This is a little mashup using the Google Maps API and the Twitter API to allow HighWire members to use their location enabled smart phones to map their travels, meeting, conferences, workshops etc.

The idea is for HighWire members to be able to easily track their movements and mark who they are with and what they are attending by sending a Tweet with specific #HashTags. These tweets are then scraped, stored and bundled over to the Google Maps interface. They are then all plotted on a map with a start point originating at HighWire’s new studio in Lancaster, England.

View the project here: HighWired.co.uk/reach

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 4 – Laughing Ourselves to Humility

There are certain religious communities that eschew modern technologies (Amish, Shakers, etc.); many merely adopt a posture of reticence toward technology (Christians and others). We can label these people and anyone who is a bit wary of computers as a Luddite. But the point is, we have reason to be reticent. We have probably all experienced a technological failure that exposes our techno-arrogance: e.g. the computer dies and you haven’t backed up a year’s worth of work; the phone, which holds all your passwords, contacts, and schedules dies, leaving you lost and in a puddle of your own tears. As Schultze says, “The resulting frustration and fear should open our hearts to the need for humility” (104).

In this chapter, Schultze argues that:

1) Technological development is an exercise in human folly: “Our high-tech endeavors are riddled with foolishness masquerading as progress” (95). We think of ourselves as experts, but how little we actually know! As Schultze says, “Fools major in the minors” (94); this seems to be our wheelhouse, focusing on the minutiae of technological knowledge. “Such fools,” he writes, “lack the whole of creation, and consciousness of our obligation to it” (95). I would phrase this concern differently: that we focus on detail, but we are losing our ability to think holistically. Holism, I argue, is one of the characteristics of a spiritual mindset.

2) We have to recognize the futility of our endeavors, because whenever we think we are solving a problem with a new technology, we are inevitably creating several new problems. I often talk about how while we persevere in the pursuit of lessening our burdens, we are counter-intuitively raising the expectations for how much work we are responsible for doing, thus making our lives more difficult (see John Thomas’ work). Cultivating humility is to recognize that we don’t control everything: “Although the technology that undergirds the information society is the product of much rational thought and remarkable technical achievement, its social nature and moral impact largely elude us” (94). And as Havel says, “we still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine core of all actions – if they are to be moral – is responsibility” (105).

3) We’d be wise to fear our technologies, because “Recognizing the potential for moral as well as technical disaster, we need to accept the humility that comes with responsibility” (93). Reticence is therefore healthy because: “if we lack any technological reticence, we also lack responsibility” (107).

4) Humor is a useful way of fostering this humility, because it “fosters a proper sense of proportion, reveals our tomfoolery, and cultivates greater patience” (93). I liked this one: “‘Without software,’ says Barry, ‘a computer is just a lump of plastic; whereas with software, it’s a lump of plastic that can permanently destroy critical data’” (111). Laughing with people is a form of empathy; it is a variation on compassion (112).

An undersold point raised by this chapter is the idea that we need to be humble enough – and brave enough – to realize that we need to make changes… even if those changes are potentially enormous. “Once a human ‘project acquires a certain size and becomes vested with human dreams of “progress” or “liberation,”‘ writes Vinoth Ramachandra, ‘it attains a life of its own, dragging human beings and societies in its wake” (102). Should we not fight against getting sucked into the quicksand? Let’s design a better cyber alternative.

And while sometimes I don’t know why Schultze says things where he does – they seem random – he also makes an important point in this chapter: “Either we accept informational mythology as a viable religion, or we critique it from the vantage point of a nontechnological tradition” (103). This is, in a nutshell, my approach.

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 3 – Seeking Wisdom in Tradition

Schultze begins by mentioning the “simplicity movement,” whose adherents quip, “Maintaining a complicated life is a great way to avoid changing it” (69). As much as we can rhapsodize about a simpler time, and even wish to return to it, not only can you never put that toothpaste back in the tube, but as Schultze says, “Slowing down our rate of retrieving and disseminating information is a necessary but insufficient step in our journey toward reclaming the habits of the heart” (69).

