Convivial Technology
[Frederica Mathewes-Green  03/01 08:11 PM]

I confess: Email Changed My Life. It made it possible to communicate with like-minded people, which wasn't so easy when I was restricted to people who are, literally, local. The neighbors were nice enough, but that's not the same as being able to talk with people who are really like me; who've read the same books, who have the same convictions and the same sense of humor, and who are ready for a rousing conversation. Rod was one of my earliest e-buddies, a dozen years ago when I first fired up the old 14k Hayes modem and logged onto AOL 2.0.

Shortly before that I had spent a year as Communications Director for a statewide pro-life referendum. In the course of losing that fight it was powerfully borne in on me that my type was not welcome 'round here. Virtually no media coverage was fair, much less friendly. Local was not a friendly place to be. What a relief to find that there were people like me scattered around the country, and that I wasn't alone after all.

But there's still a longing for local, and now and then one of my e-buddies floats the fantasy that it would be great to shake the dust off our feet and go someplace safe and stable, to live and raise the kids. (Walker Percy's Lost Cove, TN, for example.)

But utopia ain't all it's cracked up to be. I was searching for a post that came in very early in this blog — I think Rod pasted it in, on the first or second day. A woman was writing about living in a Christian intentional community, all homeschoolers and good earnest types. I remember she said that the gals all wear dresses and the men make sure the gals wear dresses. And she said that there is an insular and negative mindset, paranoia about the outside world, and ceaseless ain't-it-awful self-righteousness about the culture war. But the main point she made was that the upright citizens fail to notice that their teen children are parachuting out of the biodome — "getting pregnant, getting drunk, and joining the military" was the intriguing trio of examples she gave.

I'd like us to recognize that local isn't always easy. This is especially true if even the church we belong to is no haven, but a place where a variety of theological and moral views are on parade. Our true sense of belonging may not be local at all, but come from something very much more scattered.

And even if we voluntarily localize ourselves for the sake of our children, they too will be just as capable one day of jumping out of the local context. They too can seek their values and meaning from the outside world — values that may be the very ones we were seeking to evade.

So, local is a good thing, Rod, but technology has helped me find many more convivial friends.