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Hymns Ancient & Modern - Andrew Graystone

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91 pages

English

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Almost without noticing it happen, we have found ourselves shopping, communicating, playing and even worshipping online. Andrew Graystone aims to help Christians who want to think through their own engagement in digital culture, addressing ten key questions on how digital technology is changing our lives today.

Sujets

Religion

Christianisme

Christian Living

Social Issues

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	30 septembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786221612
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0682€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Are Machines Getting Smarter – Or Are Humans Getting More Stupid? 2 Where Am I? 3 What is Happening to My World? 4 Who Owns My Information? 5 What’s the Difference Between a Person and a Machine? 6 Who is My Digital Neighbour? 7 Who Am I These Days? 8 Who Can I Believe? 9 Is it Time to CTRL+ALT+DELETE the Church? 10 Is My Body Due for an Upgrade? What Next? Glossary Copyright
vii ix 1 15 46 70 91 105 122 138 157 178 186
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to the Sir Halley Stewart Trust and the Seedbed Trust, and to the many friends and family who continue to support my quirky vocation.
Nine times out of ten, when I have had a thought about life in digital culture, I discover that Dr Bex Lewis has had it first. Among all the naysayers she is relentlessly positive about the possibilities of technology and of life itself. She will disagree with some of what I have written here, especially my use of the term Real Life. (‘But, Andrew, it’s all Real Life.’) She is right of course. If anyone knows about Real Life, it is Bex. This book is dedicated to her.
Introduction
In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus published his work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres . His radical idea was that we humans are not at the centre of the universe but that, like other planets, our earth orbits the sun. He was right of course. But his discovery didn’t just prompt the rewriting of the relevant pages in the astronomical texts of the day. Adjusting to this new piece of information required an agonizing mind-shift for the entire human species. It took at least 200 years for the culture to adjust to the news that we were not at the centre of things.
Open a map on your phone or your laptop today, and a little pulsing blue circle will tell you where you are. Wherever you are in actual space, the blue circle on the map will be right at the centre. Copernicus’ long-fought battle to convince his fellow humans that they existed on the edges of a much wider galaxy has been thrown into reverse. Once again digital culture is telling us that the universe revolves around us. Only this time it isn’t the planet that’s at the centre, but every individual.
You will notice that I’m talking about digital culture here, not digital technology. I’m not primarily here to discuss how the Church can make best use of new digital communications media … whether bishops should blog or how churches can use the web. Those things are important, but they are not the heart of our conversations here. If you need someone to help you set up a website or choose which phone to buy, you’ve come to the wrong person. In fact I think those questions are relatively trivial, and if that’s what you need to know you would probably be best to ask a teenager for help. For me, what is fundamentally important is not digital technology and what we can do with it, but digital culture and what it will do to us. What forces are shaping the digital environment? How is the Internet changing our understanding of ourselves as individuals and communities? What is happening to authority? What does it mean to be a disciple in a digital age? It is these bigger questions that pose the greater challenges to Christians, and those are the sort of questions we will deal with in this book.

