"Being Human in a Digital World (IMHO, LOL!): Part 2"

            My words with you this morning are the second part of a two-part sermon series and are titled “Being Human in a Digital World.” Last week I talked about how more and more of us are using digital gadgetry and the Internet more and more in various ways, and I made the bold claim that our increasing use of digital technology is negatively affecting our ability to read, remember, think, feel, communicate with each other, be in relationship with each other, and live our lives as fully and as humanly as possible.

            This week I want to talk about what we might do about this, and as I said last week, I’m no Luddite. I’m not suggesting that we stop using this technology all together, but I would like to suggest that we be more reflective and intentional about how we use it, and I want to begin this morning with a philosophical assumption, something that I can’t prove to you, but something to which you might agree, and it’s this: We should have a preference for the real world over the digital world.

            Why?

            The digital world is fast. Like no technology before it, it obliterates time and distance. It’s vast. With the smartphone in my pocket, I have access to more information than contained in the Library of Congress. It’s exciting. There’s always something new. It involves very little planning or commitment.

            The real world is slow. It has so many limitations. It’s awkward and messy. It’s fragile and undependable. It involves much more planning and commitment.

            But I want to suggest - - and hope you’ll agree with me - - the real world is where it’s at. In the real world - - in meat space as opposed to cyberspace - - and that’s spelled M-E-A-T to emphasize the physicality, even the carnality of the real world - - I believe, that we live our lives most deeply, fully, richly, and abundantly.

            Let me give you an example. Last Sunday after church, Mary Paynter had a violin recital. I couldn’t be there, but everyone I’ve talked to this past week who was there has used the most superlative adjectives to describe the event. Mary played beautifully - - spectacularly, some said - - and more than this, I’ve been told that while Mary played Vivaldi, the afternoon sun could be seen setting in the sanctuary windows. One of you said, “It was magical.”

            Of course, anyone of us could have downloaded high-quality digital recordings of the music Mary played and listened to them on one of our digital devices, but I think if I had suggested that to any of you who attended the recital, you would have looked at me dumbfounded. There is something about the experience of hearing live music that cannot be duplicated online - - the vulnerability of the performer, the willingness of the listener, the connection between the two, the immediacy as well as the ephemeral nature of the experience.

            I want to suggest that this is not only true of music.

            I adore my Kindle, but last week, I checked an old Japanese book out the library. Printed in 1967 in Japan, it has that old musty book smell. As I showed it to [my wife], she held it in her hands, smelled it, and said, “It smells like Jimbocho,” which is the district in Tokyo with many used book stores, and as we held the book in our hands, we wondered about how many other human hands had held it and where.

            You can now buy robotic dogs or have online pets, and these dogs will never chew up your sofa and your shoes, they will never vomit all over the front seat of your car, they will never poop all over your yard, and best of all, they will never die, but I would never trade my dog for one of these.

            Let us be honest too about the Internet is sometimes used. I recently heard that four out of five Christian pastors struggle with Internet pornography, and one out of five struggles with low band-width. Internet pornography is a billion-dollar-a-year business, but can the flickering images on any screen ever compare to skin pressing against skin?

            And as I talked about extensively last week, nothing quite beats being face-to-face when it comes to communicating with one another and building lasting relationships.

            For all of these reasons and more, I want to suggest that when we have a near-equal choice, if possible, we should choose the real world over the digital world.

            If we have an equal choice between calling somebody or meeting somebody and sending an email or a text, we should choose to call or meet, even if it’s a little less convenient.

            If we have a choice between tending a plant in our yard  or spending time playing Farmville on Facebook, we should get our hands dirty and tend a plant in our garden.

            Most afternoons, I pick up [my son]from his kindergarten class. I usually wait outside the front door of the school. There’s usually a few other kindergarten parents there waiting. One or two usually take out their smartphones while waiting, and I know with the smartphone in my pocket, I could check email, read the news, or even read poetry. But the better angels of my nature tell me I should strike up a conversation. It might be awkward. We might have nothing to say to each other, but our children are going to school together, and probably will be for several years.

            When we can, I want to suggest we should choose meatspace world with its messiness and depth over cyberspace with its ease and superficiality. To use a truly awful metaphor, we should choose to scuba the depths of the real world rather than jet ski the ocean of the Internet.

            I know we won’t always, sometimes for good reasons. Just this last week, I had a video conference call with ten other ministers from across the world. I could see their faces and hear their voices, and I sat in my office while they sat in their offices and living rooms. One was on a patio in Mexico, making the rest of us very jealous. We saved thousands of dollars in airfare and hotel bills by meeting like this, and it was a more environmentally-friendly way to meet as well.

            Yet I know from my own life experience that the lure of using digital technology is strong and often tempts us to use it for the wrong reasons, so I also want to suggest some questions we might ask ourselves to help us be more reflective and intentional about our use of digital technology.

