Last month I spent a couple of days in Manhattan, the first time in several years that I've done that. One of the things that struck me immediately on the first morning I went walking around there was the fact that almost everyone sharing the sidewalk seemed to be deeply engrossed in conversation via a cell phone. I remembered immediately my favorite recent cartoon from the New Yorker. It shows the same scene — a sidewalk crowded with people on cell phones. A man in the foreground lowers his phone long enough to speak to a man who is empty-handed and asks incredulously, "You don't have a cell phone? Well....what do you do with your mouth while you're walking?"
Now that we have cell phones, what we do with our mouths while walking is use the phone, at least in places like New York. It's just one very visible way in which a brand new technology is beginning to change us. That's what I'm interested in thinking about today: the nature of our relationships to the new technologies that blossom around us every year. The last time I devoted a sermon to this topic was a little more than seven years ago, and although it's possible that my words from the spring of 1994 might still burn vividly in some of your minds, I won't count on it since I myself could not recall anything that I'd said then. But out of curiosity I went back to that sermon, which was titled "A Pedestrian on the Information Superhighway". Pedestrian status was something I claimed for myself back then, with a vaguely defiant satisfaction at not participating in the internet, e-mail, cell phones and so on. (Though it's hard to remember, palm pilots were not yet on the market).
I still don't have a cell phone and I still manage my schedule with a Daytimer, complete with that archaic tool called a pencil. But some other things have changed. I now own a laptop computer, which I not only use on an almost daily basis but toward which I even feel a vague affection, like an odd pet that comes along with me from home to office and back again.
I now use e-mail constantly, to communicate about the administrative details of life at USNH, to set up appointments and to stay in contact with far-flung friends. Sometimes it's the easiest way to stay in touch with my spouse when he's on the road, and it also serves as an action-alert network for the social justice organizations in which I participate. I use the internet more and more often, usually to track down magazine articles or essays I think might be useful in a sermon. It was both enlightening and amusing some months ago, during our series on the seven deadly sins, to type in search words like "lust" or "avarice" and see what came up.
I tell you all of this as a sort of declaration that I am no longer quite the 'techno-peasant' I once was. This is not to say that my peasant ways have been completely abandoned. Much of the technology I use still seems magical to me — but then so does electricity if I really bother to think about it. Our in-house computer guru David Stagg can testify that when something goes wrong with our computers at the office, I tend to suggest demon possession as the problem and keep wondering whether tech support knows how to do exorcisms. Nevertheless I seem to have found an accommodation with the machines in my life, and I have certainly opened up to their use far more than was true seven years ago.
But these machines most of us live with so intimately also give rise to a sense of dis-ease within me, which I hear reflected from lots of others as well. It's an uneasiness born of the speed of change around us, and the ways in which each new change seems to be a shift in acceleration.
Every time we turn around there is a new tool for us to use, born of this computer age in which we're steeped. At first every new tool seems exotic, destined to be used by some small elite; but before we know it almost everyone seems to have one. This was true of the first hand-held calculators when I was a child, and it was true when personal computers first arrived on the scene. It was true when cell phones became available and true again when palm pilots were introduced. Calculators are now the size of credit cards and are handed out free by banks and other businesses. It's hard to imagine any serious business without a FAX, and lots of us even have them at home, along with two, three or even more personal computers. Their turn-over rate is so fast that getting rid of old PCs is now a major landfill and recycling problem.
New machines and technologies arrive at a mind-numbing pace, and although we seem to be keeping up and adapting to each one, I think that appearance is deceptive. Most of us haven't taken much time to step back from any of the innovations as they come our way and ponder how they are likely to change our lives.
All of them do, of course, change our lives: that's the nature of new technology. In his book Technopoly, social critic Neil Postman pointed out, "Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another....New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop."
There is an ad I've seen recently promoting high-speed internet access. It's all done in bright red and proclaims in capital letters, 'THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT DAWDLING', and then goes on to explain, 'Waiting for data is a sin.'
It seems to me that this ad does a pretty good job of pointing to one of the most telling ways in which our new high-tech tools are shaping us. They are all designed to make us more efficient, to help us work faster or better, to 'save us time' as we're so fond of saying. Most of us still believe that that's exactly what our machines do for us, and it's a belief that's easy to maintain because at every step, the new innovations come with the tag-line, 'high speed' or 'instant access'. But if I use myself as a case study, doubt begins to creep in.
The lap-top computer toward which I feel such fondness (except during its moments of demonic possession) is much, much faster than my old computer. When I am working at USNH, where we have a high-speed DSL line, I can log on to my e-mail instantly. This speed is lovely, and it does in fact make me feel very efficient.
It is easy to forget, therefore, that a year ago when I came into the office the first thing I did was check for phone messages and return calls, and then I'd settle down for the scheduled meetings and work of the day. Now I check for phone messages and return calls — and then I turn to the e-mail messages which also must be answered. It isn't uncommon to find more than twenty waiting for me, and I understand that this is a pitifully small number compared to those that many of you log onto routinely.