The point of this chapter is threefold:

1) We need religion as an anchor to a greater, more meaningful continuity; or to what Schultze argues religion creates/maintains: “an overarching metanarrative” (70). I am reminded again of Joel Mason’s sermon about being participants in a story when we come to church. This chapter asks how we can possibly understand ourselves without understanding our history and that narrative. Tradition is not silly; it is truly important to our understanding of who we are. One definition quoted here is that “‘tradition’ [is] the ‘living faith of the dead’” whereas “traditionalism” is the “dead faith of the living” (74). Schultze defines religious tradition as “a transcendentally framed and morally directed way of life that faithfully aims to rebind the broken cosmos from generation to generation” (75). The problem we have to reconcile with this view, however, is that fact that the world our ancestors was describing no longer exists; things are profoundly different as our understanding of the world has grown. But then the value of traditions is that they are “direction-setting ‘maps of reality’ that generations of wisdom-seeking communities of faith have already charted” (76). Simply put, “Without history memory, there can be no wisdom” (89).

2) We need to cultivate more advanced listening skills. Think about the extreme we have arrived at where we literally shout into the ether with tools like Twitter. We don’t even presume anyone is listening to us. But what should we do? Forcibly silence the chatter? Schultze mentions attempts (successful ones!) to establish “Quiet Zones” in America: “Establishing these zones was not only a reaction against noise but also an action in favor of practices such as healing and learning” (77). (As Havel shows, having enforced silence and time for contemplation – being jailed for years – is a great way to cultivate depth of thought.) It is worth considering that monastic rule is not “‘Do not speak’ but rather ‘Do not speak unless you can improve on the silence’” (78). This requires a combination of moderation and reflection. How can technologies support this notion?

3) “we are all responsible not jut for seeking virtue but also for passing it along to each generation” (71). For example, one concern is that “impressive messaging could potentially cut us off from tradition and unravel the tapestries of gratitude and responsibility that bind us to God, neighbor, self, and creation” (81). This third point is linked to the point I was making in my last post about the value of memory to society. Interestingly, Schultze goes on a bit of an unpredicted discussion about the importance of “caring” as part of being responsible. (More predictably, this evokes questions about sustainability and corporate social responsibility, which Schultze glosses over except to say that we need to care for God’s creation.) One example of this caring that we can find on the Internet, which I personally quite like, is MS Softserve. This website was created in recognition of the emotional impact of information, which can derail a person who has recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. This website allows the user to judge the level of intensity of the information they can cope with receiving at the moment.

Again, I’m a bit wary of Schultze’s faith in religion. He says, for example, “The root word religio means ‘to rebind.’ To act religiously in the world is to rebind the broken cosmos” (72). I might attribute such loftiness to spirituality, but I am reticent in applying it to religion, which is so complicated by politics and embittered by centuries of fighting with other religions. This is just one reason I recoil from talking about “religion” – as if you can meaningfully even speak of it as a coherent thing, when it is composed of such different traditions.

But I think this is a useful test for developing technologies: “Do they foster the joy and harmonious shalom, or do they sustain alienation, conflict, unhappiness, and injustice” (72)?

Here’s a really great shorthand introduction to what Wertheim is all about:

Taking a break for a moment, this is a great article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/krista-tippett/albert-einsteins-faith-wa_b_651592.html

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty — it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves … Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. – Einstein

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 2 – Moderating Our Informational Desires

Schultze argues in this chapter that with regard to our informational wants, we practice “pleonexia: a deep-seated desire for something to the point of greed” (49). It’s psychotic, and it’s hurting us mentally, as well as morally. “Mired in pleonexic intemperance, we tend to desire greater information without considering the virtue between excess and deficiency” (67). Schulze argues that “We need to learn how to moderate the transient traffic of bits and bytes so that we are able to listen to the nontechnological voices of virtue” (68). While I see where he’s coming from, I think that disengagement does not solve the problem; and we need to consider how we can in fact design technologies so that they become voices of virtue themselves, i.e. they embody more spiritual, human, values.