What is important is not digital technology and what we can do with it, but digital culture and what it will do to us.
The rise of digital culture has had an unsettling effect on Western humans just as great as the Copernican revolution. The root of this disquiet is the sense that the place of human beings in the cosmos has shifted fundamentally. Until the middle of the twentieth century, we were sure that the human brain was the most powerful tool we had available for processing information. We could confidently live as if we were the centre of the universe of information. For all its weaknesses and unreliability, we assumed that the body, made up of flesh and blood, atoms and molecules, arms and legs and brain, was the basic unit of humanity. The body was the only place where we had power or agency. Digital culture calls these fundamental assumptions into question.
Way back in 1985 the writer Neil Postman wrote a prescient book about media culture, which he called Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it, he complained that media culture pitches us into ‘a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities’. The advent of digital media has transformed our access to information and made new forms of relationship possible. It has also increased exponentially the pointless quantity and discontinuity that Postman warned about.
Today we live with the uneasy feeling that all the important stuff is going on elsewhere, where data is being sifted by machines. If we stop to think about it, we know that those machines must themselves be located somewhere, in some physical space. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels as if information about us and our lives is being stored and processed in some sort of ephemeral realm outside of space and time. We are aware of its complexity, the power and the richness of the activity going on there, but we quite literally can’t get our hands on it. Some of the words we use add to this sense of unreality. ‘Cyberspace’ is a metaphor that tries to envisage the digital environment as akin to physical space – except that you can’t locate it, measure it or visit it. We store information in ‘The Cloud’ – another metaphor for something that we know is real but fluffy, intangible and beyond our control.
Everyday instances of automation add to this sense of detachment. A mechanical voice answers the phone or tells us where the bus will stop next. A letter arrives from the bank that has clearly been generated by a computer. A website posing as a friend recommends a book or offers a discounted holiday. After a few weeks of living in a digital culture we are well aware that these people who seem to be speaking to us are not actually speaking to us. Or rather, they are speaking, but they are not actually people. They are signals generated by an algorithm, which have never passed through human lips. After a few months we stop being surprised or disappointed that the communications aren’t genuine. Wisdom teaches us to be cynical about emails bearing gifts. After years of digital exposure we hardly notice that most of the people who seem to be communicating with us aren’t real at all. We know that there was a person attached to the voice once, or at least that somebody has made decisions to program the message. But the actual people behind the communication barely exist to us in any real way. They are more part of the machine than of our community.
Digital information is non-physical. And because our cultures generally adjust themselves to meet the limitations and requirements of the new technologies available to them, digital culture has downgraded the physical. That includes the status of the human body. Later in this book I will have lots to say about what it means to be human in digital culture. Much of it is exciting – but some of it is disturbing too.

Digital culture has downgraded the physical.
We are once again at the dawn of a new age in human culture (or more accurately, we are at around half past nine in the morning of the new age). The tool that has brought this about is the Internet. Its forms and uses are every bit as diverse as the hammer, and its impact on human culture promises to be just as great. Billions of fingers are touching, tapping and swiping billions of screens to access almost immeasurable amounts of computing power. But in a strange kind of judo-throw the computer is also acting on us, and on the people we know, and on the whole of human culture. The changes we are seeing are probably bigger and more fundamental in scope than anything we have seen in a hundred human lifetimes, but like gradual changes in the climate they are hard to notice and respond to. Since the challenges of the digital age affect the most fundamental of beliefs, such as what it means to be a human, you might have thought that Christians would be at the forefront of exploring them. Unfortunately we are still mostly busy trying to remember our passwords and work out how to set up a church Facebook page. My aim in this book is to explore some of the ways that digital culture is affecting us. I don’t claim to have big enough answers even for my own questions, but we need to identify the challenges so that we can make measured decisions about how we want to live in this first digital age.
The digital era crept up on me. One minute I was looking for a phone box to call home, and a copper 2p coin to pay for the call. The next minute I was carrying a phone in my pocket and paying the bill with a credit card using money that never existed except as numbers in my bank’s computer. Like most of us, I was so busy focusing on the practical issues – what sort of computer shall I buy; should I give my child their own phone – that I didn’t stop to think much about the bigger issues. To be fair, in the earlier days of broadcasting these were issues that had been dealt with by someone else. No-one was keeping a record of what TV shows I watched or who I phoned and for how long. (No-one, except possibly my mother.) Now, though, like the media itself, the issues seem to have come much closer to home.
Do I have a right to keep my personal data private, and if so, how can I do that when every shop seems to want to know my name, address and shoe size before they will serve me? If I write a blog or take a photo and put it online, is it still mine? Is anyone else entitled to change it, share it and even make money out of it? Then there’s the tricky balance between freedom of speech and prevention of harm: does the government have a right and duty to check what I’m writing in my emails if they believe that by doing so they might stop someo