Don: Today’s younger generations were born into a technological way of life. How do they see technology interfacing between Man and God, augmenting or assisting in a more meaningful worship experience, and as a way of strengthening and of sharing faith? Is the overall effect positive or negative?
For today’s discussion, we will limit our definition of “technology” to mean devices for personal use—computers, smartphones, and so on—and the media through which they communicate—the Internet and its social media. We will leave AI, big data, VR, AR, and other technologies for discussion another day.
This week is the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, which has sold over a billion units and which has impacted the entire world. Fifty years ago, I got a job programming a computer, the IBM 1401:
The caption to the photo, on IBM’s website, says:
Power is relative
All told, the 1401 computer of 1959 weighed about five tons and had about 16 kilobytes of memory. By comparison, today’s modern smartphones weigh less than five ounces and have about 32 billion bytes of memory—that’s roughly 10 million times faster.
IBM must have posted that a couple of years ago. The 256GB iPhone 7, which costs about $40 per month to lease from a phone company, is now 16 million times more powerful than the 1401, which could basically run small batch computations using punched cards and store the results on magnetic tape. When first introduced in 1959, the 1401 leased for $20,000 per month.
Last week, CNBC News reported that:
Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook groups to play an important role that community groups like churches and Little League teams used to perform: Bringing communities together.
And with nearly 2 billion people around the world on Facebook today, he might have a chance to make it happen.
Zuckerberg laid out his lofty ambition in a Chicago speech last week that suggested Americans are in need of something to unify their lives.
“It’s so striking that for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter,” he said during a rally for Facebook users who’ve built large community-support groups on the site. “That’s a lot of of people who now need to find a sense of purpose and support somewhere else.”
He added, “People who go to church are more likely to volunteer and give to charity — not just because they’re religious, but because they’re part of a community.”
Zuckerberg thinks Facebook can help, using its networking power to organize people.
“A church doesn’t just come together. It has a pastor who cares for the well-being of their congregation, makes sure they have food and shelter. A little league team has a coach who motivates the kids and helps them hit better. Leaders set the culture, inspire us, give us a safety net, and look out for us.”
Zuckerberg has now had six months to study how some savvy Facebook users, reportedly including Russian hackers, turned the internet platform he built into an online machine that spread fake news and helped elect Donald Trump as President — whom he snubbed this week.
Now that he’s seen how powerful a tool Facebook can be for spreading disinformation, Zuckerberg is pushing to use Facebook’s artificial intelligence algorithm to make the site even better at organizing online communities.
“We started a project to see if we could get better at suggesting groups that will be meaningful to you. We started building artificial intelligence to do this. And it works. In the first 6 months, we helped 50% more people join meaningful communities.”
His ultimate goal is to convince 1 billion users to join Facebook communities.
“If we can do this, it will not only turn around the whole decline in community membership we’ve seen for decades, it will start to strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.”
Bringing people closer together is so important that “we’re going to change Facebook’s whole mission to take this on,” Zuckerberg said in Chicago.
Facebook’s original mission was to foster communication, but that alone does not lead people to come together—to form community—for good; sometimes, just the opposite.
Technology itself is amoral, but is used to promote both moral and immoral purposes. Personal technologies by definition promote self-centeredness. Does that mean technology makes people more—or less—sociable? Does it deepen, or does it dilute, interpersonal relationships? Does it narrow or broaden them? Does God need a Facebook page? Can faith be shared over an Internet where “truth” is often debatable, to say the least?
In our discussion today we have “digital natives,” young people who were born during the age of the Internet, and older “digital immigrants,” who had to find their way to it. What is the significance, and what are the effects of this difference in the generations’ familiarity with and use of technology, with respect to worship, community, and our view of God? What would you recommend our church leaders do with respect to using technology to enhance the worship experience?
Mark: The technology is just a platform.
Nathaniel: People don’t understand technology. The technology is just a stairway to something better, such as enabling more people to attend church by being able to watch services live-streamed over the Internet, thus countering the trend to reduced church attendance.
Jason: Does technology foster deeper—or shallower—interpersonal relationships?
Isaac: It seems to me foster more relationships, but shallower ones. The church was strongest and grew the fastest when relationships were face-to-face. Technology kind of gets in the way in that respect, yet it does have some blessings—some appropriate uses.
Lily: I agree that overall, social media tend to foster shallow new relationships. But they can deepen pre-existing personal relationships by enabling contact to be maintained when people become separated.
Nathaniel: I think technology has helped our church to grow since the 1950s. Missionary work was already conducted back then, but Adventist radio and other technological channels have broadened its evangelical reach. Now, social media helps support that work. So I am not sure it is a question of relationships being shallow; rather, it is that technology expands the number of relationships, which is good for witnessing and evangelism.
Lily: I agree, but the effect is muted if the relationships are shallow, as they tend to be. People who try to share their love for God across such shallow relationships tend to be regarded as “Jesus freaks.”
