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The Worries and Wonders of Technology
The Question: E-mail: Blessing or Curse?
Our concern is with the soul: is E-mail a blessing or a curse, so far as the soul is concerned?
I will tell a story. Decades ago the Annenbergs endowed a new center at the University of Southern California, and invited Librarian of Congress and my former teacher Daniel Boorstin, technological visionary Buckminster Fuller and me to share a panel on the emergent technology called "the computer." The Annenbergs, generous philanthropists, whose interests included the Philadelphia Inquirer, Racing Form, TV Guide and other media-related companies, had been reading a then-in-vogue intellectual, Jean Gimpel, on the "decline of the West." We were urged to be declinists with him.
We all did our best to fill the bill, but "Bucky" Fuller could no be restrained in his enthusiasm, I was typically ambivalent ("blessing or curse") and Boorstin was characterisically pragmatic and realist. After a recess during which we were urged to be more pessimistic, Boorstin, having listened to woe-speakers from the floor, said, "These are whinings of the sort Americans heard 100 years ago at the Philadelphia Exposition, where Alexander Graham Bell's invention, the telephone, was being given a hearing. Was it fair?
We three agreed that every professor we knew, every writer of our acquaintance, and we ourselves, did not welcome the cursed telephoned interruptions.. Franz Kafka wrote that "for the writer the silence is never silent enough; the night is never night enough." It was devastating to the soul to have interruptions, sometimes trivial and sometimes troubling, which interrupted the creative flow.
But then, also from the floor and from us came other reminders of the blessing. There was testimony, for instance, of someone's mother who was confined to a senior citizens' home, which was limiting her freedom and thus her soul Then someone: a club president or a pastor would call her and ask her to make some phone calls to other members, and she did. She welcomed the chance to be in touch with other souls, over matters trivial or troubling. The technology of the telephone was then a blessing.
Virtually everyone everyone I know knows complains about the curse of E-mail which demands to be answered at once. A curse. But there are ways to organize the schedule so that this task does not overwhelm. (I am told.) Meanwhile, the blessing side is also there. I am a retired pastor who can continue in "the care of souls," as pastoral activity was officially called, across the miles and the decades. Recently a former student who teaches in Haifa linked up with a former colleague who teaches at Notre Dame to elicit and produce almost a hundred reports an greetings from my Ph.D. dissertation advisees scattered everywhere. In the only-snail-mail era I would perhaps have heard from a half dozen, while the rest would be lost or in my mental shadows.
I despise spam and the misuses of the internet in blogs which bring out the worst in the worst, but I celebrate the ways friends greet friends, the distant sustain relations, and the hopers spread hope to the disappointed.
Name a technological invention all the way back to camp- and cave-fire starters or the wheel, that does not a blessing AND a curse side, and I'll be astonished. I'd go on further, but I hear the "you've got mail" voice sounding off. So I will press the "Sent" key and go back to the darkness and night in which I was working.
By
Martin Marty
|
March 12, 2008; 8:29 AM ET
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Posted by: Anonymous | March 14, 2008 12:00 AM
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Posted by: Ya Ya Yo | March 13, 2008 2:16 PM
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Tools are what we human beings choose to make of them. Until we choose what we are going to do they have no inherent value of their own.
Posted by: garyd | March 13, 2008 1:02 PM
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As I read this article, all I could hear in my head was ... "I'm soooooooo old."
Posted by: Willis | March 13, 2008 9:01 AM
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Sinds mensen en vooral jonge mensen hun mening via email, sms en weblog op een min of meer anonieme manier kunnen uiten is de maatschappij er niet socialer van geworden.
