An essential AI insight that rhymes with past digital literacy initiatives

I've shared here fairly often the work of my friend and colleague Peter Levenstrong. Peter's work on AI in ministry is required reading in my personal information diet. And his post today reminded me of a key point that we tried to make in the Digital Literacies for Ministry research project my colleagues and I led in the second half of the 2010s (which I now think of as the waning years of the Networked Era).

In a post called Why I Teach Clergy to Use the Thing I Want Slowed Down, Peter begins with a great analogy: "When the freeways came for the West Village, the people who stopped them were not the ones who had refused to own a car." Of course, it was activists who "under[stood] traffic engineering well enough to argue with it" who made the difference—people who were more, not less, engaged with the question of how a freeway impacts a neighborhood.

That's the argument Peter is making about why we need ministry leaders to deeply engage with the big questions and the fine-grain details of how AI is changing, and might soon change, the social sphere and beyond. Here's a pretty good encapsulation of his point that especially spoke to me:

A seminarian told me this month that his classmates range from those who use AI for everything to those who have sworn it off and have no idea what it can do. The second group worries me more. They are the ones most likely to believe that their personal refusal is a form of opposition, and they are the ones least able to tell a legislator what should be banned and why.

This is exactly how I felt while conducting the DLM study. Yes, I heard some stories about way overzealous digital ministers who quickly found themselves out of their depth and sometimes did genuine harm. But the real eyebrow-raising stories came from leaders who were dismissive of new media entirely. They weren't just missing out on the benefits from digital connection, like helping new people find their churches and stumbling across natural opportunities for pastoral or evangelistic engagement. They were also setting themselves up to offer critique that was hollow, inauthentic, and often outright untrue.

I just don't think it's possible to speak (positively or negatively!) in credibly concrete ways about these technologically mediated experiences without ... actually experiencing them. 🙃

If you're looking for a theology-first treatment from the last time we were having big conversations about similar questions, I highly recommend Kate Ott's book Christian Ethics for a Digital Society, which I was just now excited to learn is getting a second edition in 2027. Here's a taste (p. 4–5):

[W]e need an ethical language grounded in digital literacies and entwined with creativity and faith values. For Christians committed to a more just and inclusive society, an imaginative and serious ethical response to digital technologies requires looking beyond the immediate experience of software or hardware to how it was created, how our use of it shapes us, and what values are promoted across these processes ...

The Christian ethic of digital literacy that I present builds on traditions of radical digital literacy and digital citizenship that argue for responsible use, reducing disparities in access, and attention to the impact of digital technology on relationship and community formation. The Christian part of the ethic grounds these concerns in historical and ongoing Christian visions of the common good and social justice for diverse communities and the earth.

I'm no longer primarily working in digital literacy development for ministry leaders, aside from little posts like this one. But I'm glad people like Peter (and Kate Ott!) are, and I continue to commend his current and future offerings.