Last week I watched a show on Frontline called Digital Nation, which documented the design and use of some of our newest digital media. It was so fascinating to see how far we’ve come in the past 20 years. When I was a senior in high school I wrote my research papers on an electric typewriter and was so thankful for the auto correct which had freed me from the little bottle of WhiteOut I had used my junior year. The common and corporate use of email was still a decade away and my friends were those whom I saw in my day to day life. The phones I had access to had coiled cords or required a quarter and if I was lost I took out a map from my glove compartment, a map that I never seemed to be able to refold.
I am so thankful for so much of our digital advancement. I love that I can think as I type and then delete a good share of my thoughts while at the same time keeping a line or two that seem to hold a bit of truth. When I am late I am grateful that I can text my husband and let him know that I am on my way and I value the efficiency of email and its ability to keep me in multiple places at once. Facebook and Twitter have helped people connect to friends they would never have met and have recently helped voiceless people wage war against dictators and because of my GPS my glove compartment now has room to store all sorts of unnecessary junk.
However, for all its amazing blessings, none of which I am interested in letting go, I also found myself a bit unsettled by several of the “advancements” detailed on this program. In experimenting with virtual reality they have discovered that the brain has difficulty differentiating between the real and the virtual world. In one experiment test subjects were given goggles that allowed them to view a virtual table of food in front of them. In the images presented to them they approached a table, sat down and dished up a plate full of food. The image then showed them hands that appeared to be their own, picking up utensils, scooping up food and then bringing a forkful up to their mouth. Although there was no real table or no real food and although their arms remained at their side and nothing ever entered their mouth, the subjects left their virtual meal feeling full and satisfied.
Now as I try to stick to my New Year’s resolutions and as I look ahead to the disciplines I will enter during the season of Lent, feeling full without actually eating seems brilliant. But what if what our contemporary culture is most hungry for is real fleshed out relationships with real people? And what if the virtual world that we have created actually gives us the illusion that we’ve eaten while we starve to death?
This is what I am witnessing among my congregation, a congregation of mostly 18-23 year olds. They are more connected than any previous generation. They have more friends through their social networks than any human could ever need and more details of their personal lives are shared more publically than ever before. They are available to one another 24/7 and people can be with them even when they are not with them. And yet they are lonely. Their eyes see a table set before them and their friends are all gathered around the table ready to eat. Together they load their virtual plates full of relationships and their brain tells them that they are full and yet when they log off they find themselves sitting alone in their dorm rooms still hungry and still alone.
I love the benefits of the digital world. I’m not interested in going back to WhiteOut and a phone that needs to be attached to the wall. But in the beginning when God created the world and placed Adam in it he said to him, “It is not good that you are alone.” In response to what was not good, God did not give Adam something two dimensional. He gave Adam another human which Adam described as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”. When God came to the earth he chose as his vehicle a human body named Jesus. He didn’t project himself on the screen of the sky, but rather put on skin so that he could reach out and touch others who were wrapped in skin. Don’t you find it interesting that when Jesus walked this earth he limited himself to being in one place at a time? Even the Son of God did not attempt to be in Nazareth when he was in Galilee. And when Jesus’ followers were commissioned to complete his work here on earth they were given the name the Body of Christ and were told to go and be present in the world in the same way he had been.
As followers of Jesus, the God who put on flesh to walk with his people, I don’t believe we have to give up our use of the digital world, but perhaps we have to have limits upon it. Perhaps we are to be the people in this culture who choose to actually sit around dinner tables with one another, who work hard to share the details of our lives face to face, and who try whenever possible to be in only one place at a time; to be fully present with the real people who stand in the real world in front of us.
