I was excited to set up my blog today using WordPress, which I’ve used extensively through my non-profit work. I was reminded that while we have been programmed to expect smooth, instantaneous responses from the internet, things still take time, and get tangled and jammed up behind the scenes. For example, my initial blog title “Rooted Reciprocity” caused a mysterious jam in the Wordpres server, but my secondary choice, “Rooted in Reciprocity,” set up successfully. Was it the name itself, or the link I clicked to complete setup, or just my timing that made the difference? I’m not sure, but this seemingly arbitrary differentiation illustrated that, despite what often feels transactional and uni-directional, my relationship with digital technology may be more complex. I ask technology to be responsive to me, but when things go awry, I must be responsive to it. We are in relationship.
I notice I wrote that last sentence reluctantly. I love to think about how I’m in relationship with plants, soil, water, people. I consider these elements part of my ecosystem community – we give and receive gifts from each other. We are reciprocally related. I don’t want to admit that I’m in relationship with digital technology. I want to believe I use it because I have to, because of our societal dependence upon it; I want to imagine that we’re not so intimately connected. And yet, I hold my phone more often than I hold my partner’s hand. I gaze into a screen longer than I look into my kids’ eyes. While I am working on switching up that ratio, I wonder, what if I also switched up how I thought about my relationship with digital technology? What if I grounded it in gratitude and considered what I received and could give in return? Can I root my relationship with technology in reciprocity?