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Use your technology wisely.Technology plays a prominent role in our lives. Recent developments have created new communities and revolutionized how we obtain information. Many people rely on digital media for work, study, and entertainment. Whether we are comfortable with digital media, it is here to stay. But are you the master, or is it mastering you?In How Do We Live in a Digital World?, C. Ben Mitchell considers the benefits and burdens of digital media. Technology is not morally neutral; the situation is more complicated. Rather than taking uncritical or consumerist attitudes, Christians need to show discernment. Gain wisdom for how you should live in a digital world.The Questions for Restless Minds series applies God's word to today's issues. Each short book faces tough questions honestly and clearly, so you can think wisely, act with conviction, and become more like Christ.

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Philosophie et théologie

Christianity

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Publié par	Lexham Press
Date de parution	06 octobre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683595328
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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QUESTIONS FOR RESTLESS MINDS
How Do We Live in a Digital World?
C. Ben Mitchell
D. A. Carson,
Series Editor

LEXHAM PRESS
How Do We Live in a Digital World?
Questions for Restless Minds, edited by D. A. Carson
Copyright 2021 Christ on Campus Initiative
Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
LexhamPress.com
You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at permissions@lexhampress.com .
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
Print ISBN 9781683595311
Digital ISBN 9781683595328
Library of Congress Control Number 2021937698
Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Abigail Stocker, Mandi Newell
Cover Design: Brittany Schrock
Contents
Series Preface
1. Introduction
2. The Opportunities of Digital Technologies
3. The Challenges of Digital Media
4. Ways Forward for Thoughtful Christians
5. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Study Guide Questions
For Further Reading
Bibliography
Series Preface
D. A. CARSON, Series Editor
T he origin of this series of books lies with a group of faculty from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), under the leadership of Scott Manetsch. We wanted to address topics faced by today’s undergraduates, especially those from Christian homes and churches.
If you are one such student, you already know what we have in mind. You know that most churches, however encouraging they may be, are not equipped to prepare you for what you will face when you enroll at university.
It’s not as if you’ve never known any winsome atheists before going to college; it’s not as if you’ve never thought about Islam, or the credibility of the New Testament documents, or the nature of friendship, or gender identity, or how the claims of Jesus sound too exclusive and rather narrow, or the nature of evil. But up until now you’ve probably thought about such things within the shielding cocoon of a community of faith.
Now you are at college, and the communities in which you are embedded often find Christian perspectives to be at best oddly quaint and old-fashioned, if not repulsive. To use the current jargon, it’s easy to become socialized into a new community, a new world.
How shall you respond? You could, of course, withdraw a little: just buckle down and study computer science or Roman history (or whatever your subject is) and refuse to engage with others. Or you could throw over your Christian heritage as something that belongs to your immature years and buy into the cultural package that surrounds you. Or—and this is what we hope you will do—you could become better informed.
But how shall you go about this? On any disputed topic, you do not have the time, and probably not the interest, to bury yourself in a couple of dozen volumes written by experts for experts. And if you did, that would be on one topic—and there are scores of topics that will grab the attention of the inquisitive student. On the other hand, brief pamphlets with predictable answers couched in safe slogans will prove to be neither attractive nor convincing.
So we have adopted a middle course. We have written short books pitched at undergraduates who want arguments that are accessible and stimulating, but invariably courteous. The material is comprehensive enough that it has become an important resource for pastors and other campus leaders who devote their energies to work with students. Each book ends with a brief annotated bibliography and study questions, intended for readers who want to probe a little further.
Lexham Press is making this series available both as attractive books and digitally in new formats (ebook and Logos resource). We hope and pray you will find them helpful and convincing.
1
INTRODUCTION
W e were having an early dinner at one of our favorite mom-and-pop restaurants in a sleepy little Southern town just outside where we live. As Nancy and I were talking about our day, a lad about twelve years old came through the door with an older woman who appeared to be his grandmother. It was as close to a Norman Rockwell scene as one might imagine. Grandmother and grandson were out for a quiet meal together on a Friday evening. One could even imagine this being a weekly treat for them both, a regular liturgy of life in this tiny community.