In tegendeel, er is sprake van ernstige ontwrichting van de maatschappij als gevolg van het anonieme kladderwerk, waarin mensen vaak onnodig worden gekwetst. Ik ben absoluut tegen iedere vorm van -isme, maar vind het wel nodig om een artikel als godslastering te laten staan, meer nog, het dient aangevuld te worden met het strafbaar stellen van het onnodig beledigen en kwetsen van gewone mensen van vlees en bloed. Dus de regels voor het beledigen van divine verschijningen moet ook gaan gelden voor niet-goddelijke wezens. Dat dit nodig is blijkt wel uit het onnodig kwetsend taalgebruik bij bovengenoemde communicatiemiddelen, om nog maar te zwijgen over de gevolgen van het pesten, onderdrukken en terroriseren middels bovengenoemde communicatievormen. Zodra de mensheid dan over 100 jaar een beetje schappelijker met bovengenoemde middelen heeft leren omgaan, kan altijd nog gedacht worden aan het afschaffen van het godslaster en menslaster artikel. Dus mijn advies is uitbreiden dit artikel van divine wezens en verwanten naar niet divine wezens en verwanten. Het uitbreiden van het laster artikel is met name van belang in een land als het onze waar mensen ondragelijk dicht op elkaar leven. Een maatschappij leefbaar houden stoelt op twee belangrijke peilers, wederzijds respect en strenge wetgeving m.b.t. de manier waarop men omgaat met uiterst gevoelige dingen van een ander, zoals geloof en de gewoonten die daarmee samenhangen. Dit commentaar is speciaal gericht op de bende van asocialen, jonge mensen, die zich volksvertegenwoordigers noemen. Zij hebben een voorbeeldfunctie. En kunnen ze dat niet dan mogen ze wat mij betreft vandaag nog vertrekken. Het is wat mij betreft een kabinetcrisis waard. De MP van dit land is zo'n slecht voorbeeld, door met list en bedrag het nederlandse leger naar iraq te lootsen om maar vooral de criminele amerikaanse regering niet tegen het hoofd te stoten. Dankzij het onnodig olie en energieverbruik door landen als de VS is wereldoorlog 3 aanstaande, en denk nou maar niet dat kinderen van leden van ons kabinet in die oorlog gaan vechten, nee, die rol is weggelegd voor jan boeseroen, die tenslotte zelf maar een goeie helm moeten kopen om het er levend vanaf te brengen. Dan hebben we hiermee meteen een beetje een mentaliteitsschets gemaakt van de leden van het kabinet balkenende, de laatste incluis. Dat slechte zorgen en slecht voorbeeld geld natuurlijk voor alle europese regeringen en de regering van de VS en andere grootmachten zoals China en India.
Posted by: jwh | March 13, 2008 2:47 AM
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Sounds like you had the opportunity to shut down the coming of the computer age what with being on that blue ribbon committee. Too late now.
You also failed to look into the future. Computers will eventually gain the ability to reproduce themselves. Scooter Libby, Carl Rove don't have anything to do and soon W will be unemployed too. They can get together and decide what to do about that, let it happen or shut it down, abort it even.
Ah, there's the culprit, anti abortion. The computer could have been aborted while it was still in the womb. Maybe we can sacrifice, on a temporary basis only of course, our high standards and do a retroactive abortion of the computer before it starts reproducing and turns people into slaves. Wasn't it IBM that said, "machines should think and people should work"? Computers are IBM machines you know.
There's rarely a problem that doesn't have a simple solution, abort the unwanted pregnancy for example. And when that's not done then, well, there's the "I can ignore you" approach. Who says I have to answer my E-mail right now? I can and have unplugged my phone and I can "mark all" and "delete" my E-mails with only two clicks. I just ignored the doorbell, another curse, because I looked out the window and recognized JWs coming to save me.
The cure: Mark all - Delete. But then bricks and mortar do not a prison wall make for one who can be locked up in technology.
http://www.hoax-buster.org/sellyoursoul is here for all to see and it's free thanks to the computer age. But it's not forced onto anyone unless one is a prisoner of technology. Then it's one's duty to answer the mail sent from where, heaven or hell? Is it a curse of a blessing? For sure it wouldn't be here without computer technology.
Posted by: BGone | March 12, 2008 1:50 PM
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The Question: E-mail: Blessing or Curse?
Near the end of his life, Robert Frost wrote a two-line poem about iron, one of the many things that can be either a blessing or a curse:
From Iron
Tools and Weapons
To Ahmed S. Bokhari
by Robert Frost
Nature within her inmost self divides
To trouble men with having to take sides.
(1956)
Posted by: Norrie Hoyt | March 12, 2008 12:10 PM
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Peace-Paz-Sholom-Salaam-Ahimsa...!