I’ve brought some technology with me: Ipod, (currently holding lots of music, photos from Turkey, podcasts - talks, video broadcasts, and radio shows given by others to which I have subscribed and thus are delivered directly to my computer and onto the iPod when I sync it with the computer; Kindle, a reading device using ink technology so that it resembles the page of a book and which holds thousands? of books downloaded wirelessly from the Kindle store; Palm Pilot, my telephone, date book, address book, lists, memos, and generally all that I need to function. There are many more technological wonders, but you get the picture. Technology and spirituality do not usually inhabit the same conversation, which is why I want to look at them together today. I want to explore the spiritual challenges inherent in media and communication technology, as well as the pay-offs and potential. I want to think about a spiritual response to media and communication technology that might inform the ethical dilemmas that technology invariably brings up.

The word technology comes from the Greek tekhnos and means an art, a skill, a craft, a trade, plus logia, the systematic treatment of. Technology, then, refers to the study and application of art, skill, craft, trade. Human beings, by our need to survive, have always been technological, developing our skill, creating that which we need for bodies and souls. Therefore, when we talk about the spirituality of technology we explore something intrinsic to human life. All the same, I don’t know about you, but today’s technology feels different to me.

We have become an electronic culture, in which much of our communication and media come through technology like the Kindle and the Blackberry. You can go to Hudson and attend a live simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera. You can log onto the Unitarian Universalist website, uua.org, and plug into a streamed (live broadcast via computer) General Assembly lecture or even worship service. You can hear my sermons as podcasts. The Mid-Hudson Library system will loan your computer a book and you can read it on your iPod. You can play tennis on your Wii, a three dimensional video game c onsole. What are you thinking? Do you know what I’m talking about? Are you wanting a Wii of your own? Are you feeling intimidated? Wondering why these new technologies are necessary? Do you care whether you are entirely up-to-date technologically or hopelessly out-of-touch? Do you have a Facebook page?

Media and communications technology raise lots of issues: ethical, societal, economic, personal and emotional. As it always has, our technological know-how moves fast and confronts us with unexpected situations and calls for decisions we may not be prepared to make. The electronic culture raises new questions about intellectual property rights, privacy, censorship, the enforcement of current, perhaps inadequate, laws. Bobbi Katz, an author, talks about finding her work quoted, and misquoted, on the internet without her or her publisher’s permission. I had an experience of someone in another congregation asking for an electronic copy of a sermon, which I sent. Thereupon the person edited it and sent it around to others, under my name! And he became very annoyed when I asked him to stop and accused me of curtailing his freedom of speech. How many of us have had what we=2 0considered private e-mail conversation sent around to others? This need not even happen intentionally. Some servers automatically include the previous e-mail in the body of the new communication. So if party A sends an e-mail to party B and party B replies to party A and party C together, the original correspondence between A and B gets included in the reply. Who makes these decisions about technology? Right now it’s the companies that profit from it, within whatever structures the legislature and judicial system do or do not provide.

The values of our culture, and particularly our youth, are shaped by technology. Generational chasms grow because of technology. Class chasms as well. Some congregations have gone entirely electronic, sending all communication out over the internet and/or posting it on the website. They assume that everyone has e-mail, and reads it. Have you noticed that you no longer get instruction books with the electronic equipment you buy? Rather the manufacturer directs you to a website for help and instruction. This saves paper, time, postage and printing. It allows for color in the newsletter and length does not matter. But in order to access this, one needs an=2 0internet connection and the knowledge to use it. One has to be physically comfortable with a keyboard, a mouse, reading a computer screen. The very physical set-up is friendlier to younger people than to elders with arthritis, cataracts and the like. Technology does not come cheap and lesser financial resources often mean less access to communication and media technology. Technology shapes values. What does it say about a society’s values when access to technology and technological skill is not available to all? When those who make important decisions about technology are those who will profit from them?

At the same time communications and media technology have made our experiences more global. I can read Al-Jezeera on line and I can communicate with my friend Jamie when she goes to Israel. I can enjoy the photography of Icelandic artists on Flikr. Through translation programs I can even speak to someone I do not know and whose language differs from mine. Anti-oppression work becomes more crucial as we are more exposed to hate speech and images, misleading and incorrect information about each others’ religions, cultures, values, much more violence and incitements to violence, and much more pornography, by which I mean the sexual degradation of other human beings.

And there’s no going back. Communication and media technology is here and even though it keeps changing, I think we need to consider its relationship with, and effect upon, our spirituality if we want to make optimal use of its potential and minimize its dangers.

One way to talk about spirituality is as an impulse toward connection. Connection with others, with oneself, with what one believes to be ongoing and larger than any particular life, call it God or the source of life, or higher power, or spirit, nature, etc. In this drawing toward, we follow the interdependent, interconnected nature of life. We are examples of, in Kahlil Gibran’s phrase, life’s longing for itself. In the intersections we create, we imagine, we love, we discover, we build stories, families, communities. While we might have the capacity for anything, we do know instinctively that loving makes life better for us than hating. In our perceptions of ourselves as separate, individual beings who are born alone and die alone, there is another knowing. And that is that we are connected. Our spirits long for real manifestations of that connection.

Along these lines, social problems contain a spiritual component. When our sense of connectedness is diminished, even threatened, by our communities because they do not honor, recognize, accept our needs and basic dignity, we often express the disconnect that occurs in a violent, destructive manner. Human breakdown does not occur in isolation. One cannot remain openheartedly in community with feelings of disconnection turning into rage and destruction. The individual alone cannot bear full responsibility for this. Nor can the individual alone repair it.

