Why does a religious leader care about the technological determinism debate?

Myself & colleagues with WNYC's Manoush Zomorodi, host of Note to Self.
Manoush is the one without a dopey name tag.

(Note: If you're not a fellow student at TC, check out the italicized hyperlinks to definitions / elaborations of acronyms, jargon, and other terms of art, as well as links to readings when they're publicly available. This felt like a good way to write more accessibly for multiple audiences.)

I'm an Episcopal priest who works to promote digital literacy among religious leaders. As such, I bring a certain set of questions to the conversation about about the possibly determinative roles of technological and social forces in shaping ongoing technical and social development.

I was struck in our readings this week (both in Social and Communicative Aspects of ICTs and in History of Communication) by how these broad and conceptual inquiries into the role of technology in society end up having a lot in common with other philosophical (and even theological) questions about freedom, necessity, and change.

As a theologian, I felt right at home grappling with these issues. Mostly I felt at home being overwhelmed and confused by really big questions that are hard to even pose clearly, let alone answer. How can we feel otherwise when thinking critically about cause and effect, human motivations, etc.?

In any event, I was confident in these ideas' resonance with my religious colleagues' that I dove right in with my aspiration of sharing my learning with them as I move through the CMLTD program.

One thing I'd like to do in this course is something like the opposite ... bring some of the questions, anxieties, and aspirations that I carry as a religious educator to bear on the material we're engaging in the course.

What are the stakes of technological determinism from where I sit? Several issues come to mind, but I want to focus for now on attentiveness/mindfulness/distractibility.

I agree with Smith and Marx as well as Ceruzzi that the public at large generally buys the idea that technology is the primary determining factor in society. I suspect most would agree with Heilbroner that this is particular true of today's industrial and post-industrial contexts.

But if you ask the average person on the street about if and how technology determines our individual and collective behavior, I suspect the answer you would get would be about social media, smart phones, teens addicted to their gadgets, etc.

Whether for social or technical reasons,* we can hardly argue with the claim that many people (myself included) feel a pull to be plugged in—a pull we don't seem to fully control. (*Though I am inclined to agree with Lee Rainie that people aren't "hooked on their devices" but rather "hooked on each other.")

One person who's done a lot of work on these questions of technology mindfulness, attention, addiction, etc. is Manoush Zomorodi of WNYC's Note to Self ("the tech show about being human"). It was fun to get Manoush in a room with a bunch of my colleagues this summer to talk about these issues.

What I said in response to Manoush's work and to the broad sweep of Ceruzzi's deceptively imprecise argument is that the problem of getting swept up by forces that carry us along into living in ways we'd rather not live (including, gasp, using PowerPoint!) is a very old problem. I'm not sure it has much to do with Moore's Law, though perhaps media (very broadly conceived) have always been a part of it.

For example, in this realm of distractibility: What I experience primarily as a desire to take out my phone during class is what one of my contemplative monastic friends experiences as a desire to fiddle with the ribbons of her prayer book during sermons. That we have very ancient poems/prayers/humble brags like this—

O LORD, I am not proud; *
    I have no haughty looks.

I do not occupy myself with great matters, *
    or with things that are too hard for me.

But I still my soul and make it quiet,
like a child upon its mother's breast; *
    my soul is quieted within me.

—suggests that getting your brain to slow down and pay attention has never been easy.

Of course, old problems are still problems. They still require addressing in a concrete way. And it's probably true that smart phones in particular can (and have) made the problem of personal mindfulness quite a bit worse. I believe the explosive popularity of mindfulness practices are one response. Declaring war on notifications is another more immediate and technical fix.

All this is to say that as a religious educator I am interested in what we might call the psychology (or even the spirituality) of attention. In my experience, an implicit belief in technological determinism often underlies conversations about this topic, and when that is the case it is hard to steer them in a hopeful direction.

"Is there anything I can possibly do to hold back the tide of digital distraction (at school, at work, at church, wherever)?" Yes, absolutely. But only if you believe that resistance isn't futile and are willing to take some steps.

Pace, Paul Ceruzzi.

Postscript: This post got out of hand fast, so I didn't get to talk about some of the other issues that came to mind. One is the social justice commitment that many people of faith share, and I mention it because a timely case-in-point hit my inbox last night. My friend Keith Anderson, a Lutheran pastor who writes a lot about technology, actually just wrote a nice piece along these lines, basically a religious leader's take on the gig economy. I love the little mini-victory over the supposed forces of technological determinism at the end (but notice he has chosen this way "for now").