One problem of this greed is that it leads to unchecked production of information, which in turn leads to a situation where we experience information overload. Schultze refers to Borges’ short story, “The Library of Babel,” where the characters are swimming in information but are in a state of “literary and psychic disarray” (49). There is a great volume of information, but no synthesis of it, and much of it is irreconcilable.” The message for us is: “Unless we learn moderation, our lives will be a mishmash of messages and information that is ever more tenuously connected to concrete obligations, cultures, and traditions” (48). Microsoft Research notes in its 2008 Being Human, that cyberspace has democratized information production: “We are all fast becoming content producers, publishers and developers as much as we are consumers…. As we approach 2020, we are entering an era where we are much more hands-on with our digital materials, where the world of software is no longer under strict control of developers and engineers, and where we can create a more customised, personalised digital world for ourselves” (23). This seems like a great win for democracy. But consider that until recently, we did not value information production as much as we did the acquisition of knowledge: “People spent more time remembering the past – in ritual, song, and story – than they did trying to create new information” (50). What we are losing in our mania to produce is an appreciation of what has already been produced; and it fuels the ego, which in turn weakens our commitment to the community.

We have to wonder, then, what Metcalf’s Law means in its statement that “the ‘value’ of the Internet increases at the rate of the square of the number of people using it” (51). Surely this is partially if not mostly or even entirely because of the information that these users produce. I think we have confused ourselves again in terms of value. This is because information has acquired economic value (think of the Knowledge Economy, which refers more to information – data – than knowledge – wisdom). More is better. Quantity over quality.

Schultze mentions a snarky little website “Recognizing our condition as tired Web surfers with little direction” (54), which greets people with the following:
We need moderation precisely so that we can be productive in human (rather than technological) terms: “Setting reasonable technological limits enables us to dedicate time and energy to noninstrumental pursuits that are crucial for living a good life” (56). And, “If more and more of our time is dedicated to exchanging voluminous amounts of information with impersonal databases, we will be less likely to commune responsibly with people in our own domiciles and neighborhoods” (66).

Quantity in the Internet immediately raises issues of speed, i.e. bandwidth. According to Moore’s Law, “‘computer power’ doubles every eighteen months” (51)… but should it? Do we need this? Actually, the way we are consuming right now, we need this continuous doubling. But doesn’t this signal addiction? Microsoft Research write, “Having access to email and the Web is becoming more commonplace on all phones, and this may increase the spread of the ‘disease’ of communications addiction. But as with any other addiction, there are ways of dealing with the habit. People increasingly do not feel obliged to answer email on the same day, citing email overload or by being more explicit about being out of touch. There are also numerous self-help books on what it means and how to achieve ‘turning off’. Filtering using social metadata is another possibility for people to use to manage their communication and availability better” (24).

And also, how can a model like this (Moore’s Law, that is) be sustainable? Microsoft Research wrote in 2008 in Being Human that we are casually wasting a huge amount of digital space, assuming that it is infinite and free. It is infinite only to the extent that we are willing to pay for the infrastructure needed to support and manage this data (and presumably to the extent that the Earth is able to provide the resources needed to produce the hardware). The irony is that while an awareness of a need to check our digital footprint reintroduces the notion of scarcity into the equation; and scarcity leads to greater economic value. When we begin to approach the ceiling, there will be an even greater urge for people to colonize the remaining space. On the other hand: “Scarcity, not abundance, usually denotes value and leads us to be more thoughtful about our use of resources. If we have to invest our limited time and energy into an activity, we are more likely to be committed to it” (58).

Schultze asks whether this information is making us better or wiser. I think we all know the answer: No. Firstly, it is making it difficult to compose our thoughts. Havel wrote that being limited to only a few pages retrained his thinking: “In time I leanred how to think ahead and arrange my thoughts in thematic cycles, and to weave the motifs in and out of them and thus – to build, over time, my own little structure, putting it together something like my plays” (60). Self-imposed limits can only be conducive to better thinking. But as we engage more and more with technologies, we are beginning to think more and more like them, and as a result we are becoming more and more scattered. “Stephen L. Talbott warns that the database is a metaphor for the ‘scattered mind – the mind that feverishly gathers trinkets here and there, convinced that, somehow, a big enough pile of such notions will magically coalesce into one of those new paradigms said to be taking shape all around us’” (56). Clearly, undeniably, this is the purpose of my blog. To amass informational trinkets in preparation for writing a grand PhD thesis. I see no other way of managing the great volume of data I am expected to assimilate in order to satisfy the criteria of academic rigor as well as the criteria of my interdisciplinary PhD program. I’m sure I’ll look like the guy above in a few months.

