I make coffee in a coffee pot. Does that make me an ideological Luddite? Someone once gave us one of those fancy machines, and it was nice to be able to wake up in the morning and there was a cup of hot coffee. But eventually it broke. My wife bought a new one about a year ago. Nice because it is supposed to keep the coffee warm in a jug after it's made. But none of the coffee went in the jug, it just went all over the counter and the floor. So I still make it in a coffee pot, even though after the first cup I have to heat it up in the microwave oven.

But that doesn't mean that I "condemn" those who use fancy coffee making machines. If they work for them, fine.

Does a washing machine allow me to use my time more productively by spending it on doing something better than just transferring dirt from one place to another. Ir is it something that will just get me into increasing debt, because there are things that i have to have?

A washing machine might save me time that I can put to other uses, like blogging. But is what I write in my blog worth it? Does anyone read it, and if they do read it, are they any better off for having read it?

I'm not necessarily advocating a kind of utilitarian outlook on this, but sometimes it can help. It's not just technology, but techniques that are not material. Sometimes a method for doing something can become a fad and an end in itself, and we forget what it was introduced for.

I was one of the first on my block to get a PC, because I loved the idea of being able to put information in a machine and find it again.

I was one of the last to get a cell phone. I saw no need for one until I had to take a student to get passports and visas to go and study in Kenya, and report to the church office or get information from them — and having to drive home to phone or drive around looking for a public phone convinced me that a cell phone could be a useful thing. I still don't see the point of downloading ring tones, though.

Same with Facebook — keeping in touch with people is a useful concept, but downloading applications to deal with vibrating virtual hamsters is not. When your time is frittered away with such things, perhaps technology has become an idol.

Karl – I fully understand that there are various reason to question technology and that some people have well thought out ethical reason for why they choose not to engage. I've just had a number of conversations recently with people who reject forms of technology and condemn those of us that do mostly because technology is new and different. the don't understand it, they have heard a bad story or two, and so they blanket condemn it. I find that there often doesn't have to be an all or nothing approach to things like this. I see there being ethical approaches to most things if people would take the time to engage them. And I see presenting the ethical options to people as being much more likely to take hold and persuade than to preach complete rejection.

"For the last four-plus decades, Berry, 72, has been asserting in various ways that we Americans live without much care for the world and our place in it. Berry points out that most of us consume and adopt new technologies without considering the hidden costs. Berry asks, how many of us think about environmental degradation when we start up our computers, which in cases depend on electricity from coal gouged out of the mountains of Appalachia?

Berry does not mean that no one should use a computer or technology. Indeed, at the 125-acre farm he calls home at Lane's Landing, near Kentucky's tiny Port Royal (population 116), Berry drives a truck, uses a chainsaw, and has a CD player—though there is no computer. He writes in a tree-house stand on his hillside farm.

"For some," Berry writes, "their involvement in pollution, soil depletion, strip-mining, deforestation, industrial and commercial waste is simply a 'practical' compromise, a necessary 'reality,' the price of modern comfort and convenience. For others, this list of involvements is an agenda for thought and work that will produce remedies."

http://www.ctlibrary.com/39301

Wendell Berry is my favorite author. He has been key in my changing worldview. I even read his fiction…….and I don't do fiction

Bruce