World Future Society Book Review

Futurist Bookshelf Online Catalog Review Archive

[from THE FUTURIST, January-February 2003]

[Editor's note: The following review is a longer version of the Books in Brief review published in the January-February 2003 issue of THE FUTURIST.]

Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age by Quentin J. Schultze. Baker Academic, Baker Book House, www.bakerbooks.com/academic. 2002. 256 pages. $24.99.

A Puritan Takes on Cyber Society
The information highway may not be the right road to salvation.
Book Review by Lane Jennings

"Today, we increasingly assume that doing things quickly and efficiently is more important than doing them carefully and ethically," states communications professor Quentin J. Schultze, summing up a major premise of his new book, Habits of the High-Tech Heart. Instead of continually craving "greater bandwidth" to send more messages faster, Schultze asks us to pay closer attention to what messages we send, and why.

Writing in the Puritan tradition of Protestant Christian social reformers, Schultze assails the arrogance and folly of humanity’s repeated attempts to solve life’s problems by relying on science and technology alone--without reference to any power greater than human will. In his view, the latest and most dangerous of these misguided efforts is the Internet. He puts it this way: "As cyberspace detaches information and messaging from moral responsibility, it becomes an open market with few overarching habits of the heart to leaven libertinism."

Without ever strictly defining what is moral, Schultze builds an elaborate case for setting voluntary limits to human desires and actions, based on the values enshrined in traditional beliefs. In particular, he sees "informationists" threatening six key social virtues or "habits of the heart" (a term used by Alexis de Tocqueville to describe a shared commitment to the common good): discernment, moderation, wisdom, humility, authenticity, and diversity.

In Schultze’s view, infotech weakens our discernment--the power to distinguish between genuine and bogus--as we increasingly become amoral observers rather than intimate participants in events around us. When e-mail replaces live meetings, we save time, but lose the subtleties of voice and facial expression that help conversation partners judge the sincerity and intensity behind each other’s words. Watching nightly TV news clips blurs differences between spontaneous actions and staged drama until people and events seem no more real to us than characters in a soap opera.

We lose our sense of moderation as we give in to "bandwidth envy," blindly trusting that more and faster communication must improve our lives, when too often it simply exposes us to more junk messages. Schultze compares the example of highway systems, where new and wider roads have often simply encouraged more people to drive, thus expanding traffic jams rather than relieving them.

Schultze is particularly alarmed by the decline in wisdom he perceives has resulted from society’s increasing reliance on databases rather than human experience. Facts and statistics, he reminds us, are not the only forms of information humans use to make decisions. Computers may find it difficult to mimic human value judgments based on affection, appreciation of beauty, instinct, respect for tradition, or careful listening to someone else’s opinions, but that does not make these low-tech skills less important for achieving satisfactory outcomes--particularly in complex non-zero-sum situations.

Humility--being able to laugh at ourselves, or at least see our personal concerns in some broader context--erodes when humans start to believe themselves infallible, Schultze warns. We make technology our religion, and, like the captain of the Titanic, stake our very lives on a blind faith that the systems we depend on most can never fail us. Authenticity--the simple ability to say what you mean and mean what you say—becomes hard to practice, and harder still to test, in a cyberworld where who you are depends entirely on whatever information you choose to present about yourself. Finally, true diversity—appreciation for the character and achievements of other cultures—dies out in a world that increasingly rejects whatever is "technologically unproductive" (from mid-day siestas to slow and careful reading of printed texts).

He asks readers to acknowledge that neither individuals nor institutions can ever fully control nature through technology to serve human ends and to accept that it is better for everyone if we devote our lives to serving others instead of merely seeking to maximize our personal comfort and convenience.

Schultze’s faith-based assumption that the desire to put pleasure ahead of duty is something humans should be ashamed of and suppress may not be shared by all his readers. But his warnings against blindly trusting technology, losing our grasp on reality, and endowing information with value while ignoring how it is used, all deserve to be heard.

Indeed, establishing some compromise between self-sacrifice and self-satisfaction might be viewed as a fully sustainable and desirable future for society.

The author’s inability to imagine how a "saint"—someone dedicated to humble service rather than individual success—could ever exist on the Internet strikes me more as a failure of imagination than a telling indictment of the infotech community. Nor do his laments that certain features of traditional town and village life have no counterparts on the Internet persuade me that honest, lasting, and emotionally satisfying relationships could not develop and grow over time among contributing members of a placeless cyber-settlement.

Schultze notes that "the Internet seems to serve for many as a place to be foolish." Perhaps so, but is this necessarily a fault? One great value of Schultze’s book is to remind techno-optimists and critics alike that some important differences exist between physical and information-based realities.

To act as if we had total control over other people or nature, to behave irresponsibly as if the future did not matter, to pursue private interests with no concern for how our actions impact those around us—these are all proven recipes for disaster in physical reality.

But those same limits need not always apply in cyberspace. Role-playing games, virtual-reality simulations, chat rooms, immersion in sight and sound experiences that provide the equivalents of sex- or drug-induced euphoria, all these and more might be indulged online without danger to oneself or harm to others.

Adopting different standards, identities, perhaps even different moral systems in these two separate and distinct realms of human experience, could strengthen our resolve to behave with civility and humaneness in real life, while permitting us a safe place to release the awkward, inconvenient, even "antisocial" but nonetheless real and never fully suppressed desires that are also a natural part of being human.

It is where the two realms overlap—when we use the Internet for communications with real-world consequences—that we must proceed with special thought and care. And it is this double-world that is explored in Habits of the High-Tech Heart.

Quentin J. Schultze may be a Puritan, but he cannot be dismissed as a mere Luddite unthinkingly opposed to any new technology. His book is filled with telling quotes and ideas from articulate spokesmen representing many points of view—such as this from Archbishop Charles J. Chaput: "We certainly want salvation ... but for many of us tools function as a pretty good insurance policy, just in case. ... We’ve learned to trust our own ingenuity because it works. Unfortunately, the construction crew at Babel felt the same."

About the Reviewer
Lane Jennings is research director of THE FUTURIST magazine and production editor of Future Survey.

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