Nicole: Technology is awesome, but social media can turn into an idol. People use the social media to put on a cool display and attract attention and admiration for themselves, even though it might be just a façade masking an uglier life.
Nathaniel: But we wear masks all the time anyway. We do it at church, sometimes. We pretend things are OK when they are not, or that we are always ever so pious when we are not. Because my father was a pastor, people assumed I had a perfect family, but in truth we had the same problems most families face. Appearances are often deceiving.
Julia: We seem to be talking of technology as a means of communicating messages, goals, ideas, ways of thinking, and so on. But technology is not a means of cultivating goals, ideas, and ways of thinking to any sort of depth. It takes face-to-face relationships to accomplish that. Technology may get your ideas to a person, but it cannot cultivate the person.
People who put their lives on display online often have little else to say offline.
Lily: It’s hard to connect with such people at any deep level. Social media encourage façades. Relationships built on façades cannot last. So, too, in our relationship with God. Statistics show young people are leaving the church, perhaps because we are so used to painting a picture of how we are supposed to be so we act piously but it’s really only a façade, it’s really fake. A true walk with God needs to be up close and personal; so, too, a meaningful walk with other people.
Isaac: Because of social media we are getting used to shallow relationships and that behavior is carrying over to relationship with God.
Jason: If we know about the shallowness of social media, why are they so popular? Why are deep relationships apparently less desirable?
Owen: Because our generation is lazy. We look for the easy way out, and social media make it easy to make friends—scroll, click!—compared to going out into the real world to make them the old-fashioned way.
Owen: May be because our generation is lazy and we want quick fixes for everything including relationships.
Julia: And it is addictive. It has a real effect on the frontal lobe.
Mark: Some feel they are alone in real life, but have friends online. I have been punished with the removal of my smartphone for periods of up to a month, and discovered that I can have plenty of fun in the real world.
Mike: People generally are drawn to shallowness over substance. Social media provide instant gratification, and facilitate the generation of instant personae, without the hard work that goes into creating a real persona—a person of virtue who truly deserves our attention. In the world we live in, perception is everything. I can pretend online to be a great basketball player with a great physique, and not have to prove it. It’s not the technology: It’s the person using it. Older generations can use Facebook to develop deeper relationships because they already know what that takes and can apply their knowledge to the development of online relationships. But younger people have not learned how to do things in real life.
Nathaniel: Several thoughts: First, I think down-to-earth people will be down-to-earth, on- or offline. Second: The church has always been neophobic; every new technology, from print to TV, has been resisted, but gets accepted eventually. Third: Pew Research did a study of church membership between 1990–2002 and again between 2008–2017, and found an eight percent increase, not a decrease. I think, therefore, we should just continue reaching out to young people through means that will appeal to them, as well as through our door-to-door work.
Mike: I don’t see church negativity to technology, and I don’t think technology is the whole story behind young people leaving the church—there are other factors.
Donald: The main reason people don’t leave—or come back, if they do—is a sense of belonging. I think it boils down to friendship. Can technology short-circuit relationships? Yes, but it can also build them. Before social networks, we had advertising to show us a larger-than-life virtual world. A genuine relationship is intentional, as when you send your pictures to a friend. There is a sense of belonging. In contrast, a shallow relationship is passive—you plaster your pictures on Facebook for people to idle their way through, or not, as they please. There is no sense of belonging.
Janelin: I struggle with the unproductive time I waste using technology, when I should be building my relationship with God. Social media is a distraction. We could use it for productive purposes but we tend to use it more for entertainment and as a distraction.
Robin: Technology is a wonderful tool, but tools can become idols. When Moses went up the mountain to communicate with God, the Israelites (having idolized Moses to the point where they felt lost without him) took out their tools and started to build another idol, the golden calf. We do the same. My pre-digital generation did it with TV soap operas. Today’s younger generation has a different idol, and future generations will have different ones. God wants a relationship with us, but he cannot be directly with us. We have to find a way to balance our technology and our relationships.
Eb: The Lord said to Moses:
“This applies to the Levites: Men twenty-five years old or more shall come to take part in the work at the tent of meeting, but at the age of fifty, they must retire from their regular service and work no longer. They may assist their brothers in performing their duties at the tent of meeting, but they themselves must not do the work. This, then, is how you are to assign the responsibilities of the Levites.” (Numbers 8:23-26)
In other words: There is no need for young people to keep responsibility forever. There comes a time to hand it over to a new generation.
David: The world we have today is indeed the world the young people here in this room today will be running soon enough. I would ask them to consider two questions: First, are they worried that Mark Zuckerberg has the power to sway two billion people? And second, where is technology going—what new technologies will the next generations idolize—and what effects will they have? The answer to the second question I think must inevitably involve a discussion of artificial intelligence and its changing role from communication mediator to communicating entity in its own right.
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