Is Technology Corrosive?
At Elijah School our mission of hands-on learning for non-traditional students includes teaching about values, choices, and God’s Biblical demands. We strive to help young minds think through the logical outworkings of decisions: a small step down one path may eventually lead to ruin – or great success. And we teach them above all that God doesn’t just love them, He values them: they have worth, and purpose, and abilities all their own.
I am very concerned about the amount of time young people spend immersed in technology without interacting with real, live, warm bodies. There’s nothing funamentally wrong with You Tube or Facebook, for example, but there’s lots of ugly, dark, and corrosive materials on both sites. Sexual content is among the most pervasive.
One of the more worrisome aspects of all this is that it becomes very commonplace and hence young minds can see it and watch it without even really noticing anymore. Here is an excerpt from a column of David Brooks in the New York Times:
“Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.
But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today’s world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act that the choice of an erotic partner.
This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other’s commitment.
Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.”
“…they get less help” really resonates with me. As parents, educators, and Christians it is our job to helping young minds make proper decisions and to see things for what they really are; it’s very easy to romanticize or think idyllic certain situations which are bound to have destructive effects on a young life. We need to be there with the Truth for our society – who else will?
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