Tech Enthusiasts vs Tech Workers
A group of popular memes that frequently make their way around on social media highlight the differences between tech enthusiasts and tech workers. The general gist of them are, tech enthusiasts live on the bleeding edge, staying on top of the latest trends, trying out every new thing, connecting whatever they can to their phone so they can control it on the go; on the other hand, those who work in tech, building those things, are paranoid ascetics who barely use anything digital at all.
Like most memes and jokes they are rooted in truth. Tech is cool. Increased efficiency, increased quality of life, and coolness are some of the major driving factors in tech innovation. It’s hard not to get excited about tech and want to make use of it. Tech workers like myself, on the other hand, know how the sausage is made, so to speak, as well as how incredibly fragile it all is. As such, we have a tendency to lag behind, sticking with the tried and true, with things that have earned our trust with their reliability.
These caricatures highlight a pair of opposite extremes. Aristotle defines a virtue as a habitual action that aligns with the mean, or center, between two extremes. Going too far towards either extreme makes your life difficult and unhappy; living on the bleeding edge means being constantly disappointed and frustrated with the fragility and transient nature of new tech, while being a tech ascetic means you miss out on the many benefits and good things that have come from technological advancements.
A fairly major point of the Gospel is that we should strive for virtue in all things. As tech evolves, what constitutes the virtuous mean also evolves. We as individuals, as well as the Catholic Church as a whole, need to continually re-balance ourselves and find that mean, which means neither adopting new technologies too fast (e.g. the Catholic Answers AI priest debacle), nor lagging too far behind (e.g. the official Vatican website).
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