“Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master.” --Christian Lou Lange, Nobel Peace prize recipient, 1921
It’s 1994 again.
To clarify: in my house, it’s 1994. Technologically speaking, I’m living thirty years ago. My Verizon FIOS internet service just stopped working this week. “No Internet” my laptop informed me. Well that’s just great! When I tried to reach google, my browser’s cheeky message didn’t take this tragedy seriously enough. “Hmmmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.” Ya think! Until a tech person repairs the wires that a little critter munched on, I am without the internet.
WITHOUT THE INTERNET!
That’s right. I am being forced to live in the real world, with real people, non-stop, 24/7! No surfing the web, no reading news online, no checking the weather or reading email, or perusing Facebook or falling into the Reddit rabbit hole. No more Amazon or crossword puzzles. No YouTube to review songs my choir is singing this season and no Google to quickly look up some random fact or idea.
My cyber umbilical cord has been cut, and I’ll admit…it really hurts.
I’m using my phone to connect but it’s just not the same. Not even close. Screen is way too small. No internet also means I’m without streaming services, so no TV either. No CSI New York or Star Trek Next Generation or The Good Place to soothe me when I get home from a long day at work. No Netflix. Max is missing. Hulu hidden. I got so desperate on my first screenless night, I hooked up an old DVD player and watched my favorite PBS detective show and yes, I know that makes me sound as old as dirt.
How old? The last time I lived untethered from the information superhighway, Bill Clinton was President, Tom Hanks was Forrest Gump on the big screen (Life is a box of chocolates!) and Ace of Base had the #1 song, “The Sign”. I was a kid, 33 and the most I did with my used Macintosh, was write sermons and play tic tac toe.
In 1994 millions of us were introduced to something called the “world wide web.” I still remember the day I installed America Online on my desktop computer and signed up for an email account. (Yup—I still have and use it, if only for the looks I get from the young, as in What’s AOL?). The web then was all so quaint, simple, new. I’d dial into AOL, knowing I was on my way by that weird series of beeps, buzzes, clicks and chhhhhhhhhh.
“You’ve got mail!” my computer would cheerfully chirp. Then the internet was exotic, wild, kind of clunky. Sites loaded up so slowly. It was mostly nerds and computer geeks who actually understood how to use it and how it worked.
But now? We do everything online. EVERYTHING. Nothing escapes that virtual world. We connect. Date. Fall in love. Read test results from the doctor. Book plane tickets. Order everything from flowers to pharmaceuticals to a pizza. We watch our home camera that shows the dog tearing apart the couch pillows and who just rang the doorbell. We zoom. Imagine COVID without zoom? We’d have been completely cut off from one another.
The web is also about some not so good stuff. Vulnerable people (especially kids) get bullied by anonymous folks on social media. Teens fall prey to unrealistic notions about looks, weight, life. I don’t look like that person. I’m ugly. Less than. Foreign governments like Russia and China spread disinformation and try to influence elections. Demagogues lie about everything and whip up their followers to carry out violence. Folks consume pornography in huge amounts. (Fourteen percent of web searches and 4 percent of websites are porn-related, according to a recent BBC report.)
What amazes me is how far and how fast the world has come because of the net. So much information created, disseminated, and democratized. Trillions of dollars’ worth of business transactions. And all these technologies come about because humans use the minds that God gives to each and everyone of us.
We think. We create. We progress. We change the world.
Is technology a blessing? Yes. Is it a curse? Yes. Are many of us addicted to it? Yes. Has it made life better? Yes. Could we live without it? I suppose. Do we want to live without it?
Not me.
Maybe when my internet finally comes back, I’ll ask God to help me be more thoughtful and intentional about my endless appetite for life in cyberspace. Look up from my screen into actual life. Look away from online “life” more often. Let me enjoy the thousands of movies and TV shows and documentaries I have access to, and then let me close the laptop, switch off the big screen TV. Take a walk outside. Go old school. Read a real book. Or get together in the real world with a friend for coffee. More conversation. Less text.
Verizon: I’d like to get back to 2024. Now please. I lived in 1994 once and though I miss “Ace of Base”, it’s time to come back to my wired home.
The
Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church
of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at
sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville
Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For
twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers
throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New
England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch:
pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.
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