Leader, Volume 14 #4

Assessing a Revolution in Midstream

If my experience is any guide, the most impressive quality of computers is not technological in nature. It is their ability to forgive.

In the early 1980s, attached to my fountain pen and manual typewriter, I dismissed computers as a fad whose time would soon pass. Rash words. Within a few years I was using a computer at work, and I not only grew to like it but soon bought my very own PC. Yet Luddite instincts still lurked in my soul. When the Internet arrived a few years ago, my reaction was once again to sneer--until a Jesuit friend gave me a tour of cyberspace on his computer. I promptly subscribed to an online service, and much of my leisure time is now spent rummaging around in cyberland. And has my computer ever reminded me of my anti-technological past? No. Forgiveness comes naturally to it.

My odyssey with computers is a parable for our times. Seen only rarely in offices a decade ago, the computer is now omnipresent in the work world and is increasingly found in private homes as well. As for computer networks, the world's largest online service, America Online, has five million members, making it larger than the largest Canadian city.

A revolution is clearly underway, but its significance is not yet clear. Indeed, with all the overblown rhetoric about the "information highway," it is tempting to cut computers and the Internet down to size. After all, virtually every innovation of the industrial age has been described in hyperbolic terms. But that said, some technologies have had a more profound cultural effect than others. The car and television are innovations whose effects have been especially far-reaching. My hunch is that computers will prove no less important.

Moving from hunches to analysis is another matter. Revolutions are best assessed after they have run their course, and the communications revolution we are now living through is no different. However, unless we want to be swept along helplessly by the currents of technological change, we should at least try to reflect on what is happening.

In the realm of religion, no church can ignore the opportunities for evangelization provided by the Internet. This issue looks at some of the ways Christians are using computer networks: Bishop Jacques Gaillot's "virtual diocese" of Partenia, the monks in the New Mexico desert portrayed by Antoine Houdeville, and the proliferation of Christian World Wide Web sites surveyed by Gail van Varseveld. Also, if the Internet is, as is often claimed, shrinking the world by facilitating international communication, it may prove to be a powerful agent of human solidarity. If that is true, religion, and the planet, can only benefit.

But there other issues to consider. As Jane Ubertino points out, information should not be confused with wisdom. Do we really suffer from a lack of information, or is our principal affliction a disinclination to reflect on the information we already have? Will still more information truly benefit us as spiritual beings? And is there is not something fundamental to the ethos of the communications revolution--and of all technology--that is antithetical to the life of the spirit? The technological project operates only in terms of reason, caring little for things--such as beauty and mystery--that cannot be subjected to scientific analysis and control. Where does that leave God?

Such are some of the questions posed in this issue. Answers to them will no doubt emerge in the fullness of time--or perhaps are hiding at some yet undiscovered Web site.