Since it's so popular to be highly negative about the internet, often to the point of saying nothing or far too little about the many positive aspects of it, I want to discuss the positives. I'm grateful to live at the time in history in which God has placed me, and that's partly because I consider the internet so beneficial.
It can be abused, like other tools, but that's more a problem with the people doing the misusing than with the tool that's being misused. Other good tools have been abused as well (writing, the printing press, cars, radio, television, etc.).
The internet provides so many opportunities for learning and disseminating information to other people and working with them in other ways. That's especially valuable in religious contexts, where so much is at stake, and in other contexts that are often overlooked or underestimated.
How can you look at something like such free and easy access to millions upon millions of pages of literature, including so many books and other material from past generations, and think as little of that as so many critics of the internet seem to? Or how can you care so little about being able to communicate with so many people so easily? Or think of medical contexts. Think of the ability to find medical supplies and have them delivered to your home through the internet. Many other examples could be cited.
There are tradeoffs, as in other areas of life. You get some disadvantages along with the advantages, but there's some value to it on balance. All of us apply this kind of reasoning to contexts outside the internet in our everyday lives. Think of the common objection that we don't interact with people face to face on the internet, for example. It's beneficial to have a car, even though driving involves less face-to-face interaction with people than we'd have if we traveled everywhere on foot. Using a microphone to have a pastor speak to an entire congregation at the same time makes more sense than having him speak to each person one on one, despite the advantages that one-on-one interaction would have. You can't accept that sort of reasoning in other areas of life, then ignore it or reject it when evaluating the internet (or books, radio, etc.).
A discussion of theology over the telephone is still a discussion of theology. The introduction of the telephone doesn't change that. The involvement of something new, whether a telephone or the internet or something else, doesn't change the fact that old things are present as well (like theology). The internet involves some new things, but combined with old things. Like other things in life, it involves a combination of advantages and disadvantages. You have to take both into account.
People are going to be influenced by factors like tradition and peer pressure when evaluating the internet, just as those things influence them in other contexts. More traditional and more popular activities will often receive less scrutiny than less traditional and less popular ones. A newer or less popular activity will often get criticized more, even if it's better than an older or more popular one. So, the newness of the internet will often be held against it, especially if it's used for something as unpopular as Christian apologetics, for example.
Some people will use the internet a lot in contexts like shopping, humor, posting family photographs, food, planning vacations, or watching movies, yet object to how bad the internet supposedly is as an excuse for not being involved much in other contexts that are so important and where so much more work needs done (theology, apologetics, ethics, politics, etc.). To the extent that there's inconsistency in how people are evaluating the internet in these contexts, that inconsistency should be taken into account.
A few years ago, I participated in a couple of threads discussing the value of the internet, a thread on this blog and one on Facebook. In those threads, including in the comments section on Facebook, I responded to many of the most popular negative sentiments about the internet: the objection that the internet doesn't involve face-to-face communication, the objection that we need to focus more on the local church, etc.
As with other things in life, we have to ask what the alternative is. A lot of what people suggest as an alternative to using the internet is problematic, but doesn't get scrutinized much. I agree with applying a lot of scrutiny to what people do with the internet. I disagree with applying far less scrutiny to what they do elsewhere. We have to be consistent, and there are many and major problems with what people do offline (like what's documented here). This has to be a two-way street. The scrutiny has to go in both directions. It's remarkable how often people who are highly critical of the internet or certain parts of it are so uncritical of so many offline activities (how secular those activities are, how trivial they are, how inefficient they are, etc.). Instead of comparing your preferred offline activities to the worst aspects of the internet or other aspects of it that aren't the best, why don't you compare the best to the best or do some other comparison that's more even and relevant?
Part of what we have to take into account is that some of what we benefit from in life comes through the internet (and other forms of technology that are often criticized, like radio and television), even though it's distinct from the internet. A person you met or heard about through the internet is distinct from the internet, but it was through the internet that you met or heard about that individual. How many books have you benefited from that you ordered through Amazon or some other internet source, and how many of those books would you likely have never even heard of apart from the internet? What about all of the information, articles, debates, etc. that you came across online? If you removed all of those things from your thinking and from other aspects of your life, how much worse off would you be?
I'm not suggesting that there aren't negatives to the internet as well. There are. And they, like the positives, need to be taken into account. But there's such a tendency in so many circles today to be overly focused on the negatives.
And so much of what's negative can be avoided, often somewhat easily. I don't use the internet for racism, pornography, gambling, getting into overly angry discussions about politics on Twitter, and other such things that are so often cited to broad brush the internet as something bad. If somebody is making mostly or entirely good use of the internet, what's the relevance of bringing up the worst uses of it as some kind of argument for being offline instead?
Keep criticizing what's bad about the internet (and books, television, etc.). But acknowledge the good things as well, and keep them in proportion. Given the lopsided focus on the negatives of the internet among so many people, something we need at this point is more discussion of the positives and more of an effort to get people to be aware of those positives and to make better use of them.
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