New Creations

Technological Creations.

I have been doing two things lately that are connecting –  one is serving as a volunteer secretary for a consulting team undertaking a study of a church diocese and its parishes. The other is reading about the nature of technology.  These might appear to be unconnected, but that’s not the case.

The participants in group sessions and subsequent surveys of the study reveal several views that are not in the least surprising. They have found the recent years stressful and unsettling. Some are hopeful for something new but uncertain as to what it might be. Disconnects have been noted between leadership priorities and a more practical hands-on solutions to matters on the ground. But one thing no one seems to have noticed or commented on –  how we have all been re-shaped by the recent technologies available to us – not just during this pandemic but over the past decade.

Typically I want to look up the new buzzwords, because they are everywhere but often imprecise in meaning. Here are a couple of them. A pivot (noun) is “a central point, pin or shaft on which a mechanism turns or oscillates”. In a business context, pivot (verb) suggests “completely changing how one does things to meet increased demands from customers”. “Pivot” got mentioned from time to time in the surveys, but no one appears to recognize the significance. We have accessed several new technologies in recent years.  How have they changed us?

 “Hybrid” is also part of our new vocabulary. Here is a recent definition; Hybrid (noun) is “a person whose background is a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions”. I hadn’t thought of one as a person, though I might have done so in describing a plant or an animal with immediate understanding – we have a Labradoodle in our extended family – but a person?   Yet two diverse cultures or traditions as an idea resonates since I have been part of both these the church culture my entire life and computer based technologies since the early 1980s .  We’re now part of both traditions in this study – institutional religion and technology. So far we are only looking at one of them.

My current reading is a book by Brian Arthur called The Nature of Technology.  It is not new but highly recommended, and it stands the test of its relevance since its first publication in 2009. In the introduction, Arthur observes that technology creates itself in an evolutionary process and the book is full of easily understood examples which we seldom think about.  The evolutionary process would be helpful to apply to organizations and enterprises as well.

As an example, church buildings closed for at least a full year during the recent pandemic which first seemed to bring their lives to a full stop. When we become discouraged, we might be thankful that the duration was not as long as the Bubonic plague (coming to our attention via Monty Python) starting in the fourteenth century and lasting for 400 years. There might have been far more reasons for continuing fear then, since fleas carried the infection and there were no vaccines. The technologies of the time were limited; no one flew in from a foreign country but the disease was frightfully transmissible.

Arthur sees technology development as a system of autopoesis – a living system capable of self-creation.  One might say the same of the institutional church, or indeed any organization. These all have things in common.  They arise in response to a human need, which may not always be initially perceived – but when the new thing comes into existence we find a need for it, sometimes turning it into a want. They depend on some form of energy – simple and physical first perhaps – you need some to pound a nail with a hammer - and turning stones into pointy objects for hunting was one of the first cave man technologies. Later we learned to harness other energies. The creations improve with use – users provide feedback on what works well and what doesn’t. They involve combinations of parts that may exist independently at first and then go on to produce a new whole. Original uses also get borrowed for other needs, which may change the technology further. Technologies get applied.

How such things come to being, as well as their implications for use, are vitally important.  These are worth exploring in the coming days.