"Creation Over Consumption: Practising Discernment Online." By Erin Carson DeWolfe.

When I was 11 years old, my dad—then a programmer analyst at UVic—told me about this new thing called “the internet,” which he had just started playing around with at his office. (I later learned that the ’net had been around since the 1960s, but only at the dawn of the 1990s was it beginning to gain global traction.) There was this tool called “email” that allowed you to send an electronic “letter” almost instantly to somebody else, anywhere in the world, who also had a computer connected to the internet

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We didn’t yet have the internet at home, but my dad had found a list of kids my age looking for email pen pals and asked me if I’d like to try it. So began my first foray into the wonders of our hyper-connected age: writing out letters to my Texas pen pal, which my dad would type out and send for me, printing her replies to bring home when she responded.

When I was 14, we finally got the internet at home, and I took to it like a duck to water. I had already loved computers and technology for my whole short life. I remember my dad taking me to work when I was very young and showing me the mainframe computer, with its lights and whirling tape reels. Later, he introduced me to simple computer programs like Logo, where one programmed a “turtle” (the cursor) with commands to draw lines, shapes, and geometric patterns across the screen. To my young and curious mind, it all seemed magical and futuristic.

My mom, an elementary school teacher, brought home an Apple computer from the school computer lab for my sisters and me to play with every summer - and often over spring break and Christmas break as well. I spent my allotted time trying to keep my settlers alive along the Oregon Trail, learning to code in Apple BASIC, and creating interactive games using HyperCard, a late-1980s program that allowed you to connect a stack of virtual cards containing words and graphics by creating clickable “links” on interactive objects within them. (If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same system—hypermedia—later used to create the World Wide Web.)

When I was eight, the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication (a.k.a. Expo 86) came to Vancouver, with its bright futurism and larger-than-life vision. Expo Ernie, the international pavilions, the Expo Centre, and even the floating McBarge all showed me a vision of an exciting future full of connection and technological wonder.

In adulthood, my fascination with technology has not waned - I still work in IT, for one thing—although my wariness of it has increased.

It’s not technology itself that scares me. Like any tool, the internet is neutral. AI is neutral. Cryptocurrency (and money itself) is neutral. Human hands, however, are driven by primal, misunderstood drives; we tend to turn our inventions toward gratifying our greed and pacifying our fear, rather than examining our motives, healing our wounds, and connecting with one another.

It’s a tragedy to me that the object of my wonder and hope has come to represent the worst of who we are. Romance scams. Crypto schemes. Cesspits of dangerous misinformation. Hatred, separation, and xenophobia. Mindless evangelism and conspiracy theories that drive people into madness. A capitalist swamp of manufactured fear, followed by solutions that are often more profitable than they are healing.

What troubles me most is not that technology is being used this way, but how familiar the pattern is. We have always taken our most powerful tools and bent them toward domination, distraction, and control. The internet did not invent these impulses; it simply made them more visible, scalable, and impossible to ignore.

In that sense, technology has become a mirror, reflecting back to us not only our brilliance and creativity but also our unhealed wounds and unexamined fears.

Still, I can’t bring myself to abandon it—perhaps because I remember what it once felt like. I remember technology as something that invited participation rather than passivity, curiosity rather than outrage. I remember learning by making: building small worlds in HyperCard, coaxing a turtle across a screen with careful instructions, writing letters to a stranger and waiting, patiently, for a reply. Those experiences were not about speed, profit, or scale; they were about connection, imagination, and agency.

That difference still matters.

When I use technology to create—to write, to design, to make music, to solve problems, to help people find their way—I feel more myself. My attention settles. Time behaves differently. There is a sense of participation in something larger than my own consumption. When I use it mindlessly, when I scroll or react or absorb without reflection, the opposite happens: my attention fractures, my nervous system tightens, and meaning thins out.

This is where spirituality enters the conversation for me: not as a rejection of technology, but as a practice of discernment. Spiritual traditions across cultures ask us to pay attention—to our motives, our habits, our attachments, and the ways we give our time and focus away. Technology makes that work more difficult, but also more urgent. It constantly asks us, “Who are you becoming while you use this?”

I don’t believe the answer is purity or withdrawal. We cannot—and perhaps should not—return to some imagined pre-digital innocence. Technology has helped us heal, learn, connect, and create beauty. It has expanded human knowledge and possibility in ways for which I remain genuinely grateful. But neither can we pretend that our tools are harmless when used without care.

So I live in the tension. I build with technology, and I step away from it. I remain wary, and I remain hopeful. I try, imperfectly, to choose creation over consumption, depth over velocity, relationship over reach. I fail often. I begin again.

Perhaps that, too, is a spiritual practice.

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Erin Carson DeWolfe is a communications and IT professional with a lifelong fascination with technology and a background in web design, digital marketing, client relations, and data management. She and her husband, Shawn, co-own Web321 