Virtue In A Digital Age
Part 2 of 2 pieces aimed at connecting virtue and technology
Ugh. Another article about digital technology? Add it to the pile of moralistic hankerings for a bygone era where screens didn’t exist. You can if you want to.
In the last piece, I argued that as humans we are primarily desiring creatures, not thinking ones, and that our desires are shaped by our repeated actions until they are crystallised into virtue or vice. These repeated actions are our habits and liturgies, and the incentives within our environment can be powerfully formative.
In this piece I will focus on how the technological environment we inhabit is full of these heart-shaping liturgies.
Thinking in a digital age
So we’ve heard about virtue and liturgy. We are shaped by our environment. So how does our particular technological environment shape us?
Is technology neutral? This is an important foundational question. Pause for a moment and consider the below technologies and ponder how they have shaped human society, and why.
Fire
Industrial revolution
Railroads, Cars, Jet aeroplanes
The pill
Technology is only ever one side of the coin. The other is human nature. The real question is: What are the incentives that are presented to humans by this technology?
Information/Media technology
Pretty much all I have to say on this comes from Niel Postman, who wrote a book called ‘Amusing Ourselves To Death’. He wrote it in the 80s about how TV was changing the way we thought, but his observations have proved even more prescient for our present moment.
At this point, this essay devolves into pure plagiarism, as I cannot restate Postman’s words any better than him. I will simply string together several quotes.
His refrain was that ‘the medium is the message’. The form of the information shapes the information itself and then in turn shapes us as we engage with it.
With regard to the printing press:
“The invention of firearms equalised the noble and the vassal on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace”1
Postman goes on to describe a massive boom in literacy in the US with reading rates that would put us to shame. But his point is: As a culture, when the printing press arrived, it changed the way we thought.
“Whenever language is the principal medium of communication – especially language controlled by the rigors of print – an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result. The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one’s thought.”2
“It is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said”2
“To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”2
“In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterised by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas”2
“The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition. Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.”3
In other words, the technology enabled a way of doing things, that, once dominant, changed the very fabric of society, and, because it had to do with the thought process, changed the very way people thought.
You can see where we are going with this.
With regard to Television, Postman first points out that for most of human history, information was a precious commodity. Then it slowly accelerates until we have information overload, of increasingly less relevant information.
“Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action”4
“for the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency”4
He goes on to make a deeper point about the nature of image-based information. What do images convey that words do not? What are the limitations of the image form? We go from ideas/concepts/rational thought, to images/examples/particulars/emotions. An image cannot convey an argument or any meaningful rational thought.
“Unlike words and sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world, except as we use language itself to convert the image to idea. By itself, a photograph cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract.”5
“Television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing; that television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality”6
Postman then goes on to talk about the need for television to be entertaining, and how this likewise shapes the messages that are conveyed, and shapes the way we think. In an entertainment culture, it’s all about attention. How do you get people’s attention, by giving them what they want – what they desire.
“You can get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want”7
And so you can start to see the pattern emerging. If I can switch channels to anything else, then I will gradually find the thing that is most entertaining. That gives me the biggest dopamine hit. This is the reason that television is hostile to serious thought. It doesn’t keep people engaged for long enough. Worse, shallow thought is substituted for serious thought, and even labelled as serious. This is easy to prove. We’ve all seen Q&A. It’s a shocking farce of a ‘debate’.
“But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.”8
And so if television is the main medium, then truth and rationality disappear from our public discourse, and indeed, we stop individually caring about them. As an aside, this is a totalitarian’s dream scenario. There is no need to ban books when you can have something that people will choose over books 100% of the time. Indeed, one of Postman’s driving themes is that we are living in Huxley’s Brave New World, not in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.
“To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation”9
Digital liturgies
When it comes to computers, the internet, and social media, Postman’s words become prophetic. All of the above is plain to see in our digital world.
Samuel D James has written an insightful work called Digital Liturgies, in which he discusses several ways that the internet trains our hearts and minds:
Authenticity
Everyone seems to be living in their own timeline. Information has been democratised, such that it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s fake.
“Social media platforms encourage us to distrust the processes and networks that tend to safeguard genuine knowledge and productive dialogue. We become self-appointed know-it-alls, eagerly skimming every controversial news story for confirmation bias while we curate feeds that constantly validate us”10
If you can create and curate who you are, choose your truth and your narrative, then you are unmoored from reality.
“The internet, especially social media, has untethered scores of people from any solid, given sense of identity or purpose”11
The result is a generation who is confused about what they believe. The Christian response is to submit to God’s truth, and find our identity in God’s story, not ours.
Outrage
Online thought is socialised thought. Our opinions are now constantly measured against the opinions of others. To some extent, this was always the case, but social media unlocks it in new ways. The tribe mentality has intensified.
“When the act of thinking is inseparable from the act of being noticed, approved, or shared, the threat of thinking for the sake of those things is omnipresent”12
So narratives simplify into black & white. You have to pick a side and then get angry. The algorithms are hunting our ‘anger’ response and they know what gets us most fired up.
“It’s nearly impossible to overstate how fundamentally the disembodied nature of the web has recalibrated our sense of what is good and normal”13
Christian thinking is, by contrast, careful, truthful, and communal.
Shame
Moral relativism is dead. We don’t really believe it. Cancel culture and #MeToo say otherwise. The things that generate online outrage reveal the true absolute moral standards of our culture. Human society has always been highly moral. Public shaming is a well-practised ritual. The internet exacerbates this, because everything is visible, and the mob is quick to mobilise.
