The blessing and curse of the iPhone 6

NICK EICHER: Apple unveiled this week the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Watch and new software and hardware to change the way we pay. But the day after the big tech event in Cupertino, Calif., Twitter users griped about the difficulty they had in watching the two-hour event on live stream. Browser incompatibility, lack of bandwidth, and bad audio all contributed to the “first-world problem” complaints that have become a social media classic.

I talked this week with John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview about the irony and the truths of living in a world of mind-blowing technology.

John, you’re in Washington today. I’m at WORLD headquarters in Asheville, N.C., and yet we’re able to connect in a way that makes it sound like we’re in the same place. Don’t you love technology.

JOHN STONESTREET: Most of the time, when technology works. But I’m one of those guys, when technology doesn’t work, I forget its mixed blessings.

NE: You did a short commentary on the radio this week, John, on that topic. If things are so great, why are people so miserable? In light of the new release of more cool gadgets, talk about how we’ll be cursing these new devices next week.

JS: About 10-15 years ago there was a book written by a theologian called The Way of the Modern World. The theologian was Craig Gay, and he talked about what modernism does to us. Living in this time of technological arrogance … makes the highest values in our lives convenience, efficiency, and choice. In other words, if it’s quicker and easier, it must be better, and if it ceases to be quick and easy, then we think it ceases to be good. And that’s good criteria for some things, but it’s really bad criteria for others. It’s really bad criteria for beauty and justice and goodness and love and romance and all the other good gifts that God has given us. I’m an Apple guy. I love Apple products. I think they do make life a lot easier. But it’s tempting to find ourselves trapped in that old cycle where we think that our ability to have things fast and easy is what makes life good.

NE: There are people, too, who jump off on the other side and become anti-technology. They think technology is evil. That’s not true, either.

JS: Our ability to do things with the world is remarkable. … I’m doing this commentary from Washington, D.C. This morning I was in Colorado Springs. … Everyone should be blown away. Technology is something that Christians have always innovated. If you look up my friend Glenn Sunshine’s series Christians Who Changed the World, many of them did it through technology. And the biblical framework for them was: Since the fall, work became toil. One of the things that Christians should do in reversing the effects of the fall is bring back the dignity and glory of work. This is what Gutenberg did, taking this vision of distributing the Bible around the world and making it efficient and convenient, and that was a good thing. The problem is when efficiency and convenience become the framework by which we measure the goodness of a thing.

NE: I’d like to bring up a real first world problem, and this isn’t the ironic kind. With great technological innovations has come easy access to pornographic images. A poll at the turn of the century found that one in five men had ever visited a sexually oriented website. This year a poll finds nearly two in three do so each month.

JS: I think what we have to realize is it’s a first-world problem that’s become a third-world problem. It has fueled a whole industry of sex trafficking. The spread of technology around the world has actually made this a third-world problem in both our exporting and our trying to meet the demand for it. … This is one of America’s biggest exports. We have to take seriously that one of the things the Islamic world points to as a sign of America’s degradation is this ongoing infatuation and addiction with sexual immorality and pornography. You put all that together, and this is a dramatic problem. … It’s not just the problem out there. According to statistics, it’s a problem in the church, as well.

NE: A more recent Barna Group poll found 64 percent of American men generally view pornographic content at least once a month. Among Christian men, the number is still a surprising 55 percent. What does that tell you, John?

JS: Every church has to survive within a particular culture, and the culture, at times, influences the church. That’s not always bad, but often times it is. … The church has got to become a place that tells the truth about this stuff and then also tells the further truth about the hope and redemption and restoration that people can find in their own lives and in their relationships. What an unbelievable testimony going forward. I mean, where else are folks going to get hope in this particular area?

This report is excerpted from Culture Talk. Listen to the full segment on The World and Everything in It: