At first glance David Bednar and Jaron Lanier would appear to be about as different as two people could be. David Bednar is a modern day apostle. His mission is the same as the apostles of old - “An Apostle is a missionary, bearing testimony of the reality and divinity of Jesus Christ in all the world.” Jaron Lanier was a pioneer in virtual reality technology and helped create the ideology of Web 2.0 futurism and digital utopianism. Both these men are sounding warnings about the consequences of our digitized culture – they feel we are missing the essence of things as they really are.
Lanier now calls the ideology he helped create "digital Maoism" and accuses Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” “Now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe…. Lanier is suggesting we are outsourcing ourselves into insignificant advertising-fodder. Nanobytes of Big Data that diminish our personhood, our dignity.”
Bednar is concerned about the “potentially stifling, suffocating, suppressing, and constraining impact of some kinds of cyberspace interactions and experiences upon our souls.” We existed as spirits before coming to this earth. We come here to receive a physical body and experience earth life with that body. “Our bodies make possible a breadth, a depth, and an intensity of experience that simply could not be obtained in our premortal estate.” Virtual reality and digital distractions can cause us to “disconnect gradually and physically from things as they really are.” If we are not careful we can miss the richness of person-to-person communication and the learning and joy that comes from experiences involving our physical bodies.
Technology can be used for great good. We like to think that people enjoy what's posted on this blog and are even sometimes edified by the content. This technology and others make it possible for us to stay in touch with family and friends who are far away. We also are aware of issues introduced by technology such as privacy, taking the place of in person interactions, some people and some companies knowing more than they need to know or we want them to know. It is our responsibility to use what we've been given for good purposes.
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Read more about Jaron Lanier here
Read David Bednar's talk here
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