The following is excerpted from Chapter 24 of the new book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine by Joshua Pauling and Robin Phillips.
Only a few short decades ago, mobile phone companies were just beginning to experiment with phones that could access the internet. In the late 1990s, it was barely possible for pocket computers or portable PCs to go online via a mobile phone and a modem—it was excruciatingly slow, coming in at a whopping 9.6 kbits/second. But change was coming; as The Guardian reported back in 1999, “What if your mobile phone or palmtop computer was permanently connected to the net? And what if it could work more than twice as fast as the fastest voice modem - at a theoretical maximum of 115 kbits/second - so that web pages arrived in seconds instead of minutes?” All of this sounds like the Stone Age now, when in 2024 smartphones on 5G networks can top 200 Mbits/second, with a theoretical maximum of 10 Gbits/second, allowing for high-definition video streams on multiple devices in real-time, and much more (for reference, there are 1,000,000 Kilobits in a Gigabit). But I include this brief snippet as a reminder of just how new this type of global-scale instantaneous information access is in human history.
To help us better understand this rapid increase in the speed at which data and information can be transferred, I’d like to use an illustration from the world of physics. In physics, the term “terminal velocity” describes “the maximum velocity a falling object subject to air resistance can achieve.” For example, when skydivers jump from a plane, their velocity will increase until their drag force (the air resistance which works against their downward fall), equals the force of gravity (which pulls them downward). At this point (usually around 120 mph for the average person falling in a “belly flop” position), their velocity stays virtually the same for the remainder of their fall—until they pull their parachute cord. All objects, from a rock to a spaceship, have a terminal velocity at which they cannot move any faster when falling. In an analogous way, I’d like to suggest that information has a terminal velocity—a speed at which it cannot go meaningfully faster. Of course, with digital information transfer, there is also the matter of bandwidth, that is, the amount of information that can be transferred at any given speed, which also has its limitations. And while there will be marginal improvements in bandwidth and information transfer speed, it seems that we’re nearing its terminal velocity—what I’ll call digital velocity. The HD quality or pixel count may get incrementally better, but these aren’t categorical changes in the type of information that is immediately accessible in the digital world of constant internet connectivity.
It used to take months for a message to cross the ocean, limited by the speed of sailing; then it took weeks thanks to the steamboat; then seconds thanks to trans-Atlantic telegraph cables. Now, information has reached its terminal velocity. It can’t go any faster. It is immediately available all over the globe to virtually anyone. Click “send” on the email to a coworker in China—it’s there. Facetime with a family member stationed in the Middle East—it’s there. Send a text to a friend in foreign country—it’s there. Post on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram—it’s there. Jean-Claude Larchet notes how “all the new media have this in common: they alter profoundly our relationships with space and time.” Theology professor and web developer John Dyer similarly notes, “the presence of a phone in my pocket means that my conceptions of space, time, and limits are radically different than a world without phones.”
Portable internet-connected devices put the world at our fingertips with endless possibilities that easily eclipse prior information technologies like the book, telegraph, radio, or television. Each of these new technologies clearly changed the way we interacted with information, understood our world, and experienced each other. But the immersive and interactive immediacy of internet-connected portable devices transforms them into something more: omni-tools that mediate reality to us through their ever-expanding functionality and their seamless integration into every aspect of life. “Digital technology,” as professor of philosophy Antón Barba-Kay puts it, “is not one tool among others—it is increasingly the medium, means, and meaning of culture itself. It so accelerates differences in degree that it marks a difference in kind.” In such an environment of acceleration, even time and space seem to collapse, leading to further disorientation and instability.
Such are the effects of what Harmut Rosa calls social acceleration. Rosa notes three primary areas where this acceleration is occurring: technological change, social change, and the pace of life. Together these forces form “the experience of acceleration and shortage of time that stands at the center of the modernization process,” which Rosa sees as a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a “circle of acceleration.” Jonathan Trejo-Mathys explains in his Translator’s Introduction to Rosa’s work, that “technical acceleration tends to increase the pace of social change, which in turn unavoidably increases the experienced pace of life, which then induces an ongoing demand for technical acceleration in the hopes of saving time, and so on back around the circle.” In an article for First Things, Carl Trueman helps unpack Rosa’s insights:
Our lives are technologically shaped in public and in private, and the technology changes so fast that we are unable to assimilate one development before another overtakes it. The result is a dizzy feeling that our ability to control even our personal worlds is constantly slipping further away. In such a context, the questions of who we are and what we are meant for become impossible to answer.
This dizzy feeling is what Rosa calls the “contraction of the present,” an unnatural sense and experience of time and space. Larchet notes similarly how “far from freeing up time, the new media simply shrink time and speed up everything else. The result is a world without duration.”
