“Most of those in my generation find ourselves afloat on a turbulent sea of new technology not only with little sense of how to operate the sails and rudder, but with a reflexive suspicion of anything like an instruction manual. Those who dare to decry the evils of smartphones or Facebook are quickly branded as Luddites; while those who tell us that “there is nothing new under the sun” and seek to regulate our digital lives with familiar moral platitudes.”

Although the advent of new technology has probably posed new challenges for almost every generation, no one can deny that the pace of change has increased exponentially in recent decades, inflicting ever more severe growing pains on Christians seeking to live faithfully in a rapidly-changing world. Many of my generation experienced firsthand the awkward rendezvous of the tightly-policed world of conservative evangelicalism with the internet, and my parents’ generation may recall with a groan their attempts to enforce “standards” amid the torrents of digital worldliness pouring into their homes. Confronted with these challenges, the answer for many evangelicals was a fundamentalist legalism or a laissez-faire libertinism, or perhaps an unstable back-and-forth between the two.

As a result, most of those in my generation find ourselves afloat on a turbulent sea of new technology not only with little sense of how to operate the sails and rudder, but with a reflexive suspicion of anything like an instruction manual. Those who dare to decry the evils of smartphones or Facebook are quickly branded as Luddites; while those who tell us that “there is nothing new under the sun” and seek to regulate our digital lives with familiar moral platitudes (“use Facebook, just don’t be narcissistic about it”; “surf the web, just keep your eyes pure”) seem to offer little real guidance amidst such fundamental and disorienting novelty.

Our predicament, however, reflects a more deep-seated cultural uncertainty as to how to think about technology and the ways it shapes us. We tend to assume that the ever-new technologies we are crafting from year to year are simply an extension of the tool-making process that has always been a part of human culture. We need to get things done, and we’d like to get them done more efficiently, and so we make tools for the task. We remain the masters, freely choosing our purposes as before; the only difference is that we can accomplish these purposes faster. Of course, we have not been able to escape the nagging worry that we have moved beyond the Tool Age, and our creations may be at risk of mastering us. Films like The Terminator and The Matrix attest to this worry, but at the same time enable us to domesticate it as merely the stuff of science-fiction, of little pressing consequence.

More than thirty years ago, the great Canadian philosopher George Grant devoted an essay toward analyzing the defensive remark of a computer scientist that summed up this instrumentalist attitude: “The computer does not impose on us the ways in which it should be used.”[1] From this standpoint, ethics is interested only in the particular purposes of human users of technology, not in evaluating the technologies themselves.

Grant, however, patiently deconstructs the naïvete of this remark. For one thing, it is silly to pretend that any technology is a blank slate for us to use as we would like; that is, at any rate, in tension with the very notion of technology as a tool. For tools are designed to fulfill certain functions, and while they may do these very well, they may do others quite poorly. Moreover, while we may not be bound to use them at all, we will certainly be tempted to, and all the more so the more efficient they are. Thus, by redirecting us to pursue tasks which the technology does well, and away from others which it does not do, a new technology can impose on us not merely how it should be used, but how we order all manner of aspects of our lives; just think of the automobile, for instance.

But the computer might seem at first glance unique in this respect; a computer can do almost anything we want it to, right? Well, only at first glance. Even with the dramatic advance of computer technology in the past three decades, there are still any number of ways in which a computer cannot, and presumably never will be used; it cannot feed you or transport you, for instance. But even within its domain, there are certain things it does quite well, like standardization and quantitative measurement, and others that it does quite poorly, like personalization and qualitative assessment; and this can have profound consequences when it is adopted by institutions, such as schools or hospitals. More importantly, its very versatility makes it far more subject to the law of unintended consequences–more like the automobile than the plough. The adoption of the computer has imposed upon us all manner of new ways of living and communicating that we might never have imagined.