Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age (review)

God forbid if a stranger broke into my Hotmail email account searching for what kind of person I am. Given the types of daily messages I receive, said stranger might plausibly draw at least four conclusions: I'm overly concerned about fluctuating mortgage rates; I have a fetish for cheap ink jet printer cartridges; I have a deep longing to be the second coming of John Holmes sans surgery; and, I have philanthropic financial interests in Nigeria. I have a hunch that similar, if not identical, conclusions might also be drawn about many of my readers—even my female readers. Cyberspace wasn't always this way. In the ten short years that I've been an Internet user, cyberspace has changed dramatically, from text-only features to real-time streamed video. Quentin J. Schultze might also argue that the Internet and information technologies more generally have changed each one of us—and not for the better.

A professor of communication at Calvin College, Schultze has written an unusual book; in fact, it's a hard book to categorize. To borrow from the title of a well-known book by the famous theologian Francis A. Schaeffer, perhaps we might subtitle it, "how should we then live?" in the age of the Internet. Schultze believes that most of us are living the wrong way. The Internet plays on some of our worst tendencies: it exacerbates our isolation and insulation; its distance makes us mean; its intimacy is promiscuous when it's not already disingenuous; its promotion of fluid identities functions less as a postmodern utopia and more as anarchic individualism. To borrow from Alexis de Tocqueville, and Schultze does frequently, cyberspace is driving us from what matters, from the habits of the heart. The habits to which Schultze would have us return are in the past—the ancient past. In the Hebrew and Christian traditions, he argues, will we find our way. No, Schultze wouldn't have us junk our keyboards and scrap our modems in favor of some sort of pretechnological asceticism. Ted Kaczynski he's not. But he is asking us to change our cyberhabits. And thus our lives.

I've noted over the several years that I've been in the academy that even a whiff of Christianity often provokes an immediate antifascism alert. Academics, it seems, are nothing if not hypervigilant about issues of authority—and what authorizes that authority. Typically, that translates into a worship of reason. Might we even say a profound faith in reason? And isn't it interesting that even postmodern critique is usually carried out with scrupulous attention to claims, evidences, and warrants? I've also noted something else: academics tend toward a radical individualism. This tendency only makes sense at some level: the sort of work we do usually requires us to be alone in our pursuits and presentations of knowledge. As Schultze reminds us throughout his very well-written book, cyberspace tends to valorize both the rational and the individual in self-reinforcing ways. As such his book offers a fundamental critique of academic life, where we often research online, where we often talk to our students online, and where we increasingly teach online. So while the book's audience is very broad, Schultze forces academics to confront some of their Holy of Holies. Just as there are supposedly no atheists in foxholes, Schultze forces us to wonder: are there any cyberphiles in hospice beds?

As best as I can tell, Schultze's critique of cyberculture leads in only one direction: toward the body. Our modes of earthly, and thus Heavenly, salvation are premised on spending less time proselytizing to anonymous databases and ethereal e-mailers, asserts Schultze, and more time caring for and listening to our neighbors. Face-to-face, body-to-body interactions—certainly primary orality—where we can commune with one another rather than cocoon with our monitors can save us...