Talking Tuesday: The Paradox of Technology

This week I read Andy Crouch's slim volume called The Tech-Wise Family, which is a kind of primer to thinking through the proper place of technology in the home.  While his approach deals most specifically with internet-connected technology, he makes the point that his approach can be applied to all technology in the home.  It is well worth the read and I highly recommend the book.  My only complaint is that the book is padded out with Barna research that is interesting, but is presented twice throughout the book (once in info-graphic form, and then in dense paragraph form; I found the double presentation distracting).  But Crouch's book is extremely important as we navigate the new landscape dominated by technology, and increasingly, screen-based technology.

I wanted to share a short passage from the book that is near the beginning that I thought was a great statement about what technology is.

"Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world.  But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were meant to.

Technology is good at serving human beings.  It even--as in medical or communication technology--saves human lives.  It does almost nothing to actually form human beings in the things that make them worth serving and saving.

Technology is a brilliant expression of human capacity.  But anything that offers easy everywhere does nothing (well, almost nothing) to actually form human capacities.

Since forming our capacity to be human is what family is all about, technology is at is best a neutral factor in what is most important in our families.  But it is very often not at is best, because we are very often not at our best, maybe especially in our daily lives with those closest to us.  In the most intimate setting of the household, where the deepest human work of our lives is meant to take place, technology distracts and displaces us far too often, undermining the real work of becoming persons of wisdom and courage."

~Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family.  Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2017, 66.  Emphasis in original.

The book goes on to detail ten commitments a tech-wise family can make to put technology in its proper place.  We already do a lot of the things he talks about, but I still have some food for thought about further steps we can take to make our home a peaceful place that cultivates human beings of wisdom, courage and deep character.