Digital Communication Technology:
a response by and for Jesus-followers
Swimming in a
Technology refers to the human-created tools that help us live our lives. Everything, from the wheel to a ballpoint pen to this computer screen, falls under the category of technology. However, we will be narrowing the scope of this wiki to include only digital communication technologies developed in the past 25 years.
The last 25 years have seen an explosion in both the numbers and possibilities of digital communication technology. We now have the internet and mobile phones, text messaging and voice recognition, VOIP and HDTV. These technologies, like all tools, may be used for a myriad of purposes. A hand ax can be used to create a structure, but it also can just as easily be used to kill an enemy. Cell phones can be used to talk to your grandmother or to trigger a bomb. It’s your choice.
Initially created for human use, technology also has the capacity to reshape human users on both local and global scales. The first webpage recently celebrated its 15th birthday, and the broader population began to surf the internet a mere 10 years ago. Now, we gather on the internet to shop for new items, auction off our old ones, manage our finances, and process much of our government-related business. We have created a society of instant demands instantly fulfilled, constant connection to people and organizations, and foggy boundaries between the private and the public. Western culture has become obsessed with the achievement of a constantly-growing volume of tasks every day, trading away most of the habits associated with contemplation, stillness, and community for the sake of productivity, full schedules and projects.
So, as Jesus-followers, why should we care about digital communication technology and its effects?
- Because we care for the poor. Providing tools for people to provide for themselves is one form of that care. The digital divide is a source of inequality that contributes to poverty.
- Because Jesus tells us to "go and make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 21:19). Cyberspace, which is part of the realm of digital communications, is not a nation itself, but is trans-national and calls for our attention and efforts.
- Because we already participate in the common use of these technologies, and not always in healthy or beneficial ways. As the People of God, we need to live our lives with our eyes open.
Technologies that help, technologies that harm
Technology can have powerful effects on us, making our lives better, worse, or simply different from what they were. When coming in contact with other cultures which do not use the same technologies we do, we do not wish to introduce damaging practices (or tools with fabricated or transplanted uses) into another culture as if it were our own.
The developing world often has different needs than we do, and narcissism often skews our perception of these needs. We may be unable to see the ways technology might be ineffective, or even cause problems, in non-western cultures. We tend simplify other cultures as mirrors of our own, unable to comprehend an environment with conditions so distinct from our own.
There are, however, technologies that might help alleviate many different problems in developing countries. For instance, the dissemination of information made possible through advanced print, shipping and digital technology greatly reversed the AIDS pandemic in some countries. The success of GCAP (Global Call to Action Against Poverty: One Campaign/Make Poverty History) and organizations like Bread for the World are highly dependent on communications technologies of all types, and because of their effective use of such technologies many people are now aware of and contributing to their causes.
Case Study: Two Technologies, Two Affects
One reason why some of our projected solutions for other places fail is that we assume certain details and ground rules which often prove untrue when removed from our own culture. Here are two types of technologies originating in the west that will enhance global communication, but will transform the global community in drastically different ways.
Sub- $100 Laptop
Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT alumnus who is the current Chairman of the MIT Media Laboratory, is also the Chairman of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. After facing the digital divide head-on while visiting a village in
Further research on this product shows that the specifications of this laptop are relatively adequate for developing countries. Here is the list of proposed specifications:
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- Operating System: Linux Based/Microsoft (in talks now)
- Display: Full-color and monochrome display
- Network capable: WiFi-enabled
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- USB: Currently has four USB ports
- Hardisk size: 1 Gigabyte
- Processor speed: 500MHz AMD
While this machine will not be able to hold large amounts of data, it will not need a power outlet to recharge the battery or to power up. The user will simply wind up the laptop with the built-in crank shaft. However, the specifications do not state how long the laptop will last after each winding.
As recently posted on the Wall Street Journal by Steve Stecklow, Negroponte gave a demonstration of the prototype to the United Nations on Wednesday, November 16, 2005. To quote a small section of the article:
Mr. Negroponte remains eager to place the laptop in the hands of 100 to 150 million students. He says he has learned in educational projects in
This proposal initially seems like a good thing. Narrowing the digital divide by giving 100 to 150 million students in developing countries their own portable computer sounds like a wonderful idea. But are there more negative effects than positive ones? What are the possible negative effects?
