Stephen Pickard | Michael Welker | John Witte (Eds.): The Impact of Education (Leseprobe)

32 Anne W. Stewart
technology. The voices present to us on the superhighway of information require
discernment to testthe nature of the truths they present and the capacity to read
between the lines of the appeals they offer, for theymay not always be as desirable
as they first appear on the surface. After all, not only is Google marketing to our
desires, it is marketing the consumer herself, collectingextensive data about the
user’sdemographics, geography, and preferencesthat will aid companies in marketing
their products. As the adage says, if you are not paying for the product, you
are the product. One wonders if the teacher of Proverbs might counsel contemporary
students that while their search results appear with sweet ease, in the end
they may exact sharp costs in data and privacy.
Community and Character, Friendship and Facebook
For Proverbs, the community is acentral element in the formation of character
and the development of faculties of discernment. One cannot find wisdom alone;
rather, it can be pursuedonly in the company of others. As Proverbs 15:22 advises,
“Without counsel plans go wrong, but with many advisors they succeed.” Yet
the company one keeps also requires discernment, for listening to the wrong
counsel can of course lead one astray: “Whoever walks with the wise becomes
wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm” (Prov. 13:20). The friends and companions
we seek both mirror and shape our character, for “just as water reflects
the face, so one human heart reflects another” (Prov. 27:19).
No force in the current era accelerates this dynamic more rapidly than social
networking. Facebook and other social-networking platforms are apowerful force
in the contemporary world. These platforms are designed to organize and order
the community of voices to which we are exposed. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg
once said that the idea of Facebook is to create more transparency in the
world, to let you see who your friendsreally are. He noted, “Ithink as humans we
fundamentally parse the world through the people and relationships we have
around us. So at its core, what we’re trying to do [at Facebook] is map out all of
those trust relationships, [called] friendships.” 11 Facebook’svision is to parse the
world through people and networks of relationships, in the conviction that these
relationships shape the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves. In
some respects, this is similar to the idea we find in Proverbs that one’s companions
shape one’s character and are often indicative of one’s character.
Yet Facebook does not order and displaythese friendshipswithout partiality.
Rather, its algorithms determine the content with which individual users are
11
Lev Grossman, “Person of the Year 2010,” Time Magazine Dec. 15, 2010, http://content.
time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.
html.