“Look Who’s Talking,” by Howard Rheingold (Wired, vol. 7, no. 01, January 1999), is a very interesting piece on the response of the Amish to technological changes. He writes,
[A] dispute over the role of the phone was the principal issue behind the 1920s division of the Amish church, wherein one-fifth of the membership broke away to form their own church.
They are selective in their choice of tools. Like Luddites, they often characterized as being against the new because it is new. Instead, the Amish ask what effect a particular tool will have on the community.
“When the telephone first came out here, people put them in their homes,” explained Moses. “But they were party lines. One time a woman overheard two other women gossiping about her. She objected. That wasn’t what we wanted for our families or our community, so the bishops met and home telephones were banned.”
I had heard the same story from several other Amish – in fact, this story seemed to be a key part of community mythology. A writer named Diane Zimmerman Umble, who grew up in Lancaster County and had family roots in the Plain orders, traced the story to its origin, a 1986 memoir written by an Old Order Amishman born in 1897. As a graduate student, Zimmerman Umble started investigating Amish community telephones for a course on contemporary social theory, and ended up writing a book on the subject, Holding the Line: The Telephone in Old Order Mennonite and Amish Life.
The Amish consideration of the social effects of tool use reveals that we’re often inconsiderate in our use of tools.
How often do we interrupt a conversation with someone who is physically present in order to answer the telephone? Is the family meal enhanced by a beeper? Who exactly is benefiting from call waiting? Is automated voicemail a dark hint about the way our institutions value human time and life? Can pagers and cell phones that vibrate instead of ring solve the problem? Does the enjoyment of virtual communities by growing numbers of people enhance or erode citizen participation in the civic life of geographic communities?