People have been writing for years about how scary the world
is going to get once computers become smarter than us and start controlling our
brains. Maybe we are already there and we are all slimy pale white Keanus
living our life in little pods while the Matrix controls all of our perceptions
and reality. Maybe the Borg have already made their way to planet Earth and are
assimilating us all into their bio robotic space cube that once captured Captain
Picard in Star Trek The Next Generation. Maybe
our computers are playing a joke on humanity by hypnotizing us into flooding
the internet with selfie duck-faces and pictures of cats.
People have been fearing this kind of powerful technology for
so long that even the word “cyber” seems retro and nostalgic.
And of course we have cause to be uneasy. Relationships
between people are changing drastically. Identity theft and manipulation is
easier than it has ever been before. The Government can spy on your every move.
People are running into people and light poles more than ever because they are
trying to walk and snapchat at the same time. The struggle is real in an
internet world.
None of this is new and tons of people have already written
about the dangerous effects of what our technological future will hold but I
like to do my own thing. Call me blindly optimistic or youthfully naïve but I
have been thinking and I have come to the conclusion that cyberspace might do
some good for Christianity.
Everything is in the
Cloud- Where is all of my music? Where are the books I read? Where are my
phone contacts? They are all in the cloud man, and it is far out. I can picture
all of my data just floating around through cyberspace like some Zen master
eagerly waiting my beckoning from any device on any spot on the planet. I don’t
know where the cloud is and I couldn’t see it even if I could but I have the
faith that it will always be there for me with all of my data when I need it.
Admittedly this has some major drawbacks, namely that you lose
control over who gets access to your stuff but think about the implications of
what the invisible network spanning the entire globe has on our mentality of what
it means to be human.
There is not one person in my generation who does not
wholeheartedly believe in the existence of an all-powerful, omniscient,
omnipresent being who connects everyone in the world in ways we do not
understand. We just think he is the Internet.
50 years ago people could not believe in what they could not
see with their physical eyes and touch with their physical hands. Reality was completely
physical and based on location. Now we are conditioned to trust in a world wide
web that we will never lay our hands on. We are open to the fact that Reality
is more than what our senses can perceive which is what the Church has been
preaching all along. Now the job is to show the world which all-powerful,
omniscient, omnipresent Being has been here all along and can actually live up
to His namesake.
“In Public” doesn’t exist-
Most children have grown up being taught, whether intentionally or subconsciously,
that there is a huge difference between being by yourself and being “in public”
and knowing the difference dictates what kind of behavior you are expected to
demonstrate. It was based off of the idea that “in private” you do not have to
adhere to the standards of when you are “in public” and other people are
watching.
In is 2014 and now everyone is watching. All the time.
Explosions in social media have made it almost impossible to
do anything privately, just ask Edward Snowden. We experience life through
sharing it with as many people as we can through pictures, status updates, and
140 character microblogging. The friends you haven’t seen or talked to in
decades now know exactly how you are feeling every day.
On the rare days I get a quiet evening to myself I have to
fight back the urge to tell the internet about it. “In public” is now synonymous
with simply being alive.
This means the whole world can see you for who you really
are and you are the only one who gets to decide what they see. Will the influx
of social media expose hypocrisy within the Church? Yes. Has it already?
Absolutely. Isn’t this a bad thing? Not at all.
When Christianity is harder to fake it becomes more impressive
when it is proven real. When God is actually a part of your life it will make a
bigger difference in the lives of your friends than you could have made before
the internet connected you to the rest of the world. Cyber culture means less
privacy in exchange for more people to see inside of your heart and find Jesus
waiting for them there.
People are watching you, show them Jesus.
Everyone has a voice-
I don’t know if you have tried lately, but getting a book published is
really hard. So hard, in fact, that only a small percentage of people ever have
been able to do it.
But now we have the internet where anyone anywhere can
proclaim to the masses whatever message they want. We have spent a whole lot of
time talking about how people have used this digital soapbox in the wrong way
but not enough time talking about how we should use it in the right way. I talk
about this more extensively in my other blog.
Let’s make use of the voice we have been given to do more than gain lives in
Candy Crush.
The future is upon us and there is no turning back. Instead
of condemning everything we are afraid of let’s look for ways that we can use
what is inevitable to actually advance the Kingdom of God.
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