Shaped Shapers
Technology is never neutral. We shape our tools, and our tools shape us.
This is one of the lessons I learned from John Dyer, and his book "The Garden and the City", and it introduced me to a whole new way of thinking about technology. More than ever, as we inhabit a technologised and digital world, we ought to ask the twin questions of, "how can we shape tools to better purposes?" and "how are these tools shaping me?"
Nowhere does this seem more apparent to me than in the twin realms of attention, and social media. Many have noted, and written whole books about, the way in which our digital tools, indeed entire digital economies, function on the commodity of attention - getting our attention and keeping our attention. I can tell, in my own life, how my ability to focus on single tasks, book reading above all, has declined and not just atrophied, but actively decayed over the last two decades.
I think this is an area where Christians need more, and better, thought. Not that there aren't people doing that, but because we are digital fish in a digital sea, we continually need people to say, "look, water!". Recently I have been reading one attempt at that, Andy Crouch's The Life We're Looking For : Reclaiming relationship in a technological world. I'll have more to say on that volume in a forthcoming review, but Crouch's primary axis is the way we are human persons made for personal relationship, and technology so often drives depersonalised interaction.
Our tools shape our discourse too. In this study, C. Thi Nguyen explores the way in which the metrification of twitter, e.g. number of likes, number of retweets, shapes the nature of conversations there itself. Twitter 'rewards' posts that garner attention, approval, but also controversy. It encourages us to shape our thoughts into pithy aphorisms that others will like, hate, and share. But is this the best way to converse? That is the prior question we (or rather they) should have asked. We should ask, "does participating in this conversational space serve better purposes than other spaces and tools?" and "how could I shape my own use of this tool to resist or subvert?"
It's why the example of the Amish is instructive, even if we ultimately choose not to follow it. Often the adoption of one technology but not another by the Amish seems odd, contradictory, even absurd. It is the result of a process though - where new technologies are tested, weighed, and then the community's leaders make a decision as to accept it our not. Where we might not agree with broader Amish convictions, or even this way of evaluating technology, the simple counter-example to the dominant mode of "we embrace everything" reminds us that other ways of doing things exist, and some of them may be better.
For those of us swimming more in the mainstream, it's our individual use of tools that calls for our diligent consideration. We cannot always shape our tools, but we can shape our usage of tools. I believe a considered life calls for exactly that. Not that I am some kind of successful digital ascetic, but I am rather a fellow struggler. For twitter, I have found three disciplines helpful. Firstly, I use "demetrified" interfaces - I cannot see the number of likes or retweets and so I generally remain oblivious to the reward-dynamic of quantification. Secondly, in keeping with a broader discipline, I use a program called Freedom to block my access to twitter except for two windows of time a day. Thirdly, I only interact with twitter on a computer, not a mobile device. For other tools, I have adopted other (often more radical) measures.
These aren't prescriptions or solutions, they are simply descriptions of some of the ways I attempt to curate my own attention, and use tools better for my own purposes. Every tool, platform, service, 'space' ought to prompt our own reflection and consideration, individually and communally, to ask (again) how does it shape us, and how can we shape it, or at least our use of it.
I hope to explore more of this topic in future posts, reflecting on what the development of a digital askesis might look like. In the mean time, I'd love to hear what you have observed or done to shape your own use of technology.