Engaging theTele-Culture Copyright 2002, 2006 by Shea Oakley All rights reserved
Western Civilization, particularly in the United States, has entered the 21st Century with the preceding century's inclination to embrace all technology as good still very much present. In fact, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, probably no other time in history has witnessed such a wholesale acceptance of man-made instrumentalities. This is nowhere more true than in the medium of telecommunications. For better or worse we have become the "Cell-Phone Nation,"
It does not end with the cell phone, however. Today we could just as well describe America as the "E-mail Nation" or, with a few more years to grow in popularity, the "Palm-Pilot Nation." Science has made it possible to communicate with more people, more often and at a lower expense than ever before. At times the United States seems to have become one huge electronic hive of voices.
One might think that the result of these advancements would be a greater sense of intimacy and community among the American people. The reality is that the alienation inherent in Modernity does not seem to have been banished in any meaningful way by our entering the era of "Post-Modernity." In these times we continue to know the pain of existential loneliness. The isolating tendencies of the world we live in have not gone away, even as the microwave towers have gone up all around us.
A recent study indicated that those who spend many hours on the internet e-mailing, instant messaging and frequenting chat rooms actually have a greater chance of suffering from depression than those who don't (it would be interesting to commission another study to find out if heavy cell-phone users test out as more or less mentally healthy then the average person).
It would seem that our technology-driven culture, for all the constant communicating going on, is not actually bringing people any closer. Perhaps this is because our Creator designed human beings to best relate by being physically close to one other. The thing that is missing from the electronic connections we are so steeped in today is a literal "nearness" among persons. This is the reason why the old orders Pennsylvania Dutch even today prohibit telephones. In the Amish mind you can have no community outside of physical proximity. When they communicate they want it to be face to face and the Amish, it might be added, are a consistently happy people.
So how does this relate to the Church? To begin with Christians are often just as bound up in the "Teleculture" as any one else in the world. We need to re-claim the kind of physically oriented community that the early church lived in. The greater part of our relational efforts should be focused on those who we can actually be with. This is not to say that we need cut off everyone outside a twenty-mile radius of where we call our home. 21st Century Christians live in an age of mass transportation and many of our friends and relatives no longer spend a lifetime in one area. Many do, however, and any Christian community's lifeblood, on the purely horizontal level, flows through the close relationships forged by actually being with our brethren physically. This is the kind of shared life that marked the early church. As the Body of Christ learns to live in this kind of intimacy we will become more attractive to people outside the church that sense something different and better inside. As society becomes increasingly marked by the physical separation engendered by telecommunications many people will find themselves longing for the intimate communities that God always meant the most relational of His creatures to enjoy. If the Church leads the way in establishing such communities our light will shine even brighter to a lost and lonely world.