A Permanent Puberty of the Mind

Christianity Today:

Shane Hipps was a former strategic planner in advertising, and is now a Mennonite pastor. In both vocations, he has learned a great deal about how technology quietly shapes people, for good and for ill. His latest book, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith (Zondervan), tries to help Christians understand some of the spiritual dimensions of that shaping. Senior managing editor Mark Galli interviewed Hipps at the recent National Pastors Convention in San Diego.

I found these two questions to be quite insightful:

So the Internet is an extension of the telegraph in that it only accelerates the availability of universal information?

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. The mechanical clock was created by Benedictine monks in the 13th century. It was designed to create more regular prayer intervals to enhance our devotion to God. The mechanical clock also gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, because it created measurable, uniform time units to break up your day into. So a technology originally designed to enhance devotion to God also enhanced our devotion to mammon.

And our efficiency.

That's right. This culture is on an extraordinary pace toward needing things to be more efficient. But that is a value that is ultimately antithetical to the gospel. I've never heard of efficient wisdom, efficient love, efficient suffering, or efficient compassion. So what does it mean that we inhabit a world that is so dominated by this ideology of efficiency? That's my interest in asking, what does it actually mean? How is it shaping you without your knowledge or permission right now?

I know, I know, it's quite ironic that I post this as my seventh blog post of the day. I get it. My blog doesn't exactly steer one away from this problem. Should you quit reading? Maybe, maybe not. If you read the whole interview, Shane discusses also how it's quite silly to try and be completely anti-technology.

I think part of the solution is just the simple awareness and acknowledgment that the speed of our internet use could present a challenge to our mental capacity and growth. Identify your weaknesses and then push against them. Read blogs, but more importantly, read good books.

Along these lines, Seth has an interesting post over at his blog about how blogging is being overtaken by Twittering. He thinks this is due in large part by the decreased attention span of your average human. My take is that this is probably true and very scary. If you have no attention span for blogs, what about books!?!? I can feel us getting collectively dumber.

My Dad made an interesting point to me the other day about his circle of friends. Some of his friends read books and some don't. He remarked that when various topics of conversation come up among his friends, those who read books, by and large, have much more to contribute to almost any subject of conversation than those who don't read. I think as I reflect on my relationships I see this to be true as well.

So check yo' self with the internet! (I think I need to get off my computer now).