The virtue of meekness and Technology (Smartphone)
Ave Maria!
I recently read a french book wrote by a dominican. Some references in it are questionable but I translated some extracts about the link between the loss of meekness and technology, especially the smartphone and the computer.
I hope this can help understand why the smartphone is something to be avoided and the News and Internet to be limited.
From the book Hardi les doux! Jean-Thomas de Beauregard (dominican religious).
The agony of the meekness of the world or the reasons for contemporary anger
Today's confessors are formal: there is, among the baptized, a prevalence of the sins of anger, impatience, physical and moral violence, an inner turmoil, all ages and all sexes combined. But there are perhaps aggravating factors characteristic of our time.
First of all, there is the violence of the daily influx of information through television, the internet, social networks, which leave no moment of respite to those who own a smartphone. The human psyche is ill-equipped to withstand such a quantity of misfortunes. The assimilation of this daily digital cyclone is made impossible by its excess. This constant aggression provokes an aggressiveness that is difficult to control towards the people we see when we look up from our screens. It is devastating in children who are exposed to it too early, at the age when Hannah Arendt recommended in The Crisis of Culture (1961) to make the family sphere an island of gentleness. The private screen of the telephone or tablet granted to children to buy social peace within the home makes Arendt's recommendation ineffective and gives it the appearance of a naive utopia. (...)
The Catholic philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj points out the harm of what he calls the "techno-compassionate paradigm": contrary to the illusion that was too widespread during the first modernity (from Descartes to the beginning of the 20th century), from a certain degree of perfection, technology ceases to be neutral. It is no longer simply a tool. It becomes its own end and imposes its inhuman rhythm on users. (...) It is not necessarily technologies that change social relations, but a certain state of social relations that favors the emergence and unanimous adoption of a technology. Hyper-individualism and narcissism are exacerbated by the “techno-compassionate paradigm” but they probably pre-existed it.
The “techno-compassionate paradigm” unites three factors whose accumulation is deadly for the human soul: the economy of the drive, the technical device, and the communication of content with a strong emotional charge. Contemporary techno-capitalism plays virtuoso on the keyboards of our neurons, our hormones and therefore our drives in order to transform everything into an object of desire and then immediate consumption. The major danger of the economy of the drive is to weaken the ability to defer satisfaction that normally characterizes the sane adult. Already from the 1970s the entertainment industry had discerned in children a source of untapped profits, as Alain Bloom noted in 1987 in The Disarmed Soul. For a cynical industry, children are the promise of infinite returns since they are less able to resist the impulse than adults but have a growing share of the purchasing power of parents that they are all the more ready to spend since they are not responsible for it.
Having become adolescents in the virtual age, the danger increases. Because the influx of content with a strong emotional charge in an entirely virtual device creates a hypersensitivity incapable of tolerating annoyance and aspiring to resolve everything by technology: an offense, a click; a desire, a click; a problem, a click. But the external reality, that which is not yet entirely immersed in the virtual, resists. Passions become uncontrollable - notably anger, sadness and desire - which is not very favorable to the reign of gentleness. The order of people is not the order of things; their respective rhythms are different. In 1955 Alexandre Vialatte already observed: “We don’t have time. It’s a sign of the times. We are in the century of speed and speed has made us lose time. The real problem of the day is to catch up on the time that speed has made us lose.” This is all the more important because in the order of people, time is long and reality resists. On the contrary, daily immersion in the virtual at the rate of several hours per day results in drastically reducing tolerance to frustration, which encourages violence. (...)
Paz y Bien