Technology and Incarnation

Lazar Arasu

We are agree that technology is useful and often times very necessary in our day to day life. As technology is marvelous, its help in our life too is marvelous. As much it enhances our life especially in the physical side of it, it does enormous damage to our emotional, social and spiritual life; thus creating a dualistic lifedetrimental to our wholeness. By being too dependent on technology more than its necessity, our bodily/physical life is no longer animated or directed by our inner life. Technology alienates our body from our mind and soul. The body that has become a slave of machines no longer listens to promptings of heart and the dictates of the soul. We become unethical and inhuman in our practices. Our body becomes a dungeon of trash and filth left behind by aimless technology. The interior castle of our life/soul is no longer serene and cannot house the Spirit the Animating Force of our life. Bodily pollution pollutes the soul as well. The impact of technology is multi-dimensional; for the lack of time and space, I would like to focus on the communicating relational aspect of life only. Let me exaggerate a bit but without missing the point. I share my origin and life with less technologically developed people and society. Though I missed out certain sophistications of life, by no means I was alienated from the world outside me or just around me. In fact I was physically in touch with the real world, real people, and actual realities of life sometimes very dramatically. Now in few weeks and months sharing the life of the developed world my life seems to have changed and shifted to another world sometimes leaving me yearning for some real-ness that I was used to. Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin are more faceless, spaceless, linkedout than anything else. These social networks though they have webbed together people they have not brought together people in loving or meaningful relationships. Technology that is meant to make our life easier has often times complicated it; instead of bring people together it has emotionally widened the space. Instead of making us more human, it has made us inhuman. In presupposing healthier environment it has made the atmosphere toxic. When our physical world is full of toxic matter our mind and soul too becomes toxic thus creating a vicious circle. Cellular phones, ipods, social networks have not only created a virtual world (meaning hidden), it has created virtual relationships and virtual emotions and in the process has created

virtual morality. Though we are able to communicate and link with people cheaply we have made the real and physical relationships costly. It is feared that this virtual world and virtual relationships will make us virtual human beings (hidden people) getting out of touch with our body, mind and spirit. We are drugged by the electronic drug; like any other addiction it comes with a cost, destroying relationships, taking us away from real world and always wanting to be in ecstasy. Like the drug it lifts up our body, mind and spirit vainly, meanly and lowly. In practical termsin social networks and texting we transmit thoughtless, meaningless, incomprehensive, and often regrettable messages. The message that we pass on electronically we will not do it in face-to-face communication. Because in its very nature and meaning it is silly or filthy to say the least. In the real world it will make us embarrassed or look foolish. For example someone who posts a nude picture of oneself will not show ones nakedness in front of hundreds of people in sound mind. Again, a person who finds very easy to confront another in cellular phone will not have courage or worth doing it in real world. Thus we portray or communicate the unreal self of ourselves. Or in the real world we are pretending to be good, while we are evil inside us. So now the question is what is real and who is real. We are falsely made to think that we are communicating but in actual sense we are alienating ourselves from people and the real world. So we can conclude that it is easy to be mean or fallacious to each other online. Can we call this disembodiment of oneself created by technology? Again, it does not take a nerve to text someone I luv u but it takes lot of emotional or spiritual energy to look at someone you truly love face to face and say I LOVE YOU. Hence, digital friendships leave us yearning for emotional and spiritual inter-connectedness. Thus social networks are good for transmitting of emotionless facts rather than love-building gadgets. Now in this world of digital communication the eternal message: Word became Flesh and dwelt among us has much to teach us. God chose to be in flesh-form; a concrete and a real way of loving and communicating with His creatures. He communicated in fleshnot in air or vacuumnot to virtual way. He could have chosen to redeem us in any other supernatural way. But God portrayed Himself in a real way, challenging way, and bodily way. The message of incarnation continues to challenge us to be real people being true to our nature and continue to honor our bodies. Fr. Lazar Arasu SDB

Consider this
.as our web of connections gets wider, it becomes shallower. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible, wrote Marche. It gets worse: [W]e suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. And its Facebook, Marche wrote, that can amplify that loneliness. and its brethren in social media are making us all lonelier and more narcissistic than ever before, destroying our health and even our very souls in the process.