As Negroponte saw in the Cambodian village, there is doubtlessly a need to fill, but is the need to bring in digital communication technology a perceived need or a real need? We need to meet the appropriate need at the appropriate time: Will a sub-$100 laptop feed a starving child or heal a sick family member? Will this laptop have programs in all students’ languages, or even have the letters of their language on the keys of the keyboard? Will a child really be able to know how to use this laptop to help further his education needs, or will this laptop be used for some thing else? As stated on the MIT Media lab FAQ:
In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home. 3?
There are some big questions we need to ask:
- How will this piece of technology affect the cultures of developing countries?
- Will it enhance or destroy the existing way of life?
- Will this piece of technology fuel government corruption or slow it down?
- Negroponte is in talks with the governments of these countries. How does he know that these governments will actually give these laptops to children? How do we know they will not sell the laptops to make a profit?
The technology itself is a good thing, but this technology in the context of this project seems to be pushing itself on the people it seeks to assist. The projected distribution and probable use of this technology is more negative than it is positive.
Technology is great, but as people and as Jesus-followers we need to be very careful how we share technology with other societies. What may seem like a good idea might actually be a cross-cultural force-feeding, with long term negative effects on these developing countries.
Mobile Cell Phones in Africa
Picture yourself going into a local bank in your town, anticipating opening up a bank account with a significant amount of your nation’s currency. You walk up to the teller and ask how can you can open an account. The teller gives you a look: “Sorry, we do not open up accounts for fill in your ethnic group?.” You show the teller how much currency you have. Their eyes widen, but with a smile that looks more like a smirk, the teller continues: “Sorry, we do recognize that currency here.” You are completely bewildered. How can your own country not accept it own currency, while it is even recognized in neighboring countries?
In some parts of
Jeremiah Mpanz, a South African who uses a cell phone for mobile banking, is profiled in the article, Cell phones plug Africa's poor into mobile banking. There is no paperwork involved. If you know how to push a few numbered buttons you can quickly and easily have your own virtual, legitimate bank account. “Mobile technology has already revolutionized communications in the world's poorest continent, bringing phones to millions of poor and isolated people who had never before made a call.”4?
Now one can bank, transfer funds from one account to another, pay for goods, text message, and use Short Message Service (SMS). Your boss can use their cell phone to deposit your pay check into your account, and those who live in rural places can pay bills via cell phone. "It's cheap, it's easy, it's unintimidating," said Jenny Hoffmann, head of MTN Banking, which launched the service earlier this year. "And if you live on a hill in (rural
This piece of technology serves the greater need as well. If some one needs medical assistance, someone can use the cell phone to either call or text the nearest medical center and ask for help. There is a pilot project called Distant Health Care Advancement (DISHA) involving a mobile unit with remote connectivity that gives low cost medical diagnostics to people in rural places.6?
Here’s another scenario: You have a good harvest, whether through farming or through fishing. You want to go to the place where you can sell you harvest for the best price. The only way to find it is to first find a payphone and call the different marketplaces. However, finding the local payphone is a task in itself. It could be miles away from where you are, and no matter how close or far it is from your home and your goods, the best place to sell your harvest is still probably miles away from that. You just spent time and money on travel and you haven’t sold a thing. With the time it takes to do all that traveling, your harvest is spoiling and you are losing money.
An article called “Cell phones reshaping Africa” tells of a woman named Amina Harun, a 45-year-old farmer from
The cell phone has been helping individuals and communities in developing countries. The “humble cell phone” is giving them a better opportunity to make a profit. Farmers and fishermen can even get a weather report text messaged to them so they know when to plant and fish. This technology, and the knowledge/extended capability it brings, can in turn help put food on the table; send their children to school; get necessary medical treatment; and connect with others in the next village, or even in the city.
Our Humble/Humbling Experience
For the first half of our study, the group who began this wiki focused on the sub-$100 laptop, believing it could revolutionize education and communication in developing countries. In our excitement over this project, we did not initially take into account a few roadblocks that could ultimately turn what seemed groundbreaking into yet another failed venture:
- governmental corruption
- infrastructural problems (lack of power, communication lines, etc.)
- a lack of adequate training
- low literacy rates.
