Moderating Our Informational Desires

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Moderating Our Informational Desires

Review of the Forward (Habits of the High-Tech Heart) | Schultze Preface | Intro: Identifying the Techno-Moral Crisis | Discerning Our Informationism | Moderating Our Informational Desires | Instantaneous vs Infoglut
Back to post More High-Tech Habits Chapter 2

Some optimists cite Moore's Law, which says that computer power" doubles every eighteen months, presumably enabling us to collect, distribute, and analyze more information in less time." Others cite Metcalfe's Law, which posits that the "value" of the Internet increases at the rate of the square of the number of people using it." These of "laws" are triumphalistic symbols that some eager informationists employ rhetorically to convince us that greater messaging speed and quantity are signs of social progress. Such slogans do not explain our condition so much as exhort us to greater faith in inforrmation technology.

This observation in Chapter Two contains a profound misunderstanding of Metcalfe's Law, which is a sociological evaluation of the "value" of the Internet as a NETWORK. It is not a "More is better" glorification of the type that Schultze is challenging. The Metcalfe Law has value to the Church, in my view, in that it makes the sheer population of users into a collaborative effort. Of course, there are those who use the Internet for more mundane and inane purposes, but still , the Law holds. Given the prescence of "less valuable" and "less participatory" elements which serve only to increase the glut and "noise" for those who seek serious communication, and factoring in this "expected percentage" of useless or distracting information, the more the participants, the more "opportunity" to find that "small percentage" of useful information, and so the more people will "seek out" these "hidden treasures". The sheer volume also increases the quantities of useful information and communicatons that make up some 1, 5, or 10 percent (or whatever you perceive that to be) of the "total" of content in our own neck of the woods that we surf.

This dissing of the value of the Network could be compared to dissing the value of the amount of Churches in the world. In this view, we would be remiss in celebrating the increase in the amount of Churches becuase this would be "utopian" and "naive" , since all of us know that every Church member in all of those Churches are not neccessarily living out that faith in society. We all realize that Church members are not the automatic blessing and "leaven" in society that the gospel calls us to be. And yet, we celebrate the prescence of the Church in the world because there will be , in those vast membership numbers, a select few who will indeed make a difference, and within the structures and organizations and communicatons of those Churches, we will find valuable resources. My point being, we all must still do a little "separation of wheat from the chaff" inside the Church --- few of us blindly follow the crowd in Church, knowing that there is still a need for discernment, and the responsibility to take care against "conformity to the world", as it is constantly a danger for the Church , particularly where it begins to "strategize" about how to "gain members".

In the Church we can "filter" through and find mission that is in tune with what we feel God is calling us to do. When we find our little "sub-societies" within the Church that represent some of our "small circles" of deeper intimacy and belonging, then the "connectedness" and "networks" within those groups with other people of similar concerns becomes more valuable in the Metcalfe's Law sense -- the more "members" in that network make it a more valuable society in which to participate. A larger total network makes the network more valuable in its capacity to include more information and connection to "similar groups", and the rersources offered by these groups offer another layer of "Metcalfe's Law Value" in that the more participants it acquires, the more valuable it becomes to potential new participants.

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