released 1/31/2025

This Feature presents two interviews related to how we evaluate adoption of new technology and how technology influences our thinking. First, David Nye, author of Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (The MIT Press, 1999), challenges the notion of technological determinism, arguing that people and societies do exercise real choice when it comes to adopting new technologies. However, once a choice has been made, technology often advances with a momentum that feels impossible to resist. Nye believes that this momentum becomes psychologically embedded in our view of the world so that it becomes more difficult for us to imagine that we might choose differently. Our society’s choices regarding energy use, he argues, have reshaped the home, the workplace, the city, the countryside, and even our own imaginations. Nye explains that when we adopt new technologies, we focus on the material gains, but we often don’t foresee the immaterial losses they will bring (e.g., loss of community, increased alienation, etc.). This interview was originally featured on Volume 37 of the Journal.

Then, theologian Brian Brock discusses how the influence of technology shapes the way we think about the influence of technology. His book Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (Eerdmans, 2010) focuses on the mindset and orientation toward creation that is engendered by technology and technological priorities. Because technology has been conceived primarily in terms of efficiency, productivity, and power over nature, Brock argues that the good and gifted character of creation recedes and is marginalized. When nature is understood primarily to exist for the purposes of man, the purposes of God for creation that are not necessarily those of man are marginalized. Brock examines how, apart from sustained theological reflection and communal practice, the growth of technology and Christian participation in the prevailing mindset driving technological development obscure to Christians the priority of God and his purposes which might limit or even conflict with particular developments and applications of technology. This interview was originally featured on Volume 105 of the Journal.

31 minutes

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