These messages are all from real people, many of whom are my parishioners. It's rare that the messages are frivolous or a waste of time. But it's also true that it takes time, and it isn't always clear to me where this time is coming from. Nor is it clear to me that this new use of time is actually better for me or for those I serve. How many of the people who now conduct their exchanges with me via e-mail are among those who, a few years ago, would have made a date to come in and mull something over with me? And how much is lost when our quick, efficient exchange — saving us both so much time — is done via typed letters on a screen instead of with the smile, the spark of light in the eye, the press of a hand, the nuances of voice, head-tilt, gesture and sigh? The same question can be asked of all the new ways we now connect ourselves to each other.
It's hard to remember that a few years ago cell phones were mostly the possessions of high mucky mucks who could afford them. Then they began to be marketed to give us more security when we were on the road so we could call for help if we had a break-down. Now they're multiplying like rabbits, and the mental construct that's crept in with them is the notion that we should never be out of touch. We should never be unreachable, no matter what we're doing or where we are. A couple of months I conducted a small graveside memorial service for one of our members, Eli Freeman, and just as I was saying the prayer the phone rang, right next to me, in the pocket of one of the mourners.
What is the problem for which a cell phone in every pocket is the solution? That is the most basic and essential question we need to ask each one of the new technologies as they enter the realm of the possible. What is the problem for which this machine is the answer? Whose problem is it? What new problems is this new thing likely to create? On whom will the benefits likely land, and who is likely to pay the cost?
If we fail to ask these kinds of questions, it is too easy not to notice what's lost to us in each change that slides into our lives. If we fail to notice, how will we find a way to judge whether what we gain outweighs what we lose? We are so easily seduced, over and over again, by the promise of speed and efficiency. It's a promise that we can do more with the fleeting hours of our days, fit more in to each one. It's a promise that no moment need be a wasted one, that each minute can count. But what's the cost here?
What's really going on, as far as I can tell, is that most of us are spending more and more hours at our jobs. I don't know anyone who can honestly say that cell phones, e-mail and the other tools of our age have given them back more leisure time. I don't know anyone who has been liberated by new technology to spend more hours with family or friends, or to sit back in silence and ponder or mull or muse or relax. It feels so much more productive, after all, to use that time to return phone calls or check our e-mail.
As Peter Fraenkel puts it, "We succumb to the myth of infinite possibility — the belief that if we organize our time perfectly, we can do it all and have it all, all at once. But as we cram more and more into our lives, the temporal 'connective tissue' between events is eliminated. We become lean, mean activity machines."
Last year the magazine Wired, which is devoted to the high-tech world, ran an extraordinary article written by Bill Joy, one of the gurus of our new technology and a man who has been involved in computer software invention and development for twenty years.
In this article Joy raised an almost apocalyptic alarm over the directions in which our newest technologies seem to be taking us. Joy was not writing about cell phones and home computers but about cloning, robotics and the early experiments now underway to see whether and how human beings can actually be merged in some way with our machines. He fears that within only a generation or so, machines will be created that are so sophisticated they will be able to self-replicate, and that we will have become so dependent on them that humanity itself, at least as we know it, will be in danger of extinction.
The technological world Bill Joy inhabits is so completely out of my ken that I have no way at all to measure how valid his worries might be. A lot of what he holds up for concern is easy to dismiss because it sounds like pure science fiction — and then we remember that it's already among us. We have already seen the successful cloning of mammals. Corn and soy and now trout and other animals have had other organisms genetically spliced into them, and are rapidly being introduced to our food supply. Experiments in implanting machine circuitry into our own human circuitry have long been underway in one form or another. Human-made computer 'viruses' already self-replicate.
In his article, Joy quoted Freeman Dyson reflecting on the scientific attitudes that brought us the most nightmarish machine of the last century, the nuclear bomb. Dyson wrote, "I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."
Bill Joy adds, "Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined future, driven — this time by great financial rewards and global competition — despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining."
We don't have to stay awake at night worrying, with Bill Joy, about the machines that may consume our future and change the nature of the human race. It would be enough if we could come to consciousness, come to awareness, among the machines we've already invited into our lives. It isn't our job to adapt to their pace, their insistent demands, their promises of endless efficiency. It's supposed to go the other way around, so these things we invent enhance our lives, keep us steady in the choices, the rhythms, the priorities that give us joy. Are they doing that for us? The old bumper-sticker, 'Question Authority' should be updated to read, 'Question Technology'.
The trick, for us, is to remember our priorities— to remember that it isn't our highest destiny, after all, to be as efficient as possible. The time we spend unplugged, far from our alluring machines and their demands, is time for all the things in our lives that don't happen efficiently. It's time to listen to a good story; hear a new music; raise a child; grow a garden; watch the sun go down and the stars come out, the seasons shift and the trees grow taller; savor a glass of good wine, watch the rain saturate the earth; learn a spiritual practice, sit with a dying friend. There are too many things calling our names for us to heed only the voice of efficiency.
AMEN.