In the 1970s, British science fiction writer and futurist Arthur Clarke wrote the following: “I believe that the time will come when we can move from Pole to Pole within the throb of a single heartbeat.” While Clarke had in mind some sort of ultra-high-speed transport, in a way, his prediction has been achieved through our portable screens, which place information, images, and videos from around the world before our eyes just as quick as that heartbeat. As information reaches its digital terminal velocity, time and space seem to melt away. Clarke wondered as to the effects of information and communication immediacy: “Such freedom of communication will have an ultimately overwhelming effect on the cultural, political, and moral climate of our planet. It holds danger, as well as promise.”
Interestingly, Clarke went on to predict a communications device “so small and compact that every man carries one with no more inconvenience than a wristwatch” and that “the time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth, merely by dialing a number. He will be located automatically, where he is in mid-ocean, in the heart of a great city, or crossing the Sahara. This device alone may change the patterns of society and commerce as greatly as the telephone, its primitive ancestor, has already done.” Clarke even anticipated that “no one need ever again be lost, for a simple-position-and-direction-finding device could be incorporated in the receiver,” and that “the business of the future may be run by executives who are scarcely ever in each other’s physical presence…[who] live where they please, running their affairs through computer keyboards and information-handling machines in their homes.”
Clarke’s near-clairvoyant forecasts have proven staggeringly accurate. And his questions as to their effects still linger:
Will there be time to do any work at all on a planet saturated from Pole to Pole with fine entertainment, first-class music, brilliant discussions, superbly executed athletics, and every conceivable type of information service? Even now, it is claimed, our children spend a sixth of their waking lives glued to the cathode-ray tube. We are becoming a race of watchers, not of doers. The miraculous powers that are yet to come may well prove more than our self-discipline can withstand. If this is so, then the epitaph of our race should read, in fleeting fluorescent letters: ‘Whom the Gods would destroy, they first give TV.’
While the gods may first give TV to those whom they would destroy, a portable TV that is pocket-sized, interactive, responsive, and connected to a worldwide network of unending images, sounds, words, and videos that can be made, shared, and responded to by anyone would certainly come next. Clarke’s question remains ours: “How mankind will cope with the avalanche of information and entertainment about to descend upon it from the skies, only the future can show.”
The prognostications Clarke made over half a century ago and the questions he raised remind us that these rapid changes in the way we experience the world and interact with information and each other strain human formation and clear thinking, and that we don’t really know what the long-term effects are of living in an age of digital velocity. How does such globally scaled information immediacy affect us? What does it do to civic discourse and friendship? How does it impact life together or coping with conflict? What about patience or thinking? Can human beings flourish in such an information ecosystem, where anyone from anywhere can be accessed anytime? What type of formation happens to the person with millions of social media followers who all can critique his or her life and ideas at any time—or to someone with thousands, hundreds, or even just five followers? Are humans designed for this? It's exhausting. As Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) put it, “the true and gravest danger of the present moment is precisely this imbalance between technological possibilities and moral energy.” Human goods and virtues easily get steamrolled by the pace of technological change and the formative power of the omni-tool. Some of the most effective ways to counteract the malformation that can occur in the high-volume, high-velocity information environment we live in is to reclaim a humane sense of scale, pace, and time.
There is a sense in which humans have always had access to some information instantaneously. Since the dawn of man, human beings have been able to absorb information from their environment and from those in their personal presence with no time lag. We have talked to one another, observed weather patterns in the sky, worked in teams to hunt for big game, told stories to one another, laughed and cried together. However, as technological advancements allowed information to be sent and received apart from its embodied messenger (as in writing, print media, telegraph, telephone, etc.), the circle of people with which we can have information access has expanded to the point where in the digital world, and at digital velocity, the circle seems limitless and immediate—as large as the world itself and as fast as thought can travel. Barba-Kay explains, “no single source of print or television ever reached as many people as the most popular platforms routinely do now. And, just as large cities have always been at the cutting edge of world culture, the concentration of digital attention, the sheer speed and scope of exchange within its global cosmopolis, has acted as a catalyst for widespread cultural change.” Such worldwide information immediacy distorts our sense of scale, of what we should care about, and of what really matters. Even in the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau grasped the emerging problem in relation to the telegraph:
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
Jeffrey Bilbro makes a similar point in his book Reading the Times, “Thoreau warns that the increased abundance and speed of the news threatens to fragment our attention and damage our ability to see what is really happening and to think rightly about these events.” If the telegraph was a concern, the volume and velocity of information available in the digital age increases the alarm, exploding what Neil Postman called the “information-action ratio.” Bilbro puts it this way: “By flooding us with information to which we can have no meaningful response, these technologies threaten to malform our affective sensibilities. The goal of a properly attentive life is right love and right action, and this goal is not served when we are caught up in distant dramas.” All of this raises questions regarding scale. What is a meaningful scale of information for human beings? How does one share and consume information in a humane way in a family, a community, a country, a world?