“Social media and the web pulsate with a seemingly nonstop sense of anger, frustration, and despair at the world”14
Samuel D James posits a link between shame and anger. Everyone feels shame and guilt – which cannot be atoned for in a post-religious world. So it is directed outside in anger and accusation. We find guilt in others as a defence mechanism.
The answer is the gospel. True atonement in Jesus.
Consumption
Porn is the elephant in the room in any conversation about the internet’s effect on our brains. James goes even further than typical comments by asserting that even the non-pornographic content on the internet is still ‘porn-shaped’.
There are three ways that the internet has the same shape as porn.
Novelty – we are trained to search for stimulation, which always escalates. We look for ways out of our boredom and listlessness. Dopamine cycles change our brain
Consumption – we are trained to consume experiences, even deeply personal ones or transcendent ones. So we have food porn, and earth porn, etc.
Isolation – we experience the internet alone, and often when we feel lonely
We can indulge our every fantasy, which gives us a feeling of power. This is true of all content, not just porn.
The more time we spend online, we are priming ourselves for porn’s temptation. One of the ways out is to simply spend more time in the real world. When we stop scrolling and find meaning, purpose, satisfaction in our work, our study, or our recreation, then porn seems like a hollow joke. When we see the sky, or the mountain or waterfall, or we are with good friends, our dark fantasies tend to flee. So we need to be careful which environments we inhabit, which habits we cultivate.
“There is a vital connection between aimless immersion in “content” and the spiritual mood that primes a heart to seek out lust”15
“Pornography is, after all, fundamentally a consumptive act, a transformation of human persons into soulless objects of spectacle. Porn and the web go together so efficiently precisely because they are both instruments of commodification, a way to turn the most intimate or even most elementary stuff of human life into consumable content. Consider how the term porn has even been repurposed to refer to images that make something desirable. E.g. earth porn or food porn.”16
“God’s good, given world subverts the charms of lust. The moments of weakness are the moments of listless anxiety in which we hope that something we find online can distract us or flatter us just enough. They are not the moments when we are surrounded by the beauty of snow-capped mountains or snow-white beaches or the friends and family we love most. In those moments we are brought out of ourselves; most of the time, the thought of aimlessly scrolling at such a moment feels absurd, even immoral.”17
Meaninglessness
We are trained to be constantly distracted. It leads us to be non-present. Unable to focus on the meaningful things in front of us, which are replaced by meaningless trivial content.
Discontentment leads us to want what we can’t have, or to desire a literal fantasy. Something that’s not real.
The result is a dislocation and a feeling of meaninglessness and despair. The answer is to be present and to pray, and let God’s truth bring peace to our anxious searching.
“The distraction we fall into quickly morphs into discontent: an anxious sense of impatience with the mundane, quiet, unremarkable parts of life”18
“We should contemplate more seriously the possibility that the devotedness of our thought life is connected to the question of whether God’s peace is conquering anxiety in our hearts.”19
Attention and thought
I want to finish on the most obvious and most practical point here. It’s been a bit of a thread through all the others. If the book, as the dominant form of communication changed our brains, then social media is doing something similar. The web, with its attention feedback loop, lends itself to diffuse and distracting thought. We are witnessing the death of focus.
I believe the ability to pay attention, to focus, and to persevere through something that requires intense mental effort is among the most crucial for any kind of success in life. Yet this is precisely what is under threat in a digital environment.
Our constant distraction draws us away from steady contemplation and into shallow thought. Book reading is on the decline20. No one takes the time to formulate careful opinions. We are content with such shallowness.
So we binge Netflix. Or game for several hours a night. Or scroll something. It’s all the same thing. It’s distraction and sloth robbing us of energy and time, which are called to steward well to serve God and his kingdom.
So I want to finish with a personal challenge. How many hours of content do you consume each week? How many books have you read this year?
For parents, we need to be very, very careful about how we are we forming our young minds. The “ipad kids” generation will find it extremely difficult to do anything worthwhile.
For educational policy: a key question we should be asking of our schools is: to what extent does our pedagogy cultivate focus and attention? How does our use of technology aid or hinder this? How can the trend of gamification of education do anything other than reduce us to dopamine-seeking shallow thinkers?
“No intellectual habit is so valuable as that of attention; it is a mere habit but it is also the hall-mark of an educated person.”21
Remember, knowledge doesn’t make you wise. Disciplined, consistent action in line with that knowledge makes you wise.
References
1 – Niel Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death, pp. 38
2 – Ibid, pp. 50-51
3 – Ibid, pp. 63
4 – Ibid, pp. 68
5 – Ibid, pp. 72
6 – Ibid, pp. 80
7 – Ibid, pp. 121
8 – Ibid, pp. 141
9 – Ibid, pp. 157-158
10 – Samuel D. James, Digital Liturgies, pp. 80
11 – Ibid, pp. 81
12 – Ibid, pp. 106
13 – Ibid, pp. 109
14 – Ibid, pp. 124
15 – Ibid, pp. 135
16 – Ibid, pp. 137
17 – Ibid, pp. 145
18 – Ibid, pp. 157
19 – Ibid, pp. 163
20 – Catherine Naylor, Sydney Morning Herald, 21/3/2023 https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/children-are-reading-less-but-is-it-their-fault-they-spend-more-time-on-screens-20230421-p5d2cy.html
This is citing statistics from the ABS: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/people-and-communities/cultural-and-creative-activities/2021-22
21a – Charlotte Mason, ‘Towards a Philosophy of Education’
21b – https://heritageschool.org.uk/attention-management-as-a-habit/
21c – Sophie Windsor on the Maiden Mother Matriarch Podcast (Louise Perry).