Secondly, our engagement with the Internet is making us dumber. It’s destroying our memories. Yes, our memories have always been fallible; but in designing technologies that remember things for us, we are less and less able to do our own remembering. The memory muscle is wasting away. (Again, hence the need to manically blog as I go so that I don’t forget what I was thinking, or lose the poignant quote, heaven forfend!) Microsoft Research write that blogging etc. is seen as a way of augmenting human memory, providing new ways of recording and searching memories; but this new kind of memory may surpass augmentation and even replace our biological memories (72). The authors ask: “But just what benefits will these efforts bring us? Will these technologies really help us to know ourselves better, make our lives richer, strengthen our connections to those we care about and bring us closer to the world around us” (72)? They suggest that HCI needs to consider precisely which “aspects of memory will make our lives richer”, which situations we want to remember and why, and whether in some cases it is “better and more desirable to forget” (72).

Scultze argues that there are several problems with increased bandwidth. One is that it “devalues human communication because of the ease of making and distributing digital copies” (58). This comes from Walter Benjamin’s argument in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that “the ability to mechanically reproduce cultural artifacts tends to render the originals less meaningful – less like special icons and more like everyday artifacts” (58). Also, “increased bandwidth further fragments society by expanding specialized messaging at the expense of shared culture” (59). Balkan’s Law states that “‘like interests’ coalesce online” (59) – which is a different way of describing what Carr refers to as the great unbundling of the internet that leads to polarity of thought.

Schultze makes the point that we take a very laissez-faire attitude toward technological production because we tacitly accept the idea that the market will sort it all out for us. “In other words, we do not have to concern ourselves with the habits of our hearts, because the market is a sufficiently moral arbiter of information and progress” (52). I think what we desperately need is to pause for reflection before developing technology. The problem will be getting anyone to turn off and to focus long enough, as well as to remember how to be reflective, so that we can address these issues, particularly as we are becoming less and less familiar with the pursuit of creating “shared understanding” (62).

I wonder if one of the things we might want to consider is using the power of technology to trace the development of ideas and concepts. The fact is, we are more likely to turn to Wikipedia for answers than go back to the source… particularly because we hardly know where the orignial source might be. We often quote people who are themselves quoting other people’s quotes of other people’s quotes! This is a timesaver in the way that buying a Best Of CD is the way to get the best value for money without having to pay for crappy music tracks. But I think it would be interesting if we could add another dimension to each data point (or better yet, each concept or idea), which is the continuity of that idea through time.

Schultze argues that “technological language takes on a moral weight it hardly deserves. We equate informational abundance with goodness and progress, as if all information and all uses of information technologies are worthwhile” (56). I sympathize with T.S. Elliot’s lamentation: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information” (56-7)? It is worth considering why it is that monks were only allowed to read one book a year (59-60). How deeply you can think about that book! Wow – to have the space to think that deeply would be truly precious. The closest I can come without joining a monastery is to do a PhD.

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 1 – Discerning Our Information

The main point of chapter 1 is that we “are all succumbing to informationism: a non-discerning, vacuous faith in the collection and dissemination of information as a route to social progress and personal happiness” (26), which, incidentally, “derails any quest for moral wisdom by emphasizing the is over the ought, observation over intimacy, and measurement over meaning” (21). What this means is that:

(1) We report the happenings of things without being reflective of their implications, particularly in the long-term: “Cyberculture is so focused on the here and now that it implicity rejects the human need for a long-term vision, let alone a moral compass” (28). Meanwhile, I would argue that there is a bit of a war being waged on the authenticity of the “is” – in that popular media (I’m talking about you, Fox News!) leverages its title as a “news” organization to spread half-truths and lies masquerading as “fact”; the result of which is that as our faith in the “is” increases, our reasons for having this faith decreases. Who should we believe? I think this is why many people are taking the easiest route and reverting to the Bible as THE source (as Dawkins painfully reports).

