Why Tech Can Be Good, but It Can Never Be Enough

Audio By Carbonatix

Near the end of Toy Story 5, Lilypad (the frog-shaped tablet that spent the whole movie stealing Bonnie's attention away from every real friend in reach) does something none of the toys expected. She uses her tech to subversively arrange a playdate between Bonnie and a girl she’s barely met. 

It's the moment the movie has been building toward: tech helps humans get face-to-face. 

When Technology Helps Us Find Each Other

I hear (and read) stories today about people who feel they’ve built meaningful, even lifesaving, connections through the internet. They were lonesome, scared, facing dramatic change with nobody to talk to, and then suddenly they did have someone to talk to. Tech helped them meet a need for connection. 

But when we connect online, we only partly and very imperfectly meet our deeper needs for community, nourishment, presence, and belonging. That’s because God didn’t just create souls. We are fearfully and wonderfully embodied in a world that only works when we show up as embodied creatures. 

God did not just create minds when he created us. He made bodies — and then He placed those bodies in the created world. “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being,” we read in Genesis. And then, immediately following: “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.”

God made us to live together, physically, with Him in creation. That means that not just any kind of existence will do. And certainly not technological existence alone.   

We see this woven throughout Scripture. In the Old Testament, humans wanted an experience of the God they worshiped. So, God gave them the temple — a technological innovation that helped them interface with a heaven they could not see. 

But it wasn’t enough for them to have a technological experience of God in the temple, mediated by priests. Humans needed an experience that could bring them face-to-face with the living God. 

Then we read John 1: The Word became Flesh. 

God made the kingdom of God tangible through miracles and healings. The early church didn’t just pray alone in their rooms. They gathered and ate and cared for the poor through signs and wonders. These are embodied practices through which the invisible becomes visible. 

The Limits of Online Connection

Today, despite our many distractions, we still long to live a vibrant life with each other. We just often don’t know how or trick ourselves into thinking substitutes will work.  

Tech-based relationships are not inherently bad. They are like empty calories, tricking us into thinking we have met our needs. And it’s understandable why we might reach for tech-based online relationships. It can feel convenient for our busy lives. 

Yet these technologies end up anchoring us into the busyness of our lives that we’re trying to escape. For example, the friends we find via the internet often pull our attention further and further beyond the horizons of our physical lives, the specific place in God’s creation where we eat, work, and play. 

These relationships, formed without real respect to time or place, can save lives. But what kind of life are we actually living? And what God-given limits are we trying to escape?

Without online technologies like social media, remote work apps, AI, and even cell phones, our bodies are only capable of inhabiting one space. While that feels like a limitation, it might be our way out of what many are experiencing as an unsustainable pace of life. 

Of course, one of the unseen effects of online relationships is the way it flattens us into only a human-to-human relationship. The embodied relationships we’re talking about include humans, but also include our relationship with God and with the rest of creation. 

To return to Genesis 2: God formed the man and then placed him in the garden to tend it. This is who we are. It’s who we were made to be, and how we were made to be. 

When we seek emotional connections online that obviate our bodies and places, we risk losing an important part of ourselves and our God-given purpose.

But when we garden together, share meals and pray together, we move beyond superficial interactions and into a "daily togetherness" that invigorates the soul. 

This embodied and located shared work and life also has the important effect of revealing our friends and co-workers more fully to us. Many internet relationships are asynchronous, may or may not be anonymous, and can be engaged with largely at our own convenience. We can usually choose what we disclose about ourselves, or how we present ourselves to the friend we’ve made.

Being face-to-face encourages us to encounter the fullness of what it means to be who God created us to be, and to encounter the fullness of who God created others to be. 

It also allows us to encounter completely the gifts that others have been given — and allows them to benefit richly from the gifts we have been given. 

We also have fewer places to hide our faults. These inconvenient and inefficient face-to-face relationships give us ample opportunity to experience God’s healing, patience, and grace. But these are the kinds of relationships that have built a robust community for generations.

At 4:00 in the afternoon, my wife's great-grandparents stopped working in the midwestern fields to have tea together. Practices like this helped them build a life of shared work, shared relationships, and shared faith that gave their lives meaning and purpose. 

Let Technology Lead Us Back to Humanity

In contrast, social media cannot feed our bodies or root us in place or offer us more of God’s love. Used appropriately, it can guide us to the face-to-face embodied relationships we crave.  

You can use your phone to text friends and have them over for dinner. You could use social media to organize a park cleanup. You could engage in a small group at your church using technology designed as a guide for discipleship. 

Whatever you do, let’s not be fooled by our tech. We are embodied creatures, created by God to inhabit a world He so loves.

Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/karetoria

Brendan McClenahan is the church engagement manager for Plant With Purpose and creator of the Tend initiative.