Is It Naive to Think of Technology as Neutral?
The Medium Is the Message
This line of thinking is naive because every technology carries with it opportunities to be beneficial for us as individuals and societies. But every technology also changes things potentially for the worse. And we have to be aware of those changes and be critical and alert to what might be changing in our lives, in the way we interact with one another, and as a culture because of these new technologies.
Neil Postman was kind of the heir apparent to Marshall McLuhan, and one of the things that Marshall McLuhan said that became a famous, pithy statement is “the medium is the message.” What he was getting at is that the medium of communication changes the way that communication is sent and received.
Take the message “I love you.” Those three words are a message that conveys meaning. If you said “I love you” through a text message, that carries its own sort of meaning. It carries a different meaning if you say it in person or through an elaborate proposal. The medium is the message. How you say things conveys meaning in and of itself. The form influences the content.
Scrolling Ourselves to Death
Brett McCracken, Ivan Mesa
Drawing from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and applying his insights to today’s scrolling age, this book helps believers think carefully about digital technology and inspires the church to turn difficult cultural challenges into life-giving opportunities.
So that’s talking about technology in the realm of communication, which is a lot of what Neil Postman was talking about—how the medium of TV was influencing the content of what was said, the discourse that was happening, the ideas that were being conveyed on television. But it’s true of every technology, not only communication technologies. Every technology impacts not only the practicalities of life, but the way we live as humans, the way we think, and these bigger picture modes of being in the world.
So as Christians, we can’t be naive with technology to think that any new technology that comes along can just be harnessed in a very simple way to take what we’re already doing but to do it perhaps in a more efficient way or to a larger number of people. We have to be sober, realistic, and aware of the downsides and the fact that it will change things more dramatically than we can probably even imagine now.
Brett McCracken is coauthor with Ivan Mesa of Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age.
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