(2) We have a depth problem, in that we know more about the world than ever, but have less knowledge of the world than ever (27); and social media may increase our number of friends but they do not guarantee any depth of relationship with these friends (31). This is probably as much a lack of time problem as anything. How could we possibly cultivate depth or quality when we have to know so many more things to participate in the modern world? But then at its foundation, this is a values issue: we value quantity over quality, which translates to a value of information over knowledge. “We forget that improved knowing is also a matter of being a wiser person in a better society” (33). “Informationism encourages informational promiscuity: impersonal relationships based on feigned intimacies and lacking moral integrity” (35) says Schultze. And the antithesis of this problem is intimacy, or possibly “empathetic intimacy” (33); and if we don’t address this in our cyber experiences, we may find intimacy evaporating from our lives entirely (36). Again, is it any wonder that some are choosing to read little else but the Bible? – this is a seemingly logical reaction against the informationalism of the times. Fundamentalism is, I am suggesting, a reaction against meaningless informationlism.

(3) We have located meaning in the measureable (Wertheim would probably say to the contrary that in modern society, potentially up until the creation of cyberspace, measurement and meaning became interchangable, whereas cyberspace once again makes it possible to conceive of non-measurable substance). This makes observers of us all: “Our mediated involvement in cyberspace can render us mere observers of our own neighborhoods, schools, and communities of worship” (34). We should remember what Lukacs said, “that true knowledge is ‘participant’… it ‘consists of the relationship of the knower and the known’” (36).

What this boils down to is essentially what Carr calls our progression toward becoming “pancake people” – spread ever wider, but ever thinner. And I think that much of what Schultze critiques here can in fact be applied equally to the realm of academia. For example, one cannot get published without gathering data, no matter how insipid this data is and how much we know ahead of time what the data will reveal. Did the great thinkers gather data in the past? – or did their insight come from deep reflection? “Data-processing technologies are ennobling a new class of statistical kings while dethroning veterans of the older methods of experience, common sense, and even wisdom” (40). Further, I find it exceedingly irritating that one can hardly state an opinion without quoting someone who has been published before who has said the same before. This stymies our thinking in that it normalizes it.

One of the points about this pancaking is that it squeezes out context. There is simply no room. “According to this view [i.e. Weiser's view of ubiquitous computing], contexts and shared meanings are irrelevant. Purpose, desire, obligation, virtue, and imagination are meaningless noise. Even storytelling and conversation evaporate into bits of signaling” (41). But are there possibilities for reimagining the Internet as context-rich? – for designing space for storytelling within each bit of information? This means that we have to embrace the fuzziness of information – it is not as simple as 0s and 1s, but rather requires negotiation and reflection upon “context, background, history, common knowledge, social resources” (43).

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Introduction – Identifying Our Techno-Moral Crisis

One of Schultze’s main criticisms of modern techno-society is that we are not particularly discerning with regard to the technologies we allow to creep into and in some cases control our lives. We have not cultivated critical thinking with regard to technology, because we seem to have bought into the notion that technology = progress = good. But as he says, “our tendency to adopt every new information technology uncritically – without discerning the options, setting appropriate limits, and establishing human practices – is simply irresponsible” (16-17).

The two main inspirations for Schultze are Alexis de Tocqueville and Vaclav Havel. “Tocqueville discovered that Americans’ individual self-interests are leavened morally by ‘habits of the heart.’ In his view, these social mores emerge from Americans’ commitments to each other and to the general public good. He concluded that voluntary religious associations, in particular, cultivate moral sentiments that soften self-inteest, with an overarching commitment to the common good” (17). I think there’s a lesson in this, but I think it’s not a lesson so much about religion as it is about a spiritual orientation, again, something akin to an sense of the “collectivity.” I think it’s dangerous – and probably flawed, given the negative flipside of religion, i.e. tribalism – to give the credit to religion and assume that this is the answer. The answer, I would argue, is a reattunement to the collective, what I would argue is spirituality firstly, and may secondarily be seen in religion.

