Addicted to Novelty: The Vice of Curiosity in a Digital Age

Although the new ethical challenges posed by biotechnology and digital surveillance have been the focus of close attention and heated debate among Christian ethicists, comparatively little attention has been dedicated to far more ubiquitous technologies: the internet and our smartphones. Yet evidence is mounting among cognitive scientists, sociologists, and psychologists that the internet and related media technology are profoundly reshaping human thought, behavior, and sociality (in some ways helpfully, in some ways harmfully). This is surely a matter for ethical concern if there ever was one. This essay argues that the medieval concept of the vice of curiositas is an apt diagnosis of the ways in which digital media can absorb and scatter our attention, often in pathological ways. I first offer a summary of what earlier Christian authors meant by curiosity, and I classify their concerns into a typology of seven forms of vicious curiosity. I then show how the phenomenon of online pornography addiction in particular and other forms of internet addiction more generally confirm the explanatory power of this older concept and especially Augustine's distinction of the "lust of the flesh" and "the lust of the eyes." I conclude by suggesting how the grammar of "vice" and "virtue" allows us to embrace the value of new technologies while consciously cultivating strategies of resistance to their harmful tendencies.