Technology and Community: Towards a Guiding Principle
I would guess that if you’re a Christian parent during these troubling days, there is one question you have definitely struggled with: How do I introduce smart phones, social media, and screens in general to my kids? I know you’ve asked this question because every parent I talk to wonders about it, whether her child is three years old or fifteen. The problem is not going away and there is no easy solution.
Completely restricting access is one option. I don’t think it’s the best option because, in my own life and in the experience of my friends and acquaintances, generally when all access has been taken away, it simply motivates rebellion and overindulgence as soon as any access is granted. And when it comes to smart phones and social media, at some point your child will have access, even if that’s not until he turns eighteen and moves out of your house.
Controlled access with a great deal of restrictions and surveillance is another option. The question becomes: when to allow this kind of access? And inevitably the problem becomes: just how diligent and consistent can parents be? Of course we must place limits on our and our children’s consumption of technology. The internet is not going away, nor are our smartphones, so yes, we must be master of the tool rather than allowing it to be master of us.
But we must do more. If we are to survive the introduction of such technology into our lives we must do more than attempt strict avoidance or satisfy our consciences by implementing different forms of restrictions and surveillance techniques. We must intentionally reclaim our humanity. We must create ways to use the technology that foster and benefit and serve our humanity, rather than the opposite. Instead of using every social media platform and feeding the machine which generates billions of dollars from our addiction, we must find a way to pursue community with real people in our own lives and only allow technology to be a tool in that pursuit. Knowing the difference, being able to distinguish between those times when we are being consumed by the monster and those times when we have managed to keep the monster in its cage and have even begun to train it is now the trick. So far in our society, the monster has raged uncontrolled and unchecked. Conquering it will take great strength of will, severe discipline, and true wisdom. Some of us will not have enough of these and our best defense will be strict avoidance. But I don’t think avoidance is a realistic general solution. These powers of technology exist and mastery over them is, ultimately, the only solution.
I do think that to some extent, we need to be familiar with the types of platforms and tools out there. If you have no idea what TikTok or Snapchat is, how can you wisely decide if you or your child should engage with that platform? I don’t use either of these apps but that doesn’t mean that I have no clue what they are or what they provide access to. If you have paid any attention at all over the past couple of years, you know that TikTok is an app that presents a great deal of danger for users and very minimal benefits, if any. Its purpose is almost exclusively to entertain and addict its users while it destroys the attention span and normalizes abhorrent fads, not to mention the much bigger problem that it corrupts the imagination (a topic too large for this current conversation). Snapchat is similar but inclines more towards direct interaction between individual people. The dangers are great, especially in terms of the temptation it provides young people to share pictures and information that ought to be protected vigorously and remain private. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the host of other social media platforms all hold their own dangers but perhaps offer certain benefits that can be worth the risk. I won’t write in detail about each because there has been so much public discussion about them.
I highlight TikTok and Snapchat because I’ve met many parents and other adults (and even leaders of small Christian schools) who shrug their shoulders or truly have no idea how dangerous these sites are. In the past, I have personally spoken about their great danger to both my own students and their parents because I witnessed the severe detrimental effect they had on those I cared about. Allow me to be extremely clear: this is not about being a prude. This is not about being fearful or overly protective. When you are dealing with evil, those categories do not exist. Simply because you do not understand or comprehend the deep and complete evil that these particular apps expose you to does not give you the right to call me fearful or protective. That is on you. You ought to educate yourself about the real danger, you ought to take it seriously, and you ought to stop using these things yourself. I strongly suspect that it is the parents and adults who use these apps themselves who don’t want to confront the real danger they themselves are in and therefore end up calling people like me “prudes” as a naive defense when I suggest that our children shouldn’t use them. The reason I write so harshly about this issue is because your choice not to see the danger is not simply “your choice” in that it affects only you. Besides having a permanent effect on your children’s lives, it also affects me and my family. Whether you like it or not, we all do live in a community and your choices deeply affect others. So it is worth my time to try to convince you of the dangers.
To briefly explain why I think this is such an important community issue, let me illustrate how the ill-use of technology can actually disrupt a natural community. By natural community, I mean either a community of people who naturally spend time together because they live in the same location, attend the same church, and/or send their children to the same school or a community of family members who might not live in the same location but who interact together regularly. These kinds of communities experience a great deal of discontinuity and disruption when part of the community feels differently about a certain aspect of technology than another part does. Often this happens when one group possesses a naive or even simply apathetic attitude towards dangerous aspects of technology. As soon as certain families in the community choose (whether voluntarily or by ignoring the issue) to allow their children access to phones and computers that have these apps and programs on them, those families have automatically granted access to the entire community. Now parents who do not want their children to be exposed to these things must make a hard decision: either they abandon their own principles and standards or they have to step outside of the natural community and essentially isolate themselves. They and their children will most likely be judged as “prudes” who take things too seriously and need to “chill”. You can quickly see how these kinds of technology lead to a disruption of community. No matter who happens to be right in each case (maybe one family is overly lax in their use of smartphones or maybe another family truly does need to consider a different route than complete avoidance of all technology), the reality is there: the community has been disrupted.
I noted above that I didn’t think avoidance is a general solution. What I mean is that we can’t expect to avoid all technology or prevent our children from using any of it. But I do believe that some things ought to be completely avoided. Programs like TikTok and Snapchat fall into that category. There might be other apps or websites that deserve equal avoidance.
But my larger point here is that we cannot allow technology to determine the shape and nature of our communities. We cannot allow technology to break down the inherent characteristics that define what makes a community. We may disagree with our neighbor about what we want our children exposed to, but we must begin to work towards some sort of consensus about what absolutely cannot be admitted into our public life with one another. And that might require some debate, some compromise, and perhaps even some sacrifice.
My main point remains: our humanity must be the priority. Human beings naturally exist in community with one another. This begins at the level of husband and wife and extends to families interacting with other families, and individuals interacting with individuals, etc. So when we ask how we, as parents, are going to introduce technology of any kind to our children, we must begin with the principle that our children are human beings and their humanity must be defended at all cost. If the technology causes isolation, as it so often does in a myriad of ways, any benefit it offered is now compromised. If technology begins to reduce the user to a more bestial existence, where he is using it to pursue satisfaction of his appetites, the technology has lost its usefulness as a tool. You can carry this point in many directions, but I won’t belabor it. It is time for all Christians to take the issue seriously and begin to see it in the right frame. Many in my generation have learned a similar lesson with the television (i.e. that having it as the center of life in the home creates a problem, to say the least), but it has taken quite a long time for that lesson to be learned. The new technology offered by screens and social media is, arguably, more dangerous than was the introduction of the television and we simply cannot survive the deterioration of our society and communities which these types of technology are already beginning to cause.
