspace, but eventually it took root there and in some cases now threatens to surpass the real self—the self that includes not just a mind and a soul but a physical presence as well.

wow. this is me, i fear.

Perhaps the heart of this confusion is our insistence that the Internet is a there, that it is a place. We never referred to the space between my mailbox and my friend’s mailbox as a place (letterspace?).

We take our sense of self, our sense of presence, and transport it into the ethereal world of bits and bytes. Suddenly we are here and there, at a desk in body but in soul or spirit somehow present in cyberspace. And this is new to us, new to the human experience. When we venture into this world, this mediated world, we leave our bodies behind. And more and more of us are finding that we actually like it this way, that being able to experience a space free from the limitations of real presence brings a kind of joy.

wow.

To put this in technological terms, Gnosticism teaches that humans are in a process of evolution that will eventually take them from hardware to software, from embodiment to an ultimate, and inherently better, state of disembodiment.

But this denies what the Bible tells us: “In the biblical teaching, matter is something not to be escaped but redeemed.”9 Freedom without the body, freedom without what makes us whole and complete human beings, is really no freedom at all.

Online life promises us much the same—we can be one thing and then another or one thing and at the same time another. “Taking on various identities in varying circumstances is sanctioned by this new movement, for it exemplifies the death of belief in the unitary self, the hard ego, the irreducible center of personal identity. Identity is not fixed, but fluid; not singular, but multiple; not prescribed, but protean; not defined, but diffused.”10 What we are in virtual worlds is just an expression of what we believe culturally.

Here in the cyberworld I can be popular. I can be powerful. I can be a somebody. And yet I do it all at the expense of who I really am.

am i doing this with my blogs? oh god help me.

Such communities brought people together relationally but also physically—we gathered together around a shared interest, but we were still all together in one spot. What is markedly different about our new digital communities is that they bring people together apart from their bodies. We now consider community what was previously mere communication.

It used to be that a sense of belonging was provided by a household or a community. We were always rooted to a specific context. If you wanted to call me on the phone, you had to call the family telephone; if you wanted to send me a letter, you would post it to the family home. In both cases, I was rooted to a context of geography and a context of relationship. But now, through mobile phones, e-mail, and a thousand other digital technologies, you can communicate with me in a way that is uprooted from a family or geographical context.

Shared interests rather than shared space now define community.

Do you see the shift here? Our perception of community is becoming disembodied, a product of mediated communication based on shared interest rather than a product of face-to-face communication based on shared space.

He spoke of networked individualism, noting that today’s users of digital technologies now identify less with local groups and increasingly as parts of geographically scattered networks.

Because our connections are ethereal and virtual rather than bound by geography, we can leave a community without any fear of consequences, without being concerned about a knock on the door from a concerned friend or pastor. As individuals we form our communities, and as individuals we leave them. And so we are networked as individuals who are more concerned with our own interests than those of others—the people in the communities we inhabit. Without the traditional ties of geography or genetics, we have less reason to care for our communities, to nurture them, to be concerned with their long-term strength and success.

oh lord help us fight against this.

While it may be that we have always identified in some sense with communities that were outside of the contexts of home, work, school or church, what has changed today is that for many of us, our primary context, our primary identity, is now found elsewhere, in a context unhinged from geography, from the who’s or what’s closest to us. Many of us are more concerned with who we are in a mediated context than who we are before those who live in the same neighborhood or who attend the same church. Our mediated communities, the ones that exist only in the form of communication—these are the ones we love the most and the ones for which we feel the most.

I fear this because despite arguments to the contrary, the virtual church is not the real church.

“Church” is not an event. It is people—people whom God calls us to love. What is more, it is in a very important sense an involuntary community of people: we don’t choose our brothers and sisters—God does. And sometimes (oftentimes) those people are not terribly compatible with us—not the people we would choose to hang out with. But it is this very incompatibility that is so important, for at least two reasons. First, learning to love the people I don’t like is by far the best way to learn how to love (it’s easy to love people I happen to like). Second, the church is supposed to be a sociological miracle—a demonstration that Jesus has died and risen to create a new humanity composed of all sorts of people.17

yes. amen.

We are to worship with one another and love one another on the basis of our common humanity and on the basis of our shared kinship in the family of God rather than on the basis of preference or perceived compatibility.

No mediated virtual church can do this. None can replace it, improve on it, or even provide the barest shadow of it. The mediated community will span the limitation of space, but it must do so at the cost of immediacy, of true presence, of the truest manifestations of love.

In an electronic, mediated world, let’s not neglect the privilege and responsibility we have to be real people in a real world. E-mail and text messaging are inevitable aspects of life, and there is no reason to forsake them altogether. But let’s keep them in their proper context as supplemental and lesser forms of communication. We may well find that if we are to fulfill God’s mandate on earth, we will need to communicate less often so we can communicate more. We will need to forsake the ease and the pace of quantity for the reflective significance of quality.

wow. paul, embrace this deeply!

we are more mediated than face-to-face. And more and more people are finding that there is a real comfort and familiarity in this. Many of us rely on mediated communication, not just out of necessity, but also out of preference.

uh oh. this is me.

And when we turn to the Bible, to theology, we see that some of the great promises of Scripture point us to the joy and the privilege of face-to-face interaction—that communicating in mediated ways is a concession rather than an ideal. It tells us that God is calling us to be communities of real people in the real world—communities that display the diversity of this great family God is building out of all tongues and all nations.

We’ve lost the big picture.

Mediated communication is easy and safe. As our communication with one another becomes increasingly mediated, communication that involves more of us feels too intimate, too intimidating, too difficult.

holy crap, could all this tech be a maor forceand contributor in my social anxiety?

