The Digital Revolution’s Challenges to Our Humanity: Part 1--Framework

This is the first part of a five-episode series on the challenges that the digital revolution pose for our humanity.  This episode will provide a general framework to analyze the effects of tools and specifically the digital revolution regarding our human flourishing.

The analysis begins with assessing the depth and breadth of a tool’s impact on us.  The digital revolution is widespread globally while at the same time we now spend a substantial portion of our lives interacting with it.  Additionally, the technology now vies for our attention through a myriad of alerts and other mechanisms to capture our attention.  This signals a substantial increase in the ability of the tool (digital technology) to impact our lives.

Our framework for critically analyzing whether any tool to include the digital ones is helping or harming our human flourishing is by looking at it through the lens of whether it is leading to better balance and harmony with promotion of the basic goods.  The symptoms of our skyrocketing mental health issues provide solid evidence that something is amiss, and the evidence is mounting that the digital revolution is accelerating these problems by driving us to be more out of balance by causing us to focus more and more on our psychologic dimension to the neglect of the other three (biologic, social, and spiritual) while also harming the basic goods.

References

Two essays in Public Discourse are helpful to understanding the philosophical background of this challenge.

 

Joshua Pauling’s essay entitled “Modern Man Is Psychologized, Sexualized, Politicized—and Digitized” explains how the digitized man is not an integrated embodied whole thus resulting in the myriad of problems we now see.

 

Joshua Hochschild wrote “Technology and the Soul: The Spiritual Lessons of Digital Distraction” where he explores how the digital world is changing our understanding of ourselves again to our detriment. 

E-mail for comments and questions at: Rootsofflourishing@gmail.com