of Faith
Lee
iGods
Watching Disruptive Placemaking Trinity Moral of
Art
Witness Jennifer Craft Band the Stories Gallery
Detweiler Benson
TV
iGods - Craig Detweiller
How Technology Shapes our Spiritual and Social Lives
EOF: Craig, thank you so much for taking time from your busy days to talk to us about
your book, iGods. How are you doing today?
Detweiller: Well. It’s always good to talk with you, Michael, and it’s always a great time to consider how
we, I don’t know, retain our humanity in the midst of technopoly that surrounds us.
Absolutely. You know, I can’t help, when I talk about these subjects, to feel like a hypo-
crite since I’m completely drowned in technology, but at the same time know it’s a con-
cern. But we’ll get to that probably in a moment. Maybe we could start off with this: In
your book, you discuss that we have faith in technology because we have gotten really
soft, at least in the West. We expect our air conditioning to work, we expect our cars to
start, we expect it to make our coffee; we just have gotten so complacent with technol-
ogy that we don’t even realize that it is
present, we just expect it to be there. If it
slows down, even a millisecond, we lose
the plot. Maybe you should start off by
telling us, and I know you don’t make any
commitments in the book, is technology
good or bad?
Well, let’s see. I think technology is a consolation.
You can go back to the Garden and as Adam and
Eve were facing the difficulties of life, without
God in the center of their lives, and life outside of
the Garden, God sent them out with tools. There
were tools to deal with toil. Those tools were
something to till the ground; an acknowledgment
that it’s tough to create a crop. The soil can be
challenging. And then also with clothing; a notion
of a loom and the ability to weave. The idea that
in some places it’s unbearably hot and we need
hats and we need sunscreen and we need ways
to protect our heads and our bodies. In other
areas, it’s unbearably cold and we need fur and
blankets and layers to get through long winters.
And so, in a sense, I think God has not just been a
tool maker, a creator, but also given us the ability
to create tools. To the degree that tools allevi-
ate our pain, our suffering — something like air
conditioning, yes! Wonderful, I love air condition-
ing — Oh, wait, am I poisoning the environment
with the by-products of that air conditioning? I
need a new tool to deal with how I’m damaging
the ozone layer. It has been this constant thing of
solving for one problem and then often creating
another. Technology can be a great consolation
and it can be incredibly vexing.
So,it’s kind of like, it depends on how we’re
using it, right?
Exactly.
I got ya. So, with this wonderful, I guess
“tool” might be the right word, it seems
like it’s getting to be a bit more than “tool.”
Technology has given people this sense of
self importance. You wrote the book iGods
a few years ago that it seems that, with
social media usage, this tool has gotten
even more out of hand, where people just
concentrate continuously to get more and
more and more followers; not just to get
“... whether they be
Facebook, Google,
Amazon, Apple — I tried
to go back to the core ideas
that drive the companies
or that drive their decision
making.”
data, and information, which is what the
initial tools were to feed them, but they
now want people following them and then
it makes everybody feel, you discuss this,
everybody can be a broadcaster or a jour-
nalist. They are all putting out what they
want and it makes them feel like they are
famous, even if no body is paying atten-
tion. They just have a lot of followers that
are trying to get followers, too. Right?
So, I guess that in some ways technology
affects our ability to be humble, which
is getting real close to one of the roots of