Luddites don't know what they're talking about

There's an article by Will Braun in the latest Canadian Mennonite in which he worries about what online social groupings might do to churches. He raises the spectre of the Luddites as a part of his discussion. In general Will is an alarm-ringer, so I like his style (I like to ring them bells now and again myself), but I have to admit that my ears are becoming tired of some loud noises.

I'd like to be a Luddite. I really would. I like their story. I'd like to foresee the future and realize that I have to smash the looms in order to save my job for the work of my hands. But the thing about Luddites is that they don't know. Sure they know about what they have, and what they do, now. What they don't know, what they deliberately don't experience, is the thing they condemn. And that's problematic.

Tonight I had a Skype conversation with one of my kids. For more than 20 minutes I could watch her as we talked (I have yet to get a webcam, but she has one built-in to her machine), and I could help her solve a computer difficulty on her laptop because Skype offers a feature that lets you share screens. I could actually see the thing as she was seeing it. And further, you know, we could talk like we were in the same room. I could lean back in my chair, she could move the camera around her dorm room and show it to me, we could laugh, we could be with each other.

I have had my concerns about the mediated nature of these sorts of interactions - that we're always in some way masked off from one another. But what that worry overlooks is the ability, indeed the likelihood, of the human soul to transcend the maskedness of a Windows- or Mac-screened environment. I'm saying that I felt like I was with Sara. As far as I can tell, I was with her. It was a real experience. In the last days of a now-deceased friend, she and her family used Skype to stay in touch with close friends who were thousands of miles away. I'm sure this is happening often. While Sara and I were having our conversation, over thirteen million other people were doing the same thing on Skype. And there are many other similar applications over which people are connecting through the "web". Is this a bad thing? If these people are, generally, having positive and enriching experiences with one another, isn't that on the whole wonderful?

If the soul is spirit, can it not transform these devices into something other than the sum of their parts? Isn't this the trap the Luddites misread? They still thought of themselves in economic terms. They valued the work of their hands more than the work of the machines because their concern was that they might be replaced. But one cannot replace human beings, one is more likely (for this argument at least) to confine or free them. In a sense the looms were freeing them. Of course we need to, and can, guard against a matrixesque sort of freedom, but who can say that, say, the technology of the telephone (pre-cellphones) was detrimental? Who wants to go back to the telegraph? Who knows morse code?

The reality of human experience and consciousness is that it moves and shifts and builds apparatus to help it along. That's what we do. That's also what we are. That's our ongoing adaptation. Our evolution. And as such I think we're going to have to go with it.

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