Many people identify the isolating, disconnecting tendencies of communication and media technology as among the most important challenges. Our kids play computer games by themselves; we substitute face to face talking with Facebook postings which go out en masse to all of our “friends;” we fire off an e-mail saying what we would never say in person. We lose sight of the reality of each other as we objectify everyone into digital bits and bytes. The content and the presentation of media technology, when overly violent, has been shown to increase violent behavior in society. We become sources of entertainment to each other rather than human beings worthy of compassionate presence. Quite a while ago Don Peck gave me a column by Leonard Pitts in which he writes, “We already watch television in separate rooms. Eat dinner in shifts and on the run. Go about cocooned by iPod tunes. . . . if there were not already enough in life to make you feel disconnected, disaffected, alienated and isolated.”

Yes. The family that sat around the radio in the 1940’s could and did still see and speak to one another. The family that sat around the TV in the 1960’s no longer spoke to one another or looked at each other much because the television became the all-encompassing focus. The Victrola, the record player, gave way to a SONY Walkman with individual headphones. Computers took us a step further from personal contact. E-mail, for some, has just about replaced the telephone. Under the guise of “interactivity” we find ourselves interacting more with the machines than with human beings. Again, Leonard Pitts. “I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of punching in numbers and talking to voice-recognition software. Tired of self-service checkout lines. And of customer service agents who ask robotically, ‘Have I provided you with excellent service today?’ after they have just told me they can’t help me with my problem.”

Yes. Economic prosperity which allowed access to technology for many, coupled with the individualistic tendencies woven into the fabric of American society, is reflected in an individualistic technology of communication and media. That technology, in turn, promotes greater individualism and diminishes the face-to-face personal interchanges more prevalent in other times. The communicative cues we can only pick up in person, the inter-personal skills we can only develop in person, the empathy that grows with belonging to communities, all suffer. Yes, that is a major challenge of technology.

On the other hand, the potential for wider communication and better maintenance of relationship with friends and family is also there. With e-mail and Facebook I can keep in touch with my far-flung family in more consistent ways. I can share photos with co-workers from the 80’s. Next week I’ll take part in a conference call of Buddhist practitioners with others from as far away as California. The possible exposure, in positive ways, to different cultures and peoples is abundant, if managed usefully. We still recognize the need for live communities, for a live sharing of, and attentiveness to, joys and sorrows. Here we are.

I think one of the greatest challenges of communication and media technology is honesty and trust. If we accept the impulse toward meaningful connection as a spiritual one, then we realize that trust plays an essential role in connecting and we also realize that honesty of communication is necessary. Dishones ty, intentional and unintentional, will not promote trust and without trust, connections grow brittle and frayed. Perhaps each of us has experienced intentional lying, either as the one lied to or as the one telling the lie, and we know the disruption to relationship when that dishonesty is revealed. I had an experience recently of unintentional dishonesty. A member of the Buddhist sangha said something that seemed highly critical of those who lead the sangha. When we pointed that out, he totally backtracked and denied that he said the words he said, even though we all heard him. For the rest of the conversation he stuck to the denial. And I felt so weird because, in the denial of the perception of most of those present, the feelings that arose from the perception could not be addressed. I do not know what he thought he said, or what he meant by it, but I do know that in his efforts not to upset us we experienced a disruption in connection.

The very ways of media and communication technology can blur the lines of honesty, and thus of trust, and thus of connection. In this way technology presents a spiritual challenge even as it offers spiritual potential. Here are some examples. In many postings and blogs, opinions are not clearly distinguished from facts. So much information is available to us -- potentially a powerful tool. At the same time discernment among facts and separating sound ideas from unsound ones becomes very difficult. That exemplar of democracy, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia created collaboratively by just about anyone and vetted by everyone raises doubt. Can we rely upon what’s in it? How can we know? I came upon a translation of a Greek poem, attributed to a professor of mine. I know the poem well and as I read it, I winced at the lack of poetry in the translation and I knew it was not his work. But how would another person? These days plagerism, presenting someone else’s ideas and thoughts and words as one’s own, has become a big problem in academia and journalism. This weekend I believe, Bard College is hosting a conference about educating for this technological age, with a focus on plagerism. With e-mail we can connect, but its anonymous nature makes it easier to assume another identity, a great concern to parents whose children go on the internet. How do we distinguish a photo that has been altered from one that has not? Should we? These are just some of the ways our technology makes it possible for us to misrepresent ourselves, intentionally and unintentionally, or shade the truth, or omit it. What do we need to know about the content of our communication? We cannot make connections that are real unless we can find ways to20communicate that promote honesty, or perhaps disclosure, and thereby promote trust. How open and trustworthy is your technological communication and information sharing?

In 1993 the Reverend Donna DiSciullo wrote a paper entitled “An Ethic for the 21st Century” in which she said, “ I have come to believe that moral strength is the ability and willingness to live in the tension between self and other; between the individual and the community; between self-interest and greater interest. And that to be ethically responsible for our actions requires staying connected to the consequences i.e. keeping the web of relationships intact. Detachment from the consequences leads to detachment from the relationship and hence the pain of the consequences.”

Given the challenge of isolation and detachment that our communication and media technology pose, along with the challenge of honest disclosure in communicating, paying attention to the consequences of technology so as to achieve a fruitful balance between individuality and community is of great importance. The spiritual touchstone, then, is connection. Ethical decisions regarding technology have to do with the connective consequences of communication and media. Does our technology connect us in trust? Does it disconnect us? It can do either. How does the way we use it contribute to one or the other? The leaning toward connection is a human spiritual impulse and the spirituality of technology lies in its ability to connect us meaningfully.

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food, 
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.


Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking at what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark, and use the sun to make sugar.


Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, 
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us 
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.


Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, 
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.      
--Marge Piercy (The Seven of Pentacles)

May we recognize the preciousness of our connections and may we tend them carefully. May we use our technology to make them real and deep. For so is our human longing.