From digital to
personal
By Fr.
ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
August 26, 2014
WE need to be aware of the
dangers of some aspects of our fast-growing digital culture. More than
that, we need to be adequately equipped to handle those dangers before
they come, when they come and after they have come.
Not everything in our
digital technologies is good to us. The tremendous convenience and
possibilities they offer us can benefit us wrongly. They can give us a
false sense of joy and accomplishment. They can spoil us as when they
nail us to care only of our immediate needs while sacrificing the
long-term ones.
Yes, they can blind us from
the more precious values in life to attend simply to the pressing ones
here and now. They can stimulate our senses, emotions and intellect,
but can weaken or even deaden our spiritual life. In short, our sense
of priority would be thrown into disarray.
Many people are getting so
hooked and addicted to digital games, social networking, for example,
that they even forget to take their meals properly or to take care of
their hygiene. You can just imagine what would happen in the area of
their prayer life and their other spiritual duties.
If this predicament extends
unabatedly and hardens to become the norm and culture of our life, we
can reason to expect a significant deformation of our humanity. We
would be just carnal and materialistic, and forget about our spiritual
dimension.
We would be self-absorbed,
instead of being mindful and thoughtful of others and especially of
God, as we ought to be. And as the gospel would say, we may seem to
gain the world, but then lose our soul.
Things can come to the point
of us losing the capacity to think, not to mention, to speak and
behave, in terms of our faith, hope and charity. We would simply be
governed by the movements of the flesh, the stirrings of the hormones,
the shifty trends and fashions of the world around.
In short, our sense of
reality would be greatly impaired and impoverished. The organic
relation between the objective and the subjective in our life would be
practically broken or at least dysfunctional.
This brings us to the main
point of this particular column, giving us a light of hope amid the
gathering darkness of the dangers of our digital culture.
We need to see that this
digital culture of ours that otherwise is a wonderful development in
our life help us to become better persons, rather than deplete the
substance of our being persons and converting us into objects or
automatons or humanoids or androids.
To be a person means not to
be just an individual, much less, individualistic, but one who knows
how to relate himself to God and to all the others. The powers and
faculties endowed in us, making us as a someone not a something, are
meant precisely to connect us to God, our Creator and Father, and to
all the others who are actually our brothers and sisters.
It should be the aim and
effect of the digital technologies to enhance this identity and
dignity of our being a person, and not to hinder or undermine it. When
they make us self-absorbed, indifferent to others and especially to
God, then they become a curse to us rather than a great help.
When they simply arouse our
emotions and intellectual prowess, and desensitize us from our duty to
love and care for the others, then they are used wrongly. When they
litter with traces of pride, vanity, sarcasm, bitterness, discord and
division, greed, envy, lust, etc., then they certainly are very
harmful to us.
We need to learn how to
humanize and personalize this digital culture we have today. For this,
we have to make the conscious effort to remind ourselves of this need,
pausing properly to be able to relate our digital work and time to God
and to the others.
We should avoid plunging
immediately into it without conditioning ourselves properly, since we
can easily fall into the trap of the digital wonders that can insulate
us from God and the others, and thereby dehumanizing and
depersonalizing us.
If we have the proper
mindset, what would usually happen is for us to be most delicate,
refined, charitable, patient, courteous, at least in our comments and
communications on FB, for example.
We would be open-minded and
quite tolerant in our dialogues especially when we have to sort out
things and resolve issues and differences of opinions. We would be
magnanimous and quick to forgive.
We need to make the digital
personal!