“Young people say they avoid voice calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, Facebooking, or tweeting. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip of an arriving text.”18 Isn’t it interesting that phone calls represent an interruption, and an intimate kind of interruption at that? As more-mediated communication becomes the norm (think text messaging), less-mediated contact (the telephone) becomes more intimate and, therefore, more difficult. We prefer what requires less of us ahead of what requires more.

Med...

Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University who studies how people converse in everyday life, tells of a student who “told me that it takes her days to call her parents back and the parents thought she was intentionally putting them off. But the parents didn’t get it. It’s the medium. With e-mails, you’re at the computer, writing a paper. With phone calls, it’s a dedicated block of time.”19 In a world with so much distraction, a world of near-constant communication, it is difficult to dedicate time to one person at a time and one task at a time. Mediated communication gives us the ability to dedicate less of ourselves to more people.

It lets us personalize our lives and our relationships, to respond to what we want when we want to. By looking at pornography, we can control our sexual encounters, never having to deal with a spouse who has a headache and never having a partner say, “No, I don’t want to do that.” By worshiping at a cyberchurch, we can control who worships alongside of us; we can control our commitment, showing up only when we want and participating only as much as we desire; we can control our time, choosing the time and date that works best for us. By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of a church community, we form and shape and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. But God never calls us to a life of ease, a life in which we maintain control and do things on our own terms. He puts us in marriage relationships, in friendships, in church communities, for his own reasons; he puts us in such relationships to teach us how to love one another and more and more resemble him in his great love. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real-world, flesh-and-blood, face-to-face relationships?

By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of a church community, we form and shape and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. But God never calls us to a life of ease, a life in which we maintain control and do things on our own terms. He puts us in marriage relationships, in friendships, in church communities, for his own reasons; he puts us in such relationships to teach us how to love one another and more and more resemble him in his great love. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of

real-world, flesh-and-blood, face-to-face...

We need to see the superiority of face-to-face communication and prioritize it above what is mediated. We cannot afford to become lazy, to allow pragmatism and convenience and ignorance to define the ways we communicate with one another.

All of this distraction is reshaping us in two dangerous ways. First, we are tempted to forsake quality for quantity, believing the lie that virtue comes through speed, productivity, and efficiency. We think that more must be better, and so we drive ourselves to do more, accomplish more, be more. And second, as this happens, we lose our ability to engage in deeper ways of thinking—concentrated, focused thought that requires time and cannot be rushed. Instead of focusing our efforts in a few directions, we give scant attention to many things, skimming instead of studying. We live rushed lives and forget how to move slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully through life.

As the pace grew, Jesus would constantly slow it down in order to keep his focus on what was most important. Where we might keep count of the number of people Jesus healed and those who professed him as Lord—and measure Jesus’ productivity in this way—he kept himself accountable to a higher measure. Much of his time was not productive in any way we could easily measure. And yet his time was sacred, every moment dedicated to the Father.

“It’s a condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless, and, over the long term, underachieving.” People will know they’ve succumbed to it “when they start answering questions in ways that are more superficial, more hurried, than they usually would; when their reservoir of new ideas starts to run dry; when they find themselves working ever-longer hours and sleeping less, exercising less, spending free time with friends less, and in general putting in more hours but getting less production overall.” In other words, they will know they’ve got it when they find that they no longer have time or ability to give to building relationships or to fulfilling their God-given mandate that they work, create, innovate.

shit.

We need our distraction in order to further our commitment to information. We need a constant flow of information, even if it means interrupting what we are doing, whether sitting in the office or the church pew. When we are disconnected from our sources of information, we feel as though we are disconnected from the world, as if life will move on without us. We find joy and life in that information—not in using that information or turning that information into useful action, but simply in its constant flow.

yep. this is me.

But there is a danger here. “Those who celebrate the ‘outsourcing’ of memory to the web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes.”17 Where a computer takes in information and immediately stores it as data, the human brain continues to process that information and turn it into a form of knowledge.

We deliberately forget because forgetting is a blessing, on both an emotional level and a spiritual level. Forgetting is a natural part of the human experience and a natural function of the human brain. It is a feature, not a bug—one that saves us from being owned by our memories.

wow.

Through the long history of humanity, forgetting has been normal, and remembering has been the exception. But with today’s digital technologies, the balance has shifted so that remembering is the default, and forgetting is the great exception.18

While the search engines may never forget, while those who capture data about us may never forget, we serve a God who does forget and who places great emphasis on the virtue of forgetting. He accepts all those who turn to him and confess their sins.

So what is truth? Truth is what God says. Truth is the moral integrity, the perfection of God expressed in the world. It is that which accords to the actual state of things. It is genuine; it is real; it is pure. It is whatever God thinks. Do you want to know what is true about anything—human sinfulness or the morality of abortion or the existence of the Abominable Snowman? Find out what God thinks about it, and think the same thing. That is truth.

This is not a huge concern if we continue to understand truth in an old way—if we understand that truth and authority flow from God to humans. There is nothing to fear from Wikipedia if I continue to demand that what is stated there as fact is proven in an adequate way—if it refers to authoritative sources. But there is everything to fear from Wikipedia when it demands that we change our very understanding of truth, insisting that truth comes by consensus, that every person holds equal authority, and that every source is equal to every other.

okay, very important paragraph. i'm glad he said this.

Know the One who is truth. Before we can be equipped to know what is true, we must know who is true. And in order to know him, we must find him in his Word, the Bible.

this is indeed SUCH a great place to start!

Our searches are a penetrating window into our hearts. We tell search engines what we would not tell anyone else; we ask them what we would be far too embarrassed to ask in any other context.