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Facebook, Twitter, and post-modern lightness of being.

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There is a “tortoise and hare” pattern between believers and unbelievers when it comes to technology.* It first showed up early after the fall (Gen 4.16-22). Unbelievers, unhindered by virtue or propriety, race ahead in technological development, only to be eventually overtaken by believers living a wholesome, integrated life which alone can incorporate technology in a healthy, balanced way. This is all in the providence of God: “The wealth of the sinner shall be stored up for the righteous” (Prov 13.22; see also Eccl 2.26). (Remember that technology is a form of wealth. A dishwasher and a furnace do the work of many servants.) But on the front end of technological development, believers must be careful to not get caught up in the techno-orgy. What distinguishes us from the unbeliever is not the ability to use technology, but the ability to use it without it using us. The temptation to use and be used is particularly acute in times when God providentially grants a technological quantum leap. We live in such a time. The Internet, Facebook, and Twitter are a case in point. We are danger of becoming dust in the wind, which for the unbeliever fits their understanding of existence, but for the believer it is quite the opposite. The Bible’s phrase for dust in the wind is chaff in the wind (Psalm 1.4). We are to be wheat, not chaff. Wheat is distinguished from chaff precisely in the fact that it has weight. In the Bible, weightiness is a good thing; in post-modernity, it is anathema. Weightlessness is exactly what one wants nowadays, and technology shall help us achieve it. This is not a swipe at technology, for technology can help us maintain our weightiness as well as shed it. Technology can help us stay connected to those who in former times could only speak with us through letters which sometimes took months to deliver. Now we can speak instantly, and we can see our friends as well and speak to them. What a blessing! But the main use of communication technology today is to be so instantly and constantly connected with so many similar others that our lives and relationships lose all solidness and begin to blow about in the wind. Who doesn’t dream of flying? But if you could never land, flying would be a nightmare. In the Bible, it is the wheat that is to be envied (Mat 3.12). And that precisely because it has the weightiness to stay grounded.

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* Jim Jordan has written about this, but I cannot recall where.

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