Instantaneous vs Infoglut

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Instantaneous vs Infoglut

In Habits of the High-Tech Heart, Schultze says on p.57:

The so-called conquering of time with instantaneous messaging invariably retards our capacity to know anything of great importance. Increased bandwidth favors the knowing of truncated events and disconnected messages.

This overstates things a bit. Instantaneous messaging can be overwhelming at times, but so too can the world. I pass and catch the eye of hundreds of people a day without blinking. But "retard my capacity to know anything of great importance?" And while increased bandwidth certainly brings to us increased traffic of information, I find comfort in the fact that there are , amongst the flood, messages included that do indeed connect me to friends and acquaintances and inform me of where someone has linked to something I wrote, or made a comment on my Weblog. The mere prescence of a wide variety of notices and articles about what are, to us, "truncated events" and "disconnected" messages do not deter me from my end in using "High-bandwidth" connections to get and filter mail, read news feeds on my Weblog (news selected from sources I have trusted to show me relevant or potentially relevant stories), and all of this activity is aimed at helping me to find stories that raise issues that might help us in the Church be proper stewards of communication technology.

Schultze's tact thus far seems painfully overstated in the direction of dissing everything in sight concerning cyberculture. This particular section addresses the flood of email and probably also has "instant messaging" in mind. I, for one, rarely use chat or instant messaging.

Previous sections (like "Database Babel") decry the sheer amount of information being collected. Given, much of this is irrelevant to us at best (or at least to me) , and morally questionable or abhorrent at worst. Again, like the world in general. It seems that anytime humanity is presented with new technology that carries signals of all types, something is "on the airwaves" or "on the wire" that is undesirable. Sometimes, it is simply "new exposure" to a wider audience, and so "warnings" abound. Sometimes new technologies pose a challenge to traditional authority. Some lift up the traditional values of "books" and "traditional" education and question the capacity of the new medium for hosting valuable communications. Schultze does not venerate book learning in this way. He is enough of an explorer of the impact of media to know that the Printing Press brought it's own influences which objectified knowledge to the detriment of reflection and oral transmission. These questions are explored in McLuhan's wrtings as he declared "The medium is the message", and yet McLuhan was not exactly decrying the movement from a text-based culture to a "multimedia" culture.

As we commit more and more time to impersonal, unreflective, rapid-fire messaging, we have less and less time left to commune intimately with neighbor, God, and creation. Instead of limiting high-tech bandwidth to protect the kinds of virtuous relationships and practices that take time to cultivate, we dedicate more and more of our limited time to instrumental pursuits and amoral activities. (?) we become machine like creatures, uploading and downloading messages, organizing them into folders, burning them into new storage media, and printing them off to our heart's content.

While greater bandwidth promises to save us download time, it invariably leads to new informational endeavors that consume more of our "free" time for intrinsically moral practices.

My question mark identifies what seems to be a typical stereotype of the "cyber-enthusiast", one who spends their days instant messaging, viewing porn, and swapping files on Kazaa.

My concern is with this constant questioning of "cyberculture" and constant references to "virtuous relationships and practices" without a hint of any possibility that some are using the medium for exploring the ways that this medium can help us "commune intimately with neighbor, God, and creation". It seems as though Schultze will never directly address this. The rejection of all that he identifies as "cyberculture" and "informational systems" seems decidedly one-sided. Although the warnings inherent in the message of the Tower of Babel is a crucial resource to carry with us as we traverse this "informational" society, so too is the message of stewardship. Sure, there are certainly times to "step away" from the computer. There are times to "step away" from whatever we do as work, and whatever we do in our attempts to pursue truth and develop morality. Every endeavor has its way of consuming us if we fail to practice moderation.

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