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In the early ’90s, I worked as a lifeguard at the local community pool. One day the other lifeguards and I were killing time by trying to list all Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. We were having a spirited argument over whether a particular structure was one of the seven. This was before the age of the internet, search engines, and Wikipedia. There were no smartphones or digital assistants to ask for the definitive list. So we did what people in the Stone Age did to find information: We called the local library. When the librarian started suggesting the Statue of Liberty as one of the Wonders of the Ancient World, we knew that we needed to find a more reliable source of information. We were stymied for nearly a full day, until one of us was able to get home, look it up in his World Book Encyclopedia, and report back to us.
This scenario is completely foreign to many people younger than a certain age and a distant memory to anyone else. Today we have supercomputers in our pockets that can access billions of websites. It is estimated that there are hundreds of zettabytes of data on the internet. A zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes, which is a number larger than we can meaningfully conceive of. Suffice to say, there is a lot of information accessible to us. And like what we heard from my dear librarian, not all the data on the internet is useful or true.
How are we to navigate the seemingly boundless oceans of information so that we might safely arrive at the truth? We begin by asking the question, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). Jesus had answered that He is truth, and His Word is truth (14:6; 17:17). But when the truth of Jesus is set amid that sea of data, how are we to discern what is right?
The Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament speaks often of the paths of the wise and foolish. Psalm 86:11 records David’s prayer, “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth.” Proverbs 4:11, 14 says: “I have taught you the way of wisdom; I have led you in the paths of uprightness. . . . Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of the evil.” Job 28:20 asks, “From where, then, does wisdom come?” And then answers it in verse 28: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom.” We must find the way of truth in order to navigate the digital age of information.
The Information Age is often described with the metaphor of a web. One bit of information links to another and then to another. With the advent of artificial intelligence, those links are tailored to you based on what the computer knows about you. A path is created for your browsing or scrolling by an algorithm working to provide you with what it thinks you want. It gives the appearance of depth and comprehension but is often just a shallow distraction. Hyperlinks, doomscrolling, reels, and social media feeds lead you on a predetermined path of shallow entertainment and preoccupation but not truth or wisdom. The purpose of the algorithm is to maintain the gaze of your eyeballs because your attention can be monetized. The web wants to draw you in. And if we are honest, we want to be drawn in.
Martin Luther described the nature of human sin as homo incurvatus in se (humanity curved in on itself). This is similar to the image of Anthony Esolen’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. In canto 3, Dante is led to the gates of hell. He sees the punishments inflicted on the damned. In lines 83–84, he writes: “Woe to you, you crooked souls. Give up all hope to look upon the sky.” The greatest terror of Dante’s hell is that the damned will never look up. This isn’t too much different from a society that lives with necks crooked over smartphones, never even bothering to look up to reality. It is the screened culture. It is a version of the dystopian future that Aldous Huxley warned about in Brave New World, in which people are conditioned to prefer the imitation. If they choose the imitation, they never even have to be coerced to give up the real thing. We become lost in a sea of information. We are like the weak in 2 Timothy 3:7, “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”
So is the way forward to shun all technology? No, as if that were even possible. Rather, we must employ a wise and disciplined use of digital tools. Every good gift that God has given man has been abused, but the abuse of the gift does not negate the proper and righteous use. The Information Age can be a tremendous gift to us, if we use it with wisdom.
The way of wisdom comes through understanding God as He has revealed Himself through His Word and through His creation. Wisdom is correlative to righteousness. “The mouth of the righteous brings forth wisdom” (Prov. 10:31). The person who is wise is also righteous. When we use creation, including the advances of technology and all the complicated blessings of the digital age, we must seek to conform it to God’s revealed will.
Navigating the oceans of data to arrive at the truth requires us to look up. We must look up from our devices and look up to God and His Word. Wisdom calls us to be righteous, discerning between what is good and evil, what is true and false, and what is beautiful and grotesque. The guardrails of the good, the true, and the beautiful will cut through the web and enable us to use the digital age righteously.