- assumed cultural needs, as opposed to indigenous need
If a child is given a laptop, even basic training in its use will not allow her to take advantage of it if she can't read. It's not that the $100 computer can't be useful, but like many forms of aid it makes broad assumptions about the people it is intended to help. For instance, information only available through text, such as long-term weather reports that prove useful in agriculture, remain elusive to large numbers of people, and a general lack of education contributes to the oppression of many peoples who need help imagining a better way of life. Aid fails to help, or even backfires, when the assumptions of the givers are found to be untrue or exaggerated.
When we realized that our chosen project could be more harmful than helpful, we were stunned. How are we supposed to help others? Can we do anything to help someone in another culture, or is it best to leave them alone? We discovered an article by a Kenyan economist called For God’s Sake, Stop the Aid, which really made us consider these questions.
And then we realized: good relationships with technology, and with people surrounded by technology, need to start with the people already immersed in it: us. This group was formed in a class entitled “Transforming Contemporary Cultures: Macro,” and our first instinct was to look at other cultures. Our cultural narcissism blinded our good intentions, making us look for the speck in another’s eye while smacking them with the log in our own.
We desperately need to become healthy owners and users here in our own culture. We still need to bridge the digital divide on the local level. We so often become overwhelmed with the global scale of many problems that we forget that we can work on them in small bits.
This is not to suggest that we not assist other members of the global village. We do suggest that assisting the global community means first assisting the local community. Local communities bump into each other every day, via cyberspace, business, education and tourism. Transformation is a virus. One local community undergoing transformation has the potential to infect other localities it comes in contact with, enabling others while being in community with them.
Jesus came to transform, not to destroy. This gives us both a great hope for our own culture and a clear imperative to transform without destruction as we follow in his ways.
Getting Better
So, how do we in the West determine what technologies will be useful in another culture? We start with our own context. We make a distinction between pushing a technology on a culture, and responding to them pulling for what they need from the available technical tools. It is vital that we recognize which sort of technology is which in our own culture, particularly in our marketing-flooded environment of created desire.
God gave people the ability to make choices. This means that we do not have to abuse the things that wider culture abuses. There are habits we can build that will transform us into healthy techies. We could place some general trends of existing technological use into two categories:
Incidental use refers to use without thought or a clear objective, out of habits formed by happenstance. This often leads to an abusive environment: people abusing technology, and technology “controlling” people.
Intentional use refers to well-thought and specific use, approaching the tools we use with respect and without unwitting dependence.
We can choose to become codependent, and “let technology control us,” or to live in good relationship with technology. Abuse begets abuse, and even though we are not talking about human-to-human relationships, the same principle holds true.
Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian English professor and media ecologist, published his most famous work, Understanding Media, in 1964. McLuhan developed two ideas that can help Jesus-followers use technology intentionally:
The medium is the message.
McLuhan claims that the content brought to us by technology is inconsequential next to the way a technology brings that content. In other words, the television set itself is the only message, and not the news stories on CNN or the plot of Desperate Housewives. While this could be a bit of an overstatement, many people focus only on the content of a show. Rarely do we focus on the fact that we’re sitting in front of a box plugged into the wall. Going to the movies is just as much about sitting in a dark room with a bunch of people as it is about Spiderman.
Technology acts as the extensions of man.
Technology cannot control anyone without permission to do so. McLuhan emphasized the fact that technology is human-made for our use, extending our natural abilities. A cell phone, for example, is an extension of our ears and our mouths, enabling us to hear and speak to people far out of our natural range. People often feel as if they are “slaves to their cell phones,” but in reality they are just using a tool, not submitting to slavery.
We can see this second idea in the story about Amina Harun, the Kenyan farmer we mentioned earlier, whose natural abilities were extended by her cell phone, allowing her to sell her watermelons faster and for better prices. Her cell phone set her free. Why should we allow ours to enslave us?
Following Jesus through the Circuits
Jesus-followers are called to be stewards of what God gives us, with the goal of bringing freedom in Christ to all people. Digital Communication technology is one of the tools we have been given to help us fulfill our Christian mission as agents of God's redemption in the world. Our stewardship can be categorized in three ways:
- increasing our technological awareness;
- using our purchasing power in light of God's Kingdom; and
- finding productive ways of utilizing technology's potential for the
Too many Jesus-followers see technology as an evil to be combated and avoided. In the book of Genesis we find that, when God created the first humans, they were given the task of caring for everything that they had been given. To "rule" over the earth. (Genesis 1:26-29) At this point in our history we have a more complex environment, but our task has not changed. We must care for what we have received. We need to be aware of technology that is out in the world.