            The first question we might ask ourselves is this: “Is our use of technology helping us engage more deeply in real life or is it leading us further away from real life into an online digital life?”

            I would say that of all the weddings I have officiated in recent years, nearly a half of the couples have met online, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. People who probably never would have met otherwise are now sharing their real lives together in a committed relationship because of digital technology.

            Many people credited Meetup.com as playing a role in getting people more involved in recent presidential elections in this country and Facebook and other social media as playing a role in the Arab Spring.

            To cite a far less exciting situation, when I buy pants online, I have to spend less time running errands and more time with my family.

            These are clear examples of digital technology helping us engage more deeply in real life, but here’s a more difficult situation. When we find an old high school friend on Facebook, will that likely lead to us reconnecting to that friend by phone or even in person, or will this just lead us to spend even more time on Facebook, perhaps neglecting real-world relationships?

            A second question we might ask ourselves is this: “Are we using digital technology because of unrealistic expectations? “

            To explain what I mean by this, let me tell you a story about washing machines, which seems like a strange thing to talk about in relation to digital technology, but there is a connection.

            You see, it wasn’t until the 1950s that electric washing machines became a common household appliance in the United States. Before this most people, more accurately most women, did laundry by hand. It was back-breaking, arduous, time-consuming work.

            When the washing machine came along, many women saw it as a time-saving miracle. But then something strange happened. With the rising use of the washing machine, our standards and expectations started to change. People’s expectations about how clean clothes should be went up. Instead of wearing the same clothes over and over again, people wore clothes only once before washing them. Since washing was so much easier, people also bought more clothes. Within a few years of the advent of the washing machine, many women were spending more time doing wash than they were before the washing machine became popular. It was less back breaking work, but they were spending more time doing it.

            This is a very common pattern with all kinds of technology. A new technology is developed that is supposed to save us time. But then cultural standards and expectations change to the degree that what was supposed to be a labor saving device actually ends up costing us time.

            Can anybody now see the connection between washing machines and email? I want to suggest that the ease of email has encouraged us to develop unrealistic expectations of ourselves about how often, how much, and how quickly we respond to another. The amount of email we have to deal with has gotten so bad, some of us don’t even have time to do laundry any more.

            Can anybody now see the connection between washing machines and Facebook?

            I’ve read that for most of us, there’s a group of about 12 people who we’re really close to in life. To put it in the starkest of terms, if one of these 12 people died, it would affect us severely. We just wouldn’t be sad. We’d grieve. We’d probably take time off work.

            More than this, there’s probably a group of about 150 people that we can be close to and care about. We can keep up with their lives, to some extent. This is probably why for most of human history, most small villages maxed out at about 150 people. It’s the reason the hardest size transition for a church to make is the one from small to mid-size - - one with more than 150 active members. So if anybody of us has more than 150 friends on Facebook (and to be honest, I have 344), we’re probably being unrealistic about our ability to be in even a superficial relationship with those folks.

            Can anybody see the connection between washing machines and how many people today are tethered to their jobs 24/7 through their digital devices?

            Reflecting on my own profession, the second-oldest continually operating congregation in the United States is the First Parish Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts - - founded in 1620 but now a Unitarian Universalist congregation. For several hundred years, the ministers of that congregation managed without a telephone, never mind a cellphone and email - - and from everything I’ve heard, they were pretty good ministers. Have our professions changed that much that we need to be constantly connected now, or have we simply given into unrealistic demands from employers or do we have a false sense of urgency and importance about what we do?

            A third question we might ask ourselves is this: “How much are we using digital technology to deal with our anxieties about other things?”

            In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Terkle says that when she asked teenagers about their cell phones, she often heard stories about September 11. One young woman she interviewed said, “If there was ever an emergency in the school, I could always call 911, or if something happened, if there was a fire, or some strange guy came into the school I could always call my mom to tell her that I was okay, or not okay. So it’s good like that too.” Terkle says, for the current generation of teenagers, “9/11 marked childhood with an experience of being cut off from all comfort. In its shadow, cell phones became a symbol of physical and emotional safety.”

            The anxiety is not only on the part of young people. For example, many parents complain about their teenagers use of cellphones, but at the same time, most parents are the ones who give their teenagers cellphones - - often with the implicit agreement that whenever a parent calls, the teenage child will answer. Perhaps some parents can’t spend as much time with their children as they want, but can comfort themselves with the thought that they can always be in touch if they want to be.

            I suspect that many people, perhaps some of us, use digital technology to deal with other anxieties. As John Freeman says in The Tyranny of Email, “Email has become a way to be reminded that we exist in a world overloaded with connections, that we are needed.” How many people use Facebook to deal with the loneliness they feel?

            Anxieties are a natural part of the human condition, but where we may get into trouble is when we use digital technology to assuage those anxieties instead of straightforwardly facing and dealing with those anxieties, perhaps even making changes to our lives.

