The Digital Environment As Restorative to our Humanity?

As humans, we have an obligation to restore both the natural and artificial structures and environments that surround us. Those who work in restorative justice focus on meeting the needs of the perpetrators, victims and communities – as opposed to working for the satisfaction of (in some cases) an outdated or irrelevant legal system.

Indeed, this desire to infuse the world with grace, truth, beauty, and justice is one of the most natural feelings in the world. Here in Nashville, one of the country’s fastest growing cities in the United States, there is a strong grassroots sentiment that the historical homes and irreplaceable relics of the music industry’s early days are worthy of preservation. We have a community that views these properties (that a real estate developer might describe in dollar signs and decimal points) as structures with extraordinary intangible value.

We see furniture built from “reclaimed” wood. Old scraps “repurposed” into beautiful jewelry. Vintage records “reimagined” in mashups and re-recordings. These are only small slivers, selective examples, of our very human desire to participate in restoration. We are all able to see an inherent value in the people who have come before us and the things they have contributed to the world. It’s our natural inclination to preserve their work and their ways, while contributing to it the uniqueness that only we can bring.

Now, imagine what the world could look like if we could apply this deeply ingrained proclivity for restoration to our digital environment? What if the way we communicated through social media actually made another person more acutely aware of their own humanity? What if our email marketing – something typically perceived as incredibly sterile and un-human – actually lifted another person instead of annoyed them? Is it possible to sell a product and genuinely be your customer’s friend? And most of all, are the critics right? Does our contemporary digital landscape fracture our humanity?

Or can we actually leverage the technology and our new styles of communication to become more fully human than we’ve ever been before?

(An excerpt from my forthcoming book, Finally Human)