Last night, I watched the movie Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis. Here's a bit of a plot summary from IMDB: "People are living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates--sexy, physically perfect mechanical representations of themselves. It's an ideal world where crime, pain, fear and consequences don't exist." Discrimination disappears: everyone is good-looking, and race doesn't have meaning in a world where someone's skin tone may not necessarily reflect their cultural background. Infectious diseases are all but wiped out: robots cannot transmit bacteria and viruses. Injury and death are completely avoidable: surrogates can be thrown from bridges, shot in the head and beaten, with no consequence to the operator except the need to repair or replace their robot.The flip side of this utopia is the reality that people don't actually interact with each other anymore. Bruce Willis' character lives in a world where his wife mourns the death of their son (during the pre-surrogate age) by locking herself in her room and living entirely through her surrogate. This married couple only interacts through youthful, physically perfected versions of themselves, and they hide their pain from each other by barricading their true selves in lonely isolation.
Of course, we don't need futuristic robot avatars to separate
ourselves from each other. We're doing it already. It makes me think of the opening lines of the movie Crash: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something." Impersonality is the law of the land, whether imposed consciously for self-protection or unconsciously out of habit.I recently read an article from the humor and video site Cracked.com entitled "7 Reasons the 21st Century Is Making You Miserable." (WARNING: Cracked is not known for being politically correct or polite. If you have issues with strong language a crude humor, don't read this. I'll summarize it for you anyway.) Here are those 7 reasons:
#1: We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives.
#2: We don't have enough annoying friends, either.
#3: Texting is a [crappy] way to communicate.
#4: Online company only makes us lonelier.
#5: We don't get criticized enough.
#6: We're victims of the Outrage Machine.
#7: We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less.
I'm not going to go into detail on all of these, but here are some basic points made in this article. Today's technology allows us to be selective about how and with whom we interact; therefore, we can more easily avoid dealing with obnoxious people. However, this actually makes us less able to cope with the annoying people with whom we inevitably must communicate from time to time. This article also points out that e-mail and texting allow us to avoid deeper levels of honesty and leave tons of room for miscommunication; it cites studies that found only 7% of communication has to do with the actual words we use--the other 93% is nonverbal. This means that when you talk to someone purely using words on a screen, you're only getting a tiny fraction of what they're really saying.The other thing does is that it allows us to throw things out online that we wouldn't say to someone's face. Online bullying is a real issue for kids and teens today that I, for one, simply didn't have to deal with much at all. When I was a kid, people just talked about you behind your back; now, they'll ridicule and threaten each other online. The lack of immediate consequences (or, sometimes, any consequences at all) can bring out the worst in people.
Christians are not exempt from this. Jonathan Acuff, author of
www.StuffChristiansLike.net (his book Stuff Christians Like is now available for purchase), recently wrote for CNN's Belief Blog. His post, "Why Christians are Jerks Online," gives two reasons for the preponderance of hateful Christian blogs, bitter Twittering from churchgoers, and Christian hate mail. First, what Acuff calls "The Business Traveler Approach"--going on the "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" rule, Christians are often able to separate their offline and online selves, believing that despite their commitment to the commandment to love one another, what they say on the internet "doesn't count." The second reason, one that really hit home with me, Acuff terms "Room Cleaning Christianity.""Think of it like college. When you’ve got a final paper due Monday, you will be amazed at how energetic your desire is to clean your room. You will scrub tile with a slow toothbrush if it means avoiding the bigger, more difficult work of writing your paper. The same thing happens with Christianity. Loving your neighbor might be simple, but it’s not easy. [...] So instead of dealing with that, we get online and police people. We find small things to focus on that will distract us. I think God wants us to discuss the little stuff, but we make it an idol when we practice room cleaning Christianity at the exclusion of love. And we tend to become jerks."
As a member of the Facebook group "Nothing Gets My Room Cleaner Than a Paper Due Tomorrow," I can identify with this metaphor. And Acuff's explanation connects directly to a conversation I had recently about how to be committed to your tradition without being an arrogant jerk. Sometimes we lose any trace of humility in our attempt to elevate adiaphora (non-essentials) to the state of dogma (essentials) when really we're just putting off dealing with real issues and real people.
As if this post weren't already too long, thinking about all this made me recall a book I started reading and really need to finish: Marva J. Dawn's Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time. Dawn points out that the overload thrown at us by the internet has gotten us used to learning random trivia that has no impact on our actual lives (remember Cracked.com? Totally my guilty source for exactly that kind of thing). Dawn writes, "television [and the internet, etc.] has habituated its watchers [and users] to a low information-action ratio, that people are accustomed to 'learning' good ideas (even from sermons) and then doing nothing about them." She also emphasizes the point that our technology-addicted culture decreases our ability to form intimate human relationships: "We talk about the weather and the latest ball scores, but we don't understand each other as if we belonged to each other, and we don't really want to know the answer to 'How are you?'" Ouch.I need to go ahead and admit something that you're probably already thinking: writing this entire blog has been totally self-indicting. I am the queen of Facebook, email and texting. Even making phone calls to close friends makes me nervous. I have definitely made attempts to counteract this tendency to keep a computer between myself and others--when I ran a summer camp last year, I got tired of all the volunteers communicating simply via email and called a meeting for the sole purpose of acknowledging and pursuing the incarnational nature that our faith is supposed to have. We didn't talk about anything we couldn't have done over email, but it was so much more fruitful to sit around a table with coffee and donuts and just talk and pray together.
And now I've compiled all this information and educated myself and maybe some of you. My question to myself and to my readers now is...what am I--what are we--going to do about this? First off, I'm going to get off the computer and go to lunch with a parishioner and our administrative assistant. And I'm going to pray about the possibility of going on a technology fast sometime in the near future. Some fellow Duke Divinity School students did this for a class last year, and it was interesting--it felt like they dropped off the face of the planet for a week, and yet until I was 16 or 17 I barely ever used the internet, and I didn't have my own cell phone until I was about 18. It's amazing how quickly I've become addicted to my gadgets. Recently my boyfriend thanked me for not bringing my laptop over to his apartment when I came to hang out because it removed the temptation for me to disappear into my computer and ignore him. I immediately felt ashamed that he would have to thank me for such a thing.
Are we willing and able to acknowledge that despite the amazing things technology can do (because obviously I'm not anti-technology--it's an incredible tool), it also presents a danger in limiting our personal relationships? Are we willing to have contact with others where we are not fully in control of how much time and energy we invest in that interaction? Do we really want to know the answer to "How are you?", even if the answer might make us uncomfortable or, heaven forbid, take up our time?
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