I'd kiss you if you weren't a girl
2003-02-06 - 7:22 p.m.

I found an interesting article on the Amish's use of cell phones and other technology:

Howard Rheingold. "Look Who's Talking". Wired. January 1999. http://www.udel.edu/eli/rw4/org/amcell.html

I couldn't help thinking it was awfully complicated to have a phone you used only for calling back -- from a booth in a meadow. Why not make life easier and just put one in the house?

"What would that lead to?" another Amish man asked me. "We don't want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It's not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We're also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it."

...

Another Amish workshop owner named Caleb also discussed the Amish resistance to becoming modern. They're not worried about becoming people without religion. Rather, he explained, the Amish fear assimilating the far more dangerous ideas that "progress" and new technologies are usually beneficial, that individuality is a precious value, that the goal of life is to "get ahead." This mind-set, not specific technologies, is what the Amish most object to.

In the controversy over relaxing telephone rules, some people feel that this results in people drifting apart. Others see the use of telephones as a pragmatic choice necessary to hold the community together economically. The paradox is that the telephone does both. It holds people together by making communication among community members possible, and it separates them from the world and from each other. The telephone is both good and evil.

More later.

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