Taking account of tech.pdf

Taking Account of Tech: Fulfilling Our Personhood

in the Smartphone Era

بِسْمِِ اللِِ الرَّحْمٰنِِ الرَّحِيْمِِ

Preface

But random reflections on the human condition need, like beads, to be strung on a connecting thread…this thread should be the Islamic concept of Man as God’s

Viceroy on this beautiful but transient earth… Are we or are we not fully responsible for everything that we do, regardless of whether we are obeying orders or constrained by fear?

– Gai Eaton

The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness

which is immune against its falsehood.  And as these beneficial products become

available to more individuals in more social classes, the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life… it militates against qualitative change.  Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.

– Herbert Marcuse

In 2019 I presented an earlier version of this paper to an audience of mostly Arab and South Asian Muslims residing in New Jersey.

 I wrote the paper after years of pushing back against what I saw to be the avalanche of technologization, or automation, in homes, schools, businesses, services, and workplaces.

 The impressive array of conveniences notwithstanding, I saw danger in how our increasing over-reliance on technological tools systematically underdevelops the equivalent skills within ourselves. As a society we are

externalizing our knowledge, becoming abstracted from it, and creating more false needs for the substitute tools. This phenomenon is also concretely exacerbating poverty at the extraction and production end of the global supply chain. Universal use of the US government-owned Global Positioning

System (GPS), for example, transforms our travel protocol from map-literacy, route-fluency and an observant landmark-competency to blindly following directives that are uttered piecemeal. In schools, one finds ever more demand for Smartboard-centered, technology-assisted, and web-based instruction. Even among family and friends, I often find resistance to or ridicule of suggestions to abstain from elective social media or smartphone use.

So how did the New Jersey Muslims react to my claim that over-reliance on the internet and social media is problematizing our personhood and moral

accountability in fundamental ways? Surprisingly well. Parents and community youth mentors resonated with my analysis of how youth are impacted. Others I could tell were reflecting on their own social media addictions. A prominent scholar of fiqh rightly commented that our framing of the issue must be cautious, so as not to invoke widespread anxiety and guilt over the responsible use of these tools.