In my last blog post, I went through the many ways in which Google has transformed how people think about and interact with God. The many facets of Google have enhanced our ability to research theological questions and to share our thoughts and feelings with others. They've retrieved a sense of community, where we're always connected with sources of information and people we want to interact with. Continuing with Marshall Mcluhan's 4 Laws of Media, I now want to look at what Google obsolesces and retrieves in regards to spirituality.
To start, Google obsolesces concordances. This is a good thing, because it can get annoying constantly looking up key words in a giant book to try to find where a verse is in another giant book. With a simple search, you can find where any verse is in the Bible. There are even websites like openbible.com which will show you all of the verses that deal with a certain topic. It harnesses the power of collaboration because people can vote verses as helpful or not, ensuring that after awhile, the most pertinent verses will be at the top of the page. However, social networking sites like Google+ can also obsolesce the need to share one's faith with friends. Posting a verse or thought about can give the feeling of having shared something deep, but in reality it may not even penetrate the glaze on many readers' eyes. It may end up blending in with the onslaught of information we all receive daily, and would not be nearly as effective as if shared personally.
Google is all about speed and efficiency, so it's no wonder that even deep thought itself is becoming obsolete. If I'm struggling to remember the actor in a certain movie, instead of sending a series of synapses throughout my brain, I can just Google it. Instead of remembering directions to some place, I can just look at Google maps on a smart phone on the way there. According to this article in the Daily Mail, an England-based newspaper, researchers at Harvard and Columbia University have done tests showing that we are starting to only remember where to look up information, not information itself. Since we have 24-hour access to the internet, we're using it as an external brain and our own brains are becoming useless. What does this have to do with God? Obviously, spiritual things are not surface-level topics. These are deep subjects that require the time and the effort to ponder. Yet with Google trying to provide us with an experience that uses the lease time and effort, we're becoming scatter-brained and having difficulties with concentration. One does not simply connect with God without time and focus.
So while the advantages of Google seem to make everything in life better, they may actually have a reverse effect (the last of the four laws) in some areas of spiritual life. We may think that having access to so many sermons and encouraging websites would draw us closer to God, but maybe all God wants is our time. James Bryan Smith, author of The Good and Beautiful God, says that "hurry sickness" is the number one spiritual illness of our day. "We have unhesitatingly bowed to the god of productivity and sacrificed our wellness in order to appease it." Smith points out that in the Bible, there is a time when Jesus comes to visit two women, one of whom is rushing about the house cleaning and cooking while Jesus is there. The other woman is sitting at his feet and listening to him talk. He says the one at his feet has chosen the better way. I think many Christians can be like the woman who was rushing around. We try to use technology to learn more about God, share with others, and do good deeds. Yet sometimes those good intentions can be reversed into us becoming stressed, seeming shallow, or saturating people with the same thing over and over.
I think Christians are standing at an interesting crossroads in the technological world. We have so many new possibilities thanks to Google and many other giants in the industry. But we can't forget that there is no app for intimacy with God. We have to force ourselves to be "unproductive" sometimes and simply think about life. We need to slow our pace so that we can be present wherever we are. Instead of thinking about our next appointment, we can think about how to impact the people we are with for the better.
Google has radically changed our lives and will continue to do so in the future, but there are some things in life that are too important to just be feelin' lucky.
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