Sermon quotes on technology
Laurie Anderson
Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.
Dave Barry
Bill Gates is a very rich man today… and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.
Wendell Berry
As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.
Matt Chandler
No change of job, no increased income, no new home, no new electronic device, or no new spouse is going to make things better inside of you.
Scott D. Cook
We’re still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.
Steve Jobs
I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
Marshall McLuhan
All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.
Nicholas Negroponte
Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.
B.F. Skinner
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
Henry David Thoreau
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Sherry Turkle
The tethered child does not have the experience of being alone with only him- or herself to count on. For example, there used to be a point for an urban child, an important moment, when there was a first time to navigate the city alone. It was a rite of passage that communicated to children that they were on their own and responsible. If they were frightened, they had to experience those feelings. The cell phone buffers this moment.
Walter J. Ong
Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.
Andy Crouch
Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were meant to.
Cal Newport
The source of our unease . . . becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopted them. Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable. What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.
Neta Alexander
Is buffering a punishment? And if it is, what sin have we committed?
Rage Against the Machine: Buffering, Noise, and Perpetual Anxiety in the Age of Connected Viewing,” Cinema Journal 56, no. 2 (2017): 1.
Chris Nye
We cannot abandon the soil for the microwave.
Less of More: Pursuing Spiritual Abundance in a World of Never Enough
Sherry Turkle
Digital connections . . . may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.
Andy Crouch
Technology is a brilliant expression of human capacity. But anything that offers easy everywhere does nothing (well, almost nothing) to actually form human capacities.
Byung-Chul Han
They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.
The Burnout Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 51.
Jay Y. Kim
The digital age is about getting what we want, when we want, how we want, and as much (or as little) as we want.
Taken from Analog Church by Jay Y. Kim Copyright (c) 2020 by Jay Y. Kim. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Jay Y. Kim
This is the ultimate paradox of the digital age: at the moment in human history when technology allows us to be more connected than ever, we are so very far apart, to the point that our very understanding of “community” has devolved into a sort of collection of isolated individuals.
Taken from Analog Church by Jay Y. Kim Copyright (c) 2020 by Jay Y. Kim. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Aaron Smith
A 2018 Pew Research Center study found that the percentage of adults 65 and older who believe that the internet has been mostly good for society has declined 14 points since 2014, from 78 percent to 64 percent. Keep in mind that older adults have been particularly rapid adopters of social media. Younger adults have been more consistent, but even their support has declined, from 79 percent in 2014 to 74 percent in 2018.
Louis C. K.
People say there’s delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years to do that and a bunch of you would die on the way there and have a baby. You’d be with a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie . . . and you’re home.
Judith Shulevitz
People began to learn, first from the telegraph, then from radio, newsreels, television, and the Internet, that what was happening now, all over the globe, mattered more than what was happening here.
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (New York: Random House, 2010), 96.
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