technological changes have always had a rather dramatic impact on how we see and interpret the world around us. i mean, one of the first dramatic and jarring changes was the onset of the printing press, without which there very likely never would have been the Reformation, let alone many other massive political and social movements that there was around that time. Then, there was the onset of the radio which allowed people to stay in touch with the rest of the world much easier and broaden their available entertainment. Then there were telephones, then cell phones, then the internet, then iPhones and smart phones, and churches with remote (?!) locations/'communities'.
I think in large part what most of this has done is to actually decrease community and connectedness to those around us rather than increase it in some ways. We now maintain connections with people that are based on relationships rather than proximity. In one way, I suppose, this has increased community because it has allowed ties to friends and family to remain stronger at a distance than they had in that past. but at the same time, i think it has decreased natural community. the connections in our communities, i think, in the end are actually weaker. now people can (and do) go to the grocery store and both not talk to anyone or even make eye contact in a filled store of people. it is 'acceptable' to be on the phone in a check-out line or something, staying connected with someone at a distance, while there is a living person standing in one's presence that is not even acknowledged (that one drives me crazy). both the person on the phone and their friend are feeling connected while connections are diminished and destroyed all around them.
it is a double edged sword, really. it is 'normal' and accepted and thereby becomes more common. maybe it is the result of our 'post-modern' society where reality is based upon, built by, and reinforced through communal relations. Maybe we build a world in which we live through our community, and when that community's context is changed by our physical location we tend to latch on to the old one because it is in that community that we make sense of the world around us and not within the new context. maybe that shift is too hard, or just plain doesn't 'fit' into our understanding of the world and clinging to the old is so much simpler than it ever has been in the past.
maybe this is part of the church's struggle today as well. social theorists say that one will convert to a new belief when the connections to the new group overpower the connections that they had maintained with another prior group or community. maybe now we have all of these people that go to church, but do not base their understanding of community upon the church but else where. thus, they go to church on sunday or whatever and then go back out into the world and do not live the identity that the church and Christ is working to build within them. identity will never change when there is a stronger relation elsewhere that reinforces something different.
alright, this is getting way too long way too fast so i will stop there! but these are just some thoughts that i had on community in the technological age while sara was out, and i really for one of the first time ever really felt the distance. really felt the community of two severed by absence. it was startlingly lonely, inducing a small feeling of being lost, and really made me feel a deeper longing for our relationship than on her other trips. i wonder how much of my relationships is based more on technology as the mediator rather than real authenticity. I am dependent. I do hope, and for the most part feel, that in the midst dependency there is also real, deep authenticity as well. actually, i know there is authenticity, but i do think i will pay more attention to the mediator from now on than i have in the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment