The Dangers of Digital

Imagine if Covid had happened pre-internet. We have maintained relationships and connection through video calls and social media. Without them, the isolation could have been much worse. Church too has flourished through virtualisation. Small prayer groups and Bible studies occur via video calls. Church services are also shared through this clunky means, or through pre-recorded, heavily-edited productions, on social media, which demand intensive volunteer labour.

In business, commentators are predicting the death of the office, as companies, and workers, become used to operating from home. Even if there is some return to physical space after the pandemic, there will certainly be swathes of real estate in central London for sale in coming months and years.

But there is also a human cost to remote tele-working. Many have commented that, despite productivity increasing, they miss the human contact of socialising with fellow employees. There is also a cost in mental ill-health. The absence of ‘presence’, another human being, exacts a toll on the psyche; for example among older people in care homes, who didn’t have any family visits during lockdown. Even those with dementia, who don’t recognise their relatives, still missed their visits. And now, when we can meet again (in the open, with social distancing) we still can’t embrace. So preoccupied has society been with the dangers of abusive touching, we forgot the importance of loving, caring, touch. Might similar dangers await online church?

In the 1970s, Marshall McLuhan wrote about the coming “discarnate” society, formed through TV’s  influence, whereby our embodied existence was replaced through mediated technological extensions. More recently, Charles Taylor wrote about our “excarnate” culture. This disconnection from our physicality arises, he suggested, from the West’s Platonic valorisation of the mind over the body. Besides both being Canadian, they are also Roman Catholic. The sacramental identification of spiritual meaning with physical matter, has surely affected their critique of disembodied modernity; although one examines the immediate technological means of effecting it, and the other the philosophical roots of the process. That McLuhan used the term “discarnate”, and Taylor “excarnate”, perhaps reflects the fact that the former observed the beginning, and the latter the realisation of this drift.

Already, before the pandemic, there was a reaction against this digital virtualisation of life: artisan coffees, craft beers, knitting, blacksmiths, yoga. Hipsterdom itself was an attempt to recover something of the human. Even those earning a living in the ‘new economy’ sought deeper meaning, and human connection, through material experience. Photographers preferring film to digital images. Music listeners favouring the grainy sound of vinyl over the clipped tones of the MP3. Self-help techniques and counselling schools, eschewing over-cerebral talk-therapies, and advocating getting in touch with feelings directly through identifying and monitoring our physical senses. As John Naisbitt predicted, the future will be (is) both “hi-tech” and “hi-touch”, virtual and physical, technological and personal.

For Christianity, being human is to be embodied, enfleshed. Christ’s own incarnation, of Deity in humanity, is an example, and emphasis, of this necessary truth about human existence.