Fire and Knowledge

With little or no regard for the virtue of moderation, technophiles practically venerate digital bandwidth—the amount of information that can be transmitted within a fixed period.  They so envy digital potency that they become indifferent to the ravages of informational excess.  To avoid informational deficiency, they forsake any moral vision predicated on virtuous moderation.

[The] unbridled quest for greater messaging speed discards venerable moral practices that require patience and perseverance.  Ironically, bandwidth envy essentially diminishes the value of time as an aspect of what it means to be a virtuous human being.  Knowing—being intimate—inherently requires duration.  We can come to know something or someone only by investing time in the practices of knowing.  The so-called conquering of time with instantaneous messaging invariably retards our capacity to know anything of great importance.  Increased bandwidth favors the knowing of truncated events and disconnected messages.  As we commit more and more time to impersonal, unreflective, rapid-fire messaging, we have less and less time left to commune intimately with neighbor, God, and creation.  Instead of limiting high-tech bandwidth to protect the kinds of virtuous relationships and practices that take time to cultivate, we dedicate more and more of our limited time to instrumental pursuits and amoral activities.  We become machine-like creatures, uploading and downloading messages, organizing them into folders, burning them into new storage media, and printing them off to our heart’s content.  While greater bandwidth promises to save us download time, it invariably leads to new informational endeavors that consume more of our “free” time for intrinsically moral practices…. Greater bandwidth is like a gift certificate; we feel we must buy something, regardless of whether we truly need it.

—Quentin J. Schultze, Habits of the High-Tech Heart, p. 57