The owner of the restaurant is also the cook. His wife waits tables, delivering daily specials, superb hamburgers, or house-made pizzas to mostly local customers who sit at Formica-top tables while drinking sweet tea and watching the sparse traffic pass by on the other side of the plateglass windows of the storefront restaurant. The scene was about as bucolic as it gets these days. It could just as easily have been 1956 as 2016. Except.
As we waited for our burger baskets, I noticed that the young lad was using a smartphone. That’s not unusual for someone his age or, for that matter, any age these days. His grandmother quickly surveyed the menu, asked the boy what he wanted to eat, and placed the order. The lad never looked up from his phone. I mean he never looked up from his phone. While he and his grandmother waited for their order, both of his thumbs were busy on the phone. Meanwhile, the grandmother gazed from one direction to another, trying to find something to interest her while the lad played on. He never looked up. When their meals arrived, he switched from two hands on the phone to one hand on the phone and one hand holding his hamburger. He did not look up for the entire twenty minutes it took him to bolt down that sandwich. After they had both eaten their meals, the boy followed his grandmother out of the restaurant, still never looking up from his phone.
What could have been an emotionally bonding experience between a grandmother and her grandson, turned out to be dinner alone, together. Instead of receiving the wisdom of her years of life experience, the lad spent all his time on a digital device. The most disheartening reality of this picture is that we’ve all seen or experienced something similar and it’s not as disturbing to us as it ought to be. Familiarity has eroded contempt. Or, at the very least, we have no idea what to do about it, so we just move on while the proverbial water boils the frog in the kettle.
Digital technology is here to stay. And on our best days, I don’t think we’d want it to go away. We’ve become quite comfortable with digital technologies and even dependent on many of them. We like the speed, efficiency, and connectivity they offer. We have come to depend on a quick text message, an informative email, or an entertaining meme on Facebook. As the number of so-called digital natives continues to swell—those individuals born after 1980 who have always had access to computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and whatever is next—rapid adoption of new digital technologies will continue to be the norm rather than the exception.
Yet despite the number of technologies we use, there seems to be large-scale naivete about technology’s effects, especially the impact of digital technologies. Even otherwise helpful theologians and social analysts sometimes make the unsophisticated claim that technologies are morally neutral; that in and of themselves they are neither good nor bad, but it is the use of the technology that may be right or wrong. If it were that simple, answers to our questions would be much simpler. Unfortunately, the morality of technology is more complicated than we have imagined. Emerging biotechnologies—like genetic augmentation, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and robotics, for instance—mean that the human technologist may become the technology, the engineer may become the engineered. That is, beings themselves may become the artifacts of biotechnological innovation. More about that later.
As Stephen Monsma and his colleagues at Calvin College pointed out decades ago in their book Responsible Technology , 1 and the French philosopher Jacques Ellul 2 before them, technologies are hardly value neutral. That is not to presume that technology is by nature evil. Far from it. But every tool has an impact on its user and the choice to develop and adopt any technology is a morally freighted choice. We must assume that the technology makes life better or we would most likely reject it. And since “better” implies some notion of the good life, the invention and adoption of a particular technology is informed by certain values, almost always nowadays the notion that efficiency is better than inefficiency and that faster is necessarily better than slower.
Despite the fact that we make certain choices about technology, as founding editor of WIRED magazine, Kevin Kelly, has put it, there seems to be an inevitability about it. Some people even speak of a kind of technological determinism; if the technology exists we must use it. Although technological determinism may overstate the case, Kelly’s point is that there is a certain momentum to technological developments, including digital innovation, that continues to propel them. “The strong tides that shaped digital technologies for the past 30 years,” he predicts, “will continue to expand and harden in the next 30 years.” 3 If he’s right, and I suspect he is, where is technology going, and what will our technoculture look like in thirty years? These are profound questions, especially for Christians who, as the apostle Paul said, are not to be conformed to the world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom 12:2).
Let’s begin with where we are today. The accumulated data are breathtaking. According to the World Economic Forum’s report, Digital Media and Society: Implications in a Hyperconnected Era , 4 in 2015 there were approximately 3 billion internet users, 2 billion acti