            A fourth question we might ask ourselves is this, “Are we using digital technology because we feel addicted to it?”

            A lot of the digital technology we use is very appealing to our brains, in the same way that certain substances are very appealing to our brains. I know that sitting in an airport waiting area, even if I have a book in front of me that I want to read, it’s hard not to be drawn, to be lured, to the flickering, moving images of CNN on a nearby TV, and on all the screens we have or hold in front of us - - the alerts, the hyperlinks, the pop-up messages, the movement from one screen to another - - is also very alluring to our brains.

            Most of us have probably seen experiments of rats pushing on a lever to get a food pellet. And when we use our digital devices, something similar is happening. We hit a button or press a key on one of our devices, and we get a response. Brain imaging studies are beginning to show that when our devices reward our actions in some way, our brains receive a little shot of dopamine - - a hormone and neurotransmitter that our brains really like. Using repetitive, intensive, interactive cognitive stimuli, our digital devices are training us to need them, to want them, even to love them.

            I read about a young woman named Julia. She says that after she sends out a text, she is uncomfortable until she gets one back. “I am always looking for a text that says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ or ‘Oh, that’s great.” Without this feedback, she says, ‘It’s hard to calm down.” Artemio Ramirez, Jr., an assistant professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, points out that e-mail addicts are people who like to feel desired and needed. In my experience of life, that’s most of us.

            There’s some evidence that there are similarities in the experiences of sitting in front of slot machine for hours, playing videogames for hours or spending hours using the Internet. People who do these things don’t do them to win at slots, or to get a new high score on a video game, or to do anything on the Internet, but just to be, to disconnect from the problems of real life, and zone out. But while these activities are appealing to our brains, the evidence shows that taking a walk in nature leaves our brains much more relaxed and rested than any amount of time we spending zoning out online. It is in face-to-face fellowship with each other that our humanity is restored, and it is in our experience of the natural world in which we rediscover, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the “dearest, freshest, deep down things.”

            Once again, I’m not suggesting that we give up all our digital technology. I’m only suggesting that we become more reflective and intentional about how we use it - - occasionally asking ourselves some of these questions I’ve mentioned, or more generally asking ourselves, “What am I feeling now? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Is there something else I might be doing instead?”

            In addition to asking ourselves these questions, we also might consider setting limits for ourselves. After all we set limits for ourselves around all kind of things that have both good and bad aspects to them. For example, think about the limits we set for ourselves around things like, say, alcohol, or our use of automobiles, or even Marie Callender’s chocolate satin pie.

            As far as digital technology goes, many experts recommend we set a rule for ourselves to only check email twice a day, and never first thing in the morning. Not trusting people’s self-control, some major corporations have started experiments where they totally cut off email access for all their employees for several hours a week. Many writers have started  using programs like “Freedom” and “Anti-Social” which block our computer’s Internet access totally or to social media sites for up to eight hours at a time. People who use it say they get a lot more done.

            I want to suggest that each of us need at least a few hours a day totally free from digital communication, and all of us need at least one day a week free from digital communication - - a digital Sabbath of sorts. This is something I try to practice for myself and in my family.

            A word of warning here, though. I know that at least a few of you are somewhat proud of you lack of participation in the digital age. I also know a lot of the teenagers and younger adults in this congregation tend to use digital technology more than the older adults. Before any of us get too high-minded, judgmental, or hollier-than-thou with anybody else in this congregation or anybody in our own families, let’s remember this…In a Newsweek magazine poll of American adolescents, 73 percent said that parents spend too little time with their teenagers. With parents and even grandparents leading their own overly-busy lives, is it any wonder then that children and youth turn to digital technology as often as they do seeking the attention they crave from parents and other older adults? Before confronting anyone else about their use of digital technology, I want to suggest we reflect on our role in the other person’s use of digital technology.

            Most of all, I want us to continue to talk with one another about this topic - - openly, honestly, and compassionately. In talking about this for the last two weeks, my hope is to start a conversation among ourselves, not to have the last word. But this morning, let me finish with something I learned recently about Steve Jobs. As you probably know, Jobs was the co-founder of Apple and helped design many Apple products, including the iPhone. He died of cancer last October.

            His recently published biography reveals that most Apple products were designed without an on/off switch. Why? Because of Jobs’s own anxiety about death. Having a switch on a product that could switch it off forever reminded Jobs that one day he might get switched off forever, and he didn’t like to think about that.

            In the liberal religious tradition of Unitarian Universalism, we don’t know whether we’re switched off forever or ever get rebooted somehow. But I know this, some day - - along time from now, I hope - - when I’m nearing my own switch off,  I don’t want to think to myself, “I wish I had spent more time living in the real world when I had the chance.”

            My friends, may each of us live as deeply, fully, richly and abundantly as is possible for us. So may it be. Amen.