I loved this WaPo article by Jeff Smith on how the Amish consider questions of technology integration with their society:
When a church member asks to use a new technology, the families discuss the idea and vote to accept or reject. The conversation centers on how a device will strengthen or weaken relationships within the community and within families. Imagine if the United States had conducted a similar discussion when social media platforms were developing algorithms designed to amplify differences and then pit us against one another, because anger drives traffic and traffic drives profits.
Friends of mine belonged to an Amish church in Michigan. One of the church members wanted to purchase a hay baler that promised to be more efficient, even as it enabled him to work alone. The members discussed the proposal — yes, the new machine might increase productivity, but how would community connections be affected if he began haying without the help of others, and what would happen if his neighbors adopted the same technology? The risk to social cohesion, they decided, wasn’t worth the potential gains.
In other words, they put the health of the community above the advantage of the individual; contrast that to greater America, where simply acknowledging there is a community can be a struggle, much less asking if a given advance is actually damaging to the community. When the algorithms are designed to drive division and dollars, as Smith notes, why should a community accept it? In a sense, this is an instance of the Precautionary Principle, incidentally a subject for mockery in the libertarian movement of the ’90s.
But – as a member of the first generation of social media[1] users, back in the 1980s, I was attracted to the new community we were building precisely because the more traditional, real-life, community within which I was embedded was, more or less, toxic. Stratified, riddled with religious theologies for which I had no respect (I found them boring when they weren’t terrifically ridiculous), consumeristic, mixed with a liberal dose of hormones, for me social media was a rescue.
Then again, those BBSes were far more true to the concepts implicit in the naive use of the phrase social media than today’s behemoths of the same category. Many of us, nearly terminally shy, began coming out and meeting in public, dating, getting married and divorced. While I’m sure this happens with Facebook as well, we did it without commercials or nuanced algorithms that would cause political anguish – we did that to ourselves on the up and up.
So, in the end, it’s possible that a hypothetical Amish community might accept a BBS of the varieties popular back in the 1980s, while rejecting those of today.
And, I think, for good reason.
1 aka Bulletin Board Systems.
