"I didn’t own a cell phone until five months ago because of the way I feared it would shape my soul."
Have you ever worried that your mobile phone might 'shape your soul'?
Honestly, I can't even muster up any anxiety about the possibility that it may damage my brain, let alone shape my soul.
But Shane Hipps is pondering your soul, even if you aren't.
You can read his thoughts in this Christianity Today article. He is a former strategic planner in advertising, now a Mennonite pastor in the United States. He has written book called Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith. I've got it ordered, and I'm looking forward to reading it.
Everything inside me defends new technology.
Shane Hipps thinks that there are many positive things about it too. In fact, he says that its 'silly to resist' technology. But, he claims, very few people 'try to understand it'.
Says Hipps:
"The telegraph more than anything broke the historic connection between transportation and communication. Prior to the telegraph, the fastest [that] information could travel was about 60 miles an hour, maybe the speed of a locomotive. Suddenly, with the telegraph, communication is instantaneous. It also divorces context from information. There is this great line by Samuel Morris, who said people in Texas will now know when there is a murder in Boston.
"So information that used to be local becomes universal. Where we used to have the problem of information scarcity, we now have the problem of information glut."
Hipps was asked by his interviewer: "So the Internet is an extension of the telegraph in that it only accelerates the availability of universal information?"
To which he replied:
"And it creates a permanent puberty of the mind. We get locked in so much information, and the inability to sort that information meaningfully limits our capacity to understand. The last stage of knowledge is wisdom.
"But we are miles from wisdom because the Internet encourages the opposite of what creates wisdom"”stillness, time, and inefficient things like suffering. On the Internet, there is no such thing as waiting; there is no such thing as stillness. There is a constant churning. Every technology has embedded spiritual consequences."
So, some questions for you:
* Is he right about creating “a permanent puberty of the mind”?
* Have you ever fasted, or pulled the plug? Why, or why not?
* Is our ready access to information our master, or our servant? (Take a read of anything by Steve Kryger)
* As a friend of mine once put it, has the iPhone, or iSermon, or iMobile, or iInternet created an iHarvest of Righteousness?
Discuss.
