A soft light glows in the corner. The far reaches of the room opposite the light are fully dark. Office-furniture shadows line the hotel walls. The last few words of a conversation hang in the air, now transformed into thoughts and ponderings.
The chat was easy with today’s technology. Miles don’t mean as much as they used to. It’s not easy for relationships to breathe anymore. What are thousands of miles and several state borders to someone with a smart phone? Wherever we are we have a soundtrack to our lives and a text message. It’s an all-in-one information orgy, vulgar in its over-indulgence.
It’s so normal that it doesn’t feel forbidden. Yet it is so similar to Eden’s forbidden fruit. Knowledge upon knowledge. Information upon information. Maybe it isn’t benign, after all. Are we any different than our Parents, who wanted to be like God…. KNOWING?
What is smart-phone if not a towering Babel all its own? What difference is there, really? An endless parade of apps line the pages of our mobile devices so that we can… KNOW something. We must know. We must know NOW. We need to know so badly that we interrupt precious moments between souls so we can… KNOW something.
Is all the information we have access to really ours to have access to? Can we have it? Should we have it? Is it benign? Are we repeating the sins of our Parents by striving to know good and evil? How much do we want to know? How much do we need to know? Is the information we hold in our hand truly ours to hold?
I don’t have a smart phone.
But I love to SKYPE with the people I love across the miles. Is that a spiritual failing? I don’t think so.
Looking up information and paying attention to the news across the world- is that a sin.
I don’t think so. Maybe I just don’t understand what you are ranting about?
Relationship needs to be constantly managed and renewed. If Eve and Adam had sought out the Lord’s presence rather than acting upon their own initiative- then would they have fallen? I think the state of the heart and the relationships in our lives- with God, with our loved ones is what we need to gauge our seeking of information or knowledge upon.
What I’m really wondering about is our relationship with and desire for information in the modern era and how it compares to Adam and Eve’s desire to know good and evil. It’s not a question we ask very often. Is our information just information? Is knowledge just knowledge, or is there something more / spiritual about the knowledge itself? Not in the sense that information itself is sentient, but in how we relate to it and what claim we have to it.
I love to Skype and connect via mobile phone to the loved ones in my life, too. And I think we should do those things. Technology that allows us to do such things helps us maintain connection to our dear ones.
In this post I’m concerned with information, how we consume it, why we want it, and what we do with it. I think it’s so easy to get information that we never even bother to ask the question, “Is it ours, and should we get it?” It’s such a strange question that it’s hard to even write about it, to ask questions about it, to wrap my head around it.
This post wasn’t really a rant as much as a question to all of us. Have we the right to the information that we get? Is that something we ever think about? Is that something *worth* thinking about, and how it may affect our lives and our relationships?
At first I shared Heidi’s sentiment, but your clarification helped. I agree with your concern about how and why we seek information. I often feel a compulsion to “catch up” on Facebook for fear I might “miss something.” While some of that is relational (an announcement of an engagement or a new member of a family or a prayer request) some of it is just knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It’s good to step back and question what we seek and why. Thanks for facilitating that.