At the very least an answer begins with attending to those in your presence with love and care. Leo Tolstoy’s short story entitled “Three Questions” offers a good starting point for reclaiming a sense of human scale and attention—a more manageable information-action ratio. In the story, a king issues a proclamation promising great reward to the one who could answer the three questions that he thinks will make him a great king: What is the right time for every action; Who are the most necessary people; What is the most important thing to do? The king wants precise and efficient answers, logical answers that always work, clear calculations—perhaps even machine-like answers. After some unsatisfying answers from a variety of characters, the king disguises himself as a common man and sets out on a journey to ask a wise old hermit his questions. The king arrives and finds the old hermit hunched over, digging in his garden. The king asks his questions, impatiently wanting an immediate answer. But no answer is given. The king sees the hermit struggling to dig and has pity on him, and tills the garden for him throughout the day. In the evening, a wounded man stumbles through the woods and comes upon them, whom the king helps late into the night. The next morning when the king awakes, he asks his questions one final time to the hermit, pleading for an answer now. The hermit responds that the questions have already been answered. The king is confused. The hermit explains: “There is only one time that is important—Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with anyone else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!” The king wanted to find the most efficient way to rule; instead, he found the best way to live.
Each moment, no matter how mundane, deeply matters, and the people we are with are worthy of our attention as we seek to love them as ourselves. In our globalized, instantaneous, and industrially-scaled information ecosystem, Tolstoy reminds us to slow down and attend to those in our presence and in our lives: family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, church members, local community. These are the people who are worth more than the latest information about China’s economy, American politics, celebrity scandals, sports scores, or how many likes or shares we get on social media.
Tolstoy’s parable resonates with what Jonathan Haidt so helpfully summarizes in his new book The Anxious Generation. Digitality radically alters our sense of time, space, and scale, our relationships with one another. Haidt describes the differences between the “real world” and the “virtual world.”
When I talk about the “real world,” I am referring to relationships and social interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for millions of years:
They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously.
They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about and timing and turn taking.
They involve primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment.
They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.
These are the normative ways humans are designed to build relationships and in which they most likely flourish. And, Haidt argues, the digital habitat works in the exact opposite direction:
In contrast, when I talk about the “virtual world,” I am referring to relationships and interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for just a few decades:
They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artificial intelligences (AIs).
They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments. (A video call is different; it is synchronous.)
They involve a substantial number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potentially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel.
They take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.
As Haidt puts his finger on these four central differences, the puzzle starts to fit together as to why the digital world impacts us the way it does. It goes against our natural embodied and relational nature.
Writing in 1979, Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama noted in his book Three Mile an Hour God that “we live today an efficient and speedy life. We are surrounded by electric switches, some of which cost us 10 dollars and others may even cost 2,000 dollars. We want more switches.” Since Koyama’s writing, the switches have multiplied, as has the pace of life and speed of information. Everything is fast. A top news story in the morning is gone by the evening. We are always doing, going, consuming. Efficiency, technique, productivity, optimization, and speed reign. Barba-Kay extends Koyama’s argument to the digital information ecosystem, explaining that “never has such change struck so fast. The printing press and firearms were technological watersheds with world-historical implications, but they took decades or centuries to assimilate. Digital technology has, by contrast, so changed human life within a couple of decades that teens are today growing up in an altogether new cultural environment.” In Barba-Kay’s view, this means that the problems and challenges we face “are all problems in kind—problems intrinsic to the structure and logic of digital technology itself—not in degree.”
Koyama calls us back to the pace of God. He asks, “how much streamlining can we take and still be able to say that the meaning and structure of our human life has not been swallowed by technological efficiency?” Living in this fast-paced, ever-changing environment, we easily forget that God chose to take on flesh as a man at a time when walking was the most common mode of transport, before electricity or the automobile, before the telephone or television, before the computer or the internet, before the steam engine or the smartphone. God became man; not machine, not message. God became flesh; not image, not video. God united medium and message in himself. Koyama nails it:
Jesus Christ came. He walked towards the ‘full stop’. He lost his mobility. He was nailed down! He is not even at three miles an hour as we walk. He is not moving. ‘Full stop’! What can be slower than ‘full stop’ ‘nailed down’? At this point of ‘full stop,’ the apostolic church proclaims that the love of God to man is ultimately and fully revealed. God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.
Koyama calls us to slow down to the pace of the incarnate Son, the one who unites time and eternity, Word and flesh, reason and experience. Pause and ponder the profundity of God walking on earth; the one who spoke the world into existence and who is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient slows down to the pace that our human legs can carry us; God slows down—and maybe we should too.
The preceding is excerpted from Chapter 24 of the new book Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine by Joshua Pauling and Robin Phillips.