Technology, Wonder, and Attention / Aaron Cline Hanbury
For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & CultureShow Notes
Technology, Aaron Cline Hanbury suggests, is never a purely neutral tool. But the history of ethical thinking about technology shows that as long as there's been technology, there's been anxiety about it. Or perhaps more accurately, anxiety about what we might do with it. And increasingly, what it might do to us.
A journalist, founding editor of *Common Good* magazine, and author of *Wired for Wonder*, Hanbury came of age as the internet entered the home and has spent his career reporting from the places where technology, faith, and everyday life collide. Rather than offering another list of screen-time tips, he asks a deeper question: How do we relate to the things we make?
In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Hanbury wrestles with what it means to be human when the machines we’ve made can do more and more. He criticizes the seduction that we should embrace technology simply because it is inevitable. He explores how connection, efficiency, and unrestrained technological freedom quietly became unquestioned goods, why our powers of attention are eroding in real time, and wonders what it might take—personally, communally, and structurally—to reclaim our humanity through presence, and the rough ground of embodied life.
About Aaron Cline Hanbury
Aaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor whose essays and profiles have appeared in *The Atlantic* and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of the award-winning magazine *Common Good* and a past editor of *RELEVANT*. He writes about the places where technology, faith, and ordinary life meet. His book, *Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self*, breaks open the tired binary between tech optimists and Luddites in the context of memoir, ethics, journalism, and theology.
Helpful Links and Resources
- *Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self*, by Aaron Cline Hanbury: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889833451/Wired-for-Wonder - Aaron Cline Hanbury's website: https://aaronclinehanbury.com/ - Aaron Cline Hanbury's Substack: https://aaronclinehanbury.substack.com - Aaron Cline Hanbury on X: https://x.com/achanbury - Common Good magazine: https://commongoodmag.com/author/aaron-cline-hanbury/ - Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo23186480.html - The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book - Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry's novel: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/
Show Notes
- Anxiety and technology - Patient zero for life online—coming of age as the internet entered the home - Low-church tradition, quick to adopt and ask questions later - Journalism as a front-row seat to three decades of change - Early adopter or Luddite? Rejecting the spectrum's false ends - The device paradigm—technology as pattern, not neutral tool - A hammer's telos, and why misuse cuts against a tool's design - Made things have a maker—intentions baked into what we build - The inevitability argument—get on board or get run over - Resistance is futile? The Borg, Cannes, and defeatism - Progress as reversion—tobacco bans, ocean dumping, processed-food rollbacks - Family Guy, satire, and pulling tech ethics out of the esoteric - The class and income divide the internet promised to erase - Online radicalization vs the promise of mass education - Children as the guinea pigs of early adoption - Chromebooks, daycares, and offloading discomfort onto kids - Testing tech on the vulnerable—Jonathan Haidt on teen mental health - Social media vs attention media—commodifying human focus - The plug-in drug—parents, screens, and pacified kids - Focused attention and the feeling of being fully alive - Connection, efficiency, freedom—goods we stopped questioning - Dunbar's number and the real limits of friendship - Online ties without public accountability, and bad formation - Embodiment, particularity, and getting back to the
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