Levinas

We can even go further and note whenever and whatever there is no face with which we can connect, there is war and anguish.

How true this seems in the war of technology. I do not refer to the comprehension of one company to offer benefits and advantages at a reduced cost in competition with another company, nor do I refer to the battle, which the plethora of information at our fingertips would suggest we are on the verge of gaining as a foothold. The battle of reconsideration is more access to information, which might lead to qualitative knowledge attached to wisdom.

Technology in use is stimulating. It is also wholesome. Proper use of technology, which also requires knowledge and wisdom, is a wonderful means of developing our way toward what Levinas calls face.

Rather, as the war rages along the access route of facelessness we are in trust to the world, which has grown larger, extends further and maintains its significance, tending toward the dawn of individuality in functioning in a universal scope. Yet what controls our access, what guides us through these channels of communication, Facelessness.

The ultimate in commute fictional act. The void of selfishness and care for earnings. Along with the more potential, which is at our fingertips, we are swallowed by the less than human presence. We are thrown into an arena where, on the other hand, it is easier to be human because all we might do is communicate. We communicate for good or ill, but we never physically abuse thought words. Yet it is harder to be human with face.

Computers make the essential aspect of communication (to commune) easier by making the fundamental aspect of miscommunication (dis-interested, distracted) even greater.

We face the computer, which does not face us in return. We give the computer words with no voice, and the computer accepts whatever we give it as important datum, which it passes on with no desertion and fortunately, or unfortunately, no addition. For any addition is an essential aspect of communication.

So what we seem to have is a more potential for communicating with the process through a serving of that which is necessary for community: face. In the faceless battle to win wars of competition and knowledge, our access to ourselves in communion - which is just what the computer provides even the loneliness, even the most homely and otherwise disturbed person - proceeds not only through faceless terminals but through mindless functions. While the computer allows us an opportunity, never before available in the history of all humanity, to become present, more present than our mere bodies allow, more immediate than driving up the street, or into the next village the computer also allows the limit to that "being there" which would allow us to slip into being more functionaries.

As the wind makes nerves rattle, it would become the case that mere functionaries become the new function of the community. So, in community miscommunication matrix of being there/not there, of physical/mental we who are human beings have more provision to be either functionaries and faceless, messengers in an option board, or a people with a voice. We have really come so far that / not for all we have a voice. We have always been offered the choice between being and less than being (presence of less absence) and we can always have been engaged or disgorged.

Now we have been with greater opportunities for presence, but these are attendant upon greater possibilities for disappearance. If so, the issue does not seem to be technology or technological but how do we handle technologies. In fact, we either handle technology or we allow it to handle us, and technology, a mere function of human relations, will not handle us kindly. So we need to learn to handle technology, take control. We have taken control of technology as a function. We have, therefore disingenuously handled one another - without face - as functions and functionaries. We should hand instruments and messages, which are a voice, which lasts longer and without incriminating implications. They are messages made of dashes and dots, which are a communication of intelligence. The blinks are the larger composite of human imagination in the process of imagining - not as a means toward greater human relations.

We already have access to that possibility; have always had access to that function. Rather, we should approach technology as a means of being preset, of facing the world. We should engage technology as a means of facing the world. In the only from where we typically feel comfortable with our own face: in commune. Human relationships - not functions, not monetary considerations, not competition and it is, necessitation of law and its roadway in the form of court - human relationships ought to define that which is functional. We have too long allowed the reverse to be true, to be an insult, with the result that, as human beings, we have become untrue. We are, in society, simply datum, false datum at that.

We are untrue datum unless communism becomes more important than it has been for generations. We must achieve the action, which allow us to gain independence from being mere machines.

© G. David Schwartz

G. David Schwartz is the former president of Seedhouse, the online interfaith committee. Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue. Currently a volunteer at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati, Schwartz continues to write. His new book, Midrash and Working Out Of The Book, is now in stores or can be ordered.