Thought for the Day Sat 31st Jan

Thought for the day
31st January 2009
Rob Marshall


Good Morning
Most children find it impossible to imagine a world without broadband. The rise of digital technology has been phenomenal. And this week’s Government report Vision for Digital Britain has set a target of everyone to be connected to broadband before the 2012 Olympics.

The report pulls no punches. Broadband should become the backbone of our economy, important in education and necessary for entertainment. Britain, though, has slipped from 7th to 12th in world ranking for digital technology and so the pressure is on to continue to invest and to develop. To communicate.

The report celebrates all that is good about the new technology: it is generally fast, interactive and involves the sharing of stories (Andy Burnham, the culture minister, calls this “content creation”) at a personal and corporate level. Charles Leadbeatter, writing in the Spectator last year, noted that “our collective capacity for collective memory will make us more productive.” And it’s true, generally speaking, communications in the 21st century are certainly more integrated and dynamic.

Most of my work in the church has been associated with the interaction of modern communications methods and media and how faith and spirituality can find a place in such a shifting landscape.

What I often find, is that whilst people celebrate the impact of the digital revolution and its transforming qualities at home and at work – there is, at the same time, a discernible concern that it can so easily take us over, disrobe us of our humanity and distort our priorities in life.

And I hear this time and time again, speaking to groups across the country – we love the broadband revolution, it is exciting and somehow limitless – but it does leave us “never quite there”, restless. There are some deep questions about how human beings cope spiritually with such a communications revolution.

The corpus of literature in the Old Testament which I grow increasingly fond of and which is very relevant here, is known as wisdom. And in those books there is an overt difference between the grasping and gaining of knowledge and what Proverbs calls “understanding”: “He that hath knowledge spares his words: a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit”

And it’s our sense of understanding, or not, that perhaps feels most left out as the broadband revolution gathers momentum. Searching brings knowledge: but without understanding, all the knowledge in the world, is both transient and without lasting value.