Sometime around 1980–81, two brand new personal computers rolled into my high school in Montana, inciting much excitement. Until that day, few, if any, of us had ever seen such a thing. We had previously known computers as enormous monsters that filled entire rooms, storing and processing data for the military, high-tech industries, and the like. I remember seeing one of those colossal machines on a field trip. I can’t remember where, or who or what it served, but I remember the multiple units standing side-by-side, clicking and whirring loudly, recording data on reel-to-reel tapes. The desktop units in our school followed suit on a smaller scale, employing cassette tapes. They were ridiculously expensive, and did next to nothing. They included one or two games, but they were so unimaginative and crude that no one would have predicted that gaming would one day be a major portion of computer use. Computers were not toys. They were tools, useful for spy agencies, star ships, and businesses. Little did we know what the future held.
As Tim Challies writes, this has been the way new technology has always developed. And just as current technology may have metamorphosed into something far from its original purpose, new technologies that we adopt may change our lives in unintended ways. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a fact of which we ought to be wary.
When we create a new technology or add one to our lives, we may have a sense of how it will play out its hand, but rarely do things go exactly as we had planned. More often than not, the consequences are quite different from what we had expected.
This owes, at least in part, to the reality that the invention of a technology almost always precedes its function. Technology is generally created independently from the way it will eventually be used. It is usually only after a new technology is invented that we use our creativity and ingenuity to find ways of integrating it into our lives. This exacerbates its unintended consequences. If a technology was created specifically for business application and we adapt it to a worship service, we will see that there are some businesslike ideologies wrapped up in that technology (such as when we take PowerPoint from the boardroom to the sanctuary). The wise consumer of technology will realize that the technology he uses today, the technology he has come to love and depend on, will have unintended consequences in his life and in the world around him. He will look not just to the technology itself but to the function for which it was created, the problem it was originally supposed to address.
—Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Zondervan,2011), 62.
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