I’ve been reading,  somewhat exasperated at times,  Quentin Schultze’s Habits of the High-Tech Heart.  He approaches the subject in much the same contrarian, straw-dog argument and “anti-hype” as I remember in Clifford Stoll’s “Silicon Snake Oil” did about 10 years ago. 

For instance:

Contemplative ways of life are not anti-technological as much as pro-community, pro-wisdom, and pro-faithfulness” (p. 197)

and yet I can find nothing but anti-technology as the over-arching theme of the book.  Moving back to the final two chapters and exploring the direction of the arguments reveals more of the same. 

The final paragraph:

To regain a moral footing in contemporary life,  we must dig deeper than information and knowledge, to the traditions that carry virtue from generation to generation.  we will have to invest as much time and energy inthe habits of our hearts as we do inour high-tech practices. Otherwise we will lose track of crucial links to the past that can illuminate the path to goodness. (p. 209)

p.186,  conclusions in chapter7, Nurturing Virtue in Community:

Most of the rhetoric about cyber-community  wrpongly assumes that we can deeply commune with one another  using only the instrumental techniques of communication. 

NOBODY does this.  NOBODY uses only the “instrumental techniques of communication”.  Included in every communication that I would consider to be of truly personal nature is the transmission of  some embodiment of that person.  It is NOT something which contains ALL of a person,  for NOTHING is.  Not even our “face-to-face” , “traditional” relationships do that.  I have maintained for years that I have experienced ONLINE relationships that FAR surpass the level of “interpersonal exchange” that I have experienced from 99% of my experience of “face-to-face” , “Traditional” churches,  the kinds which are supposedly transmitting those religious traditions Schultze says are being ignored by the online community efforts.  

I scratch my head when I read statements like :

Online community ultimately lacks a real environment where people can be fully neighborly and hospitable.

High-tech community that exists “out there,” on wires and radio waves or on beams of light, is too morally amorphous to sustain virtuous living.

If we sincerely desire to be a grateful and responsible society,  we will have to commit ourselves to renewing local community as much as we do to extending our messaging into the distant reaches of cyberspace.

One by one,  I will be “picking” at these and other generalizations and biases. I’ve been disappointed in the one-sided treatment ;  that “this book,  subtitled as Living Virtuously in the Information Age” apparently defines such virtuous living as “avoiding the Web as much as possible”,  since there isn’t much chance of discovering anything truly worthwhile.  If he thinks otherwise,  there is nothing I can find which actually cites positive use (or in Schultze’s case, “worthy use” of the Internet in the pusuit of “moral ends”.)