Through this process we can join in our creative potential by leading the cause in useful and innovative technology.
Once we have understood what technologies are on the horizon, we must also make consciously consider how these technologies might affect our lives. We were created to live in a certain rhythm. Living within this rhythm is what Jesus came to teach us. It is the best possible way to live. This means that we need to learn how to slow down sometimes, to take up the words of Jesus from Matthew 6:25-34 and not worry about or keep stress in our lives. The goal of life is not to produce more. We need to find the value in simply being children of God. We need time to stop and reflect on our lives and our direction. Sometimes we may even need to be reminded of Hebrews 10:24-25, which encourages us to continue to meet together and encourage each other.
While technology can be a wonderful aspect of our lives, the fact that technological use in the west has been overwhelmingly incidental means that our tools have not been used to create relaxation, unity, and wholeness. We must be aware of these tendencies, teaching ourselves and our world to use technology and not “let technology use us.”
We must also learn to use our purchasing power in light of the
Finally, we must use technology in order to better the world. Many of us may not have the chance to go to a developing country and install wireless networks, or teach an uneducated people how to use more advanced agricultural technologies. We should be excited to help bring technology to others whenever we have the chance, but it is not a feasible everyday focus. We do have the power to use the technologies that we have in order to support ministries throughout the world.
The Missionary Tech Team (http://www.techteam.org/) is a great example of a ministry that technologically enables other outreaches. While technology can be a ministry in and of itself, it is greatly used as a tool within the contexts of many other needed missions. Jesus-followers should learn to harness this power for the glory of God.
Technology is a powerful aspect of our everyday lives. With it's potential to kill, tear apart, and destroy lives and communities, comes the potential to unite, build up, and invigorate them as well. To be a Christian in the here and now is to be a person who is constantly increasing their awareness of technology and it's affect on people, purchases technologies from companies who support more Christian world values, and uses technology daily in order to build up and restore the body of Christ in communities all over the world. May we each be that kind of person every day.
Small Bits: What You Can Do Now
Use Technology Wisely:
The next time you sit down to watch tv, pick up the cell phone, or log onto imdb.com, ask yourself the following questions:
- Why am I using this tool right now?
- How would I be accomplishing this task without it?
- Could I accomplish this task without it? How would that be a different experience?
- What would I be doing right now if I weren’t using it?
- How has it shaped or changed how I think about my life/lifestyle?
- How has it shaped or changed how I interact with other people?
Spend Your Money Justly:
The overwhelming majority of products we buy are technologies, or tools for our use. The next time you go shopping, whether in a store or online, whether looking for electronics or detergent, ask yourself these questions (note: this requires some pre-purchase research on your part):
- Why am I buying this product?
- Does it fit the task I want it to fulfill?
- What materials are used to make this it?
- Who makes it? Which company? Which workers?
- Who sells it? What do I know about them?
- Is it a fair trade product?
- Is it excessively packaged?
- Regarding many foods, is this product local? If it isn’t, is there a local alternative? What technology had to be used to make it, process it, and get it
here?
Support the Work of the Kingdom:
We can support ministries who fight injustice by:
- designing websites
- creating videos
- donating equipment
- spreading fundraisers
- emailing important information
Go to _______ for a list of social justice ministries.
1? http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html accessed on November 14, 2005
2? “The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality” By STEVE STECKLOW Staff Reporter of THE
3? Gotten from the MIT Media Lab website FAQ http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html accessed on November 14, 2005
4? This quote was taken from the article Cell phones plug Africa's poor into mobile banking by Rebeccah Harrison written November 1, 2005 and accessed on November 14, 2005.
5? This quote was taken from the article Cell phones plug Africa's poor into mobile banking by Rebeccah Harrison written November 1, 2005 and accessed on November 14, 2005.
6? This came from the article “Philips Sees India as Test Bed” from this website: http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=14466&hed=Philips+Sees+India+as+Test+Bed§or=Regions&subsector=Asia
and was accessed on November 14, 2005.
7? This quote was taken from the article “Cell phones reshaping