Late adopters, non-adopters, & early adopters

I’m reading an article in the latest Relevant Mag, “Just a Phone,” written by Chris Haw on the downside of technology and the iPhone in particular.

Chris draws heavily on the influences of Wendell Berry, who Haw sums up his position as “He wants to remain centered in his soul by asking the basic questions: what are the problems with the world (or myself) and what are the ways those will be solved…for Berry, the problems with the world are the following: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, and good work. Computers, for the most part, have not aided our solving these problems.”

Before I speak to that, let me confound it with another thought Chris uses from Catholic theologian Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. She said that it’s not clear to define “what luxuries and technological developments are worthy of Christian participation…but the Christian should often be a late or slow adopter.” This is a most interesting statement to me, because 1,000,001 Christian bloggers and young, techy church leaders are all about how the church is lame and culturally ineffective because they’re “late adopters.” There are countless young Christian leaders that pour as much energy into being technologically relevant and saavy as they do being theologically thoughtful. Nice contrast there. And, nice critique coming from a dude blogging, huh? But I digress…

How has technology already solved some of these problems that Berry is concerned with?
Political Honesty: Anyone see what Twitter was doing the last couple of weeks?
Family and Community Stability: When I can work from my computer after my family goes to bed but take off work earlier and spend time with them in the early evening, I think that’s adding stability to my family & community life.
Economic Justice & Ecological Health: There are countless non-profit orgs that are revolutionizing Third World Countries through harnessing technology, like Blood:Water Mission and Micro-financing companies.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not technology’s biggest advocate. And, admittedly, there are downsides to all of the technological upsides I just mentioned. Pits to fall in everywhere. Indeed, I’ve fallen in some of those pits. There are also countless scenarios that technology could aggravate that we haven’t even grasped yet.

Here’s my only original thought in this whole thing… what would it look like for us to increase the amount of energy and time we spend becoming theologically reflective and spiritually contemplative? If we’re truly finding our souls doing well, maybe we’ll be prepared to guard against the downsides of technology. The iPhone can do a lot of things for us, but it won’t rest our souls.

The article does resign with an interesting question, “is an iPhone the shape of the distance between the current me and that better me?”