Technology

Concern about the impact of technology on contemporary life is by no means limited to evangelicals. Voices across the political and social spectrum have begun to suggest that scientific advances are at least partly responsible for the psychological malaise now so prevalent in much of the modern world. The criticism dates back at least to the advent of television. Television, in the eyes of its critics, has contributed to a decline in human communication and turned viewers from active participants in the experience of life into passive observers. With the advent of the computer, the process has accelerated as recent generations of young people raised on video games and surfing the World Wide Web find less and less time for personal relationships or creative activities. At the same time, however, the Internet provides an avenue for lonely individuals to communicate with the outside world and seek out others with common interests. The most that can be said at the present time is that such innovations provide both an opportunity and a danger— an opportunity to explore new avenues of communication and a danger that in the process, the nature of the human experience will be irrevocably changed.