Havel is a bit of a hero for Schultze because he wrote a series of letters to his wife, published later as Letters to Olga, in which he addressed “the crucial signifiacne of personal and collective responsibility in maintaining democratic freedoms amist increasingly technological and bureaucratic social institutions,” and criticized our “uncritical faith in technoogy” (18). He made a fantastic statement at the 1992 World Economic Forum:

We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that sooner or later it will spit out a universal solution….
[Instead] we have to release from the sphere of private whim and rejuvenate such forces as a natural, unique, and unrepeatable experience of the world, an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and faith in the importance of particular measures that do not aspire to be a universal, thus an objective or technical, key to salvation (21).

Jacques Ellul has made similar critiques, arguing that “this technological-mindedness is essentially a faith in la technique, the means of efficiency and control” (18). I think that this necessarily requires us to talk about technology in Foucauldian terms, i.e. disciplinary power. (See how the problem gets deeper and deeper!?)

Schultze himself is wary of phrases like “digital democracy”, which he sees as propagandist in support of this faith in technology; “it socializes [us] in technological values” (18). This has caused me to pause: what does it mean to be a PhD student in a programme funded by the EPSRC’s Digital Economy initiative? What is the digital economy? I will explore this in greater detail later.

The very ways in which we speak of technology have the potential to influence our values. For example, what happens when we “replace humane, morally informed wrods such as ‘wisdom’, ‘person’, and ‘justice’ with technological terms such as ‘information’, ‘user’, and ‘access’” (19)? I think, again, Foucault would be able to shed light on this – it all boils down to power. And it does seem that the Internet is becoming a Goliath: “Instead of intentionally embedding cyber-technology within existing cultures, we let cyber-technology shape our way of life” (20), in part beacuse we have a similarly strong faith in the market to determine what we need. And while religious leaders may weigh in with respect to moral implications of technology, it is not as if these leaders are in a position to design alternative kinds of technology. The people who do have this power seem, on the whole, to have adopted in their designs (if not otherwise politically) the libertarianism which “celebrates technique and promotes strident individualism, affords little respect for moral order” (20).

Schultze sees one of the keys to developing moral technology as being an awareness and consideration of their long-term consequences. “As members of the information society, we are so concerned with divining the near future that we lose some of our historical grounding in moral ways of understanding” (21). He relays an anecdote of Danny Hillis, designer of computer architecture, who took action along these lines by creating the slowest computer in the world, “The Long Now Clock” that will run for 10,000 years. The point of this is to make us slow down a bit and to stop thinking about the immediate needs of the here and now. Schultze interpreted the project thusly: “By calling our attention to an older tool, he hoped to interest us in the future of humanity” (15). See this video.

What’s interesting about this is that it forcibly resituates us in time, whereas in recent years, the “Internet largely has released us from the tyranny of space and time” (15). What would it look like if we were to build a cyber analogue to this clock? And if we did, what would the effect be? After all, as Wertheim showed, the spiritual potential of cyberspace lies in the precise fact of its liberation from space-time. Then again, this liberation produces an amoral space precisely because it encourages people to live only in the here and now. Further complicating things, I would argue that many spiritual teachings encourage this similar practice of living in the moment, described as mindfulness; yet somehow in the case of these spiritual practices, perhaps because it is a tradition carried through generations, one is able to do so without shutting oneself off to the future consequences of one’s behavior. Thus morality is preserved. But this is a very complicated question that will require a great deal of further thought.

Ultimately, Schultze’s aim is fairly modest: “To be virtuous people in a high-tech world is to be neither moralists nor pragmatists but rather sojourners who humbly seek goodness in an eternal adventure that began before we were born and will continue after we die. As sojourners, we realize that this world is not our final destination but only one leg of a journey whose outcome we can neither fully control nor completely envision” (24). Me, I’m more of an activist. I think that what we do on this earth matters, and that the decisions we make can usher in dramatic changes for good or bad. What’s ironic about Schultze’s statement is that is seems to promote an observationist approach to the world – kick back and watch it, rather than participate actively in it – which he later criticizes as one of the great problems of technological culture; i.e. that it makes observers out of us. But then I recognize my own hypocricy, because while I agree wholeheartedly that we need to be more humble when it comes to technological development, I also think that we may just be clever enough to think our way out of the mess we have created and design technology that fits a more spiritual way of living.

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Foreward and Preface

Jean Bethke Elshtain writes in the forward that to the extent that there is a religion of technology, this religion is built upon the quicksand of libertarian individualism and bound together by consumerism. This means, then, that “In this vision, we are not bound to one another in substantive and constitutive ways in families, churches, or politics” (9). The substance of it lacks what religions ostensibly serve to provide, i.e. the “moral fabric of our lives” (9). Furthermore, it weakens what Durkheim identified as a key feature of religous experience, i.e. the “collective effervescence” as he called it, because indeed “Cyberculture disconnects us from human communities in a particular termporal location… even as it connects us in thin ways to strangers” (10). The community is important – and we engage with it – only in as much as it is useful to us, such that “Human relations take on a quality of temporariness and proceed on strictly cost-benefit lines” (10).

Elshtain emphasizes Schultze’s point that our abandoment of religion has left us morally confused (Schultze might even say bereft), particularly as it relates to our engagement with technology. This forced me to ask myself, Why am I not talking about designing “moral technology”? There are probably several reasons, but one is because if I am to speak about morality without first grounding this morality in spirituality, I’m afraid that the morality I speak about, too, will be tainted by the values that underpin technology. In other words, I think it’s best to begin from spiritual practice, then get to morals, then use that to inform the design of technology; rather than to (seemingly as Schultze does in this book, in fact) critique technology for its lack of certain presumed morals. Where do these morals come from? How did they function in society in the past?

Another reason is that in my mind (perhaps wrongly), morality implies dogma, whereas spirituality implies guidance. I do not wish to impose my morality on anyone else, no matter how much I like to think I’m right. But what I am interested in is exploring new ways in which technology can accommodate alternative value sets. It’s a bit more passive, so I prefer the softer terminology.

Elshtain uses the phrase “responsible stewardship” to evoke a moral imperative to behave differently than we are currently and to recognize our important role in the creation of our future. She writes, “it is responsible stewardship alone that will determine whether the future is one in which we are all wired as millions of isolates or whether we are connected as creatures of the flesh who can be lifted up in spirit and nurtured in hope only through community” (11). Again, the emphasis is on community. I’m only now beginning to realize that the progression of my academic career makes a bit of sense: it’s always been about communities. So when I wrote previously about fostering social capital through digital technologies, this was another way of describing what I see as a lack of a community spirit that in some way technology needs to address. Fostering social capital is an attempt to harness the collectivity, which in many ways relates to the heart of spiritual or religious practice (again, Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”). My hope (and what I will explore in my PhD) is that we can create more spiritual technology, something that imbues a moral consciousness into our engagements with it and with our communities through it, and in turn reinforce our experience of a collective responsibility to one another, all of which may very well later be couched in social capital terms.

There is, however, a personal experience of technology and the technological world, and this too is very disturbed (say I, and Schultze). Schultze begins, “This book is partly a personal journey to find my way in an era when many human beings seem, like me, to have wandered off the trail that leads to what Socrates called the ‘good life’” (13). Bizarrely, as I’m reading Schultze’s book, ostensibly about religious morality in the high-tech age, I am constantly reminded of Karl Marx’s warnings about the way capitalism destroys what is so great about being a human.

Right off the bat, Schultze echoes what I have identified as a critical flaw with technology – and potentially its eventual downfall if it becomes redundant for us: “they [technologies] do not satisfy my need for moral coherence and spiritual direction” (13). Quite the contrary, Schultze argues that they distract and confuse, actively preventing the achievement of these goals.

While I think Schultze and I are essentially concerned with the problem, our solutions are possibly very different. His stated goal is as follows: “My goal is not so much to discard database and messaging technologies as much as to adapt them to venerable ways of life anchored in age-old virtues” (13). This implies minor tweaking. I’m suggesting major overhauling, revisioning of the foundations of technological development. For example, this would not mean changing how we message, but imagining up entirely new possibilities for communication not yet explored in technology. The reason this radical approach is necessary is because, I fear, the technology we are familiar with is built upon a foundation that reinforces values anathema to the religious or spiritual (something Wertheim’s book exposed).