Giving the internet its soul

SORRY to sound like a spoiler, but I strongly feel we need to be
leery of the flashflood of novelties and possibilities that the
internet and other modern communication technologies now offer us.

We should see to it that we maintain a firm footing before this
tsunami-like development that has tremendous potentials both for good
and for evil. We should avoid being swept away by their notoriously
delirious and self-absorbing tendencies.

The internet, just like anything else in life, will always be a tool
for us. We have to be its master, not its slave. We have to be the
ones to direct it, not the ones directed by it. We have to humanize
and Christianize it, not to be instrumentalized by it.

Wherever I go, I see many people, especially the kids and the youth,
helplessly swallowed up by their highly addictive properties. The
internet and its relatives are no ordinary sweet poisons. Their
effects are immediately deep, vast and massive. They can change
persons and cultures almost overnight.

This is a very disturbing development. Even in my restricted
environment of working as chaplain of a technical school catering
mainly to underprivileged youth, I have seen how these gadgets can
adversely affect the students.

Many of them, especially those coming from the provinces, who enter
the school still largely innocent and even naïve, quickly acquire the
ways of the wily and the sly when exposed to these gadgets.

I have been trying my best, and I ask all the other teachers, mentors
and staff to do the same, to closely check on the students so they
don’t fall into addiction and, worse, moral corruption.

In these electronic devices, pornography is just a click away. The
virus that reinforces bad values and habits like vanity, frivolity,
caprice, laziness, disorder, intemperance, disorder, waste of time and
money, etc., is in pandemic proportions.

Truly, I see more clearly how education is not so much a matter of
inculcating more info and skills as in cultivating the proper
hierarchy of values and virtues. It’s not so much having and doing
many things as being a better person. “Non multa sed multum.” Not
many, but much. Not quantity, but quality.

Of course, we should not shy away from these modern facilities that
through the digital system expand our world of knowledge and other
possibilities. But we should be the ones to call the shots, not the
other way around.

We need to be sharp in discerning when they are serving us properly
and when they are exploiting us. Many of us get lost and confused in
this duty. Thus, we need to help one another, and constantly clarify
the true purposes of these devices.

Obviously, we need to pass through a learning curve whose initial
stages are always difficult, challenging and usually accompanied by
mistakes. But we have to perfect the process, going through the steps,
in a musician’s lingo, of doing the scales, then the etudes, then the
concertos.

With these gadgets, we need to go beyond the stages of just being
amazed at the new big world they can present us, and at being just a
techie. We have to see to it that these gadgets make us a better
person and a better child of God, because everything in life has that
as its purpose.

So, we need to ask ourselves often: Do these electronic tools bring
me closer to God and to others, do they make me pray more and give
myself more generously to the others, do they build up my love for God
and others?

Do they develop my virtues, deepening and enlarging them to cover
more areas of responsibility and concern? Do they make me more of a
contemplative soul, enabling me to see God in others and in things?

If the answers are not a clear ‘yes,’ then we still have a lot of
things to work out. This is how we can give the internet and the like
their soul, an indispensably constitutive element that should go with
them, otherwise, they end up using us, instead of us using them.

This duty of giving them their soul is a very dynamic process that
involves discovering new frontiers, since the task of knowing and
loving God and others through them will never end.

It can be a very fascinating, fulfilling and rewarding adventure,
whose end is actually already marked out, but whose way has to be
worked out still by us. We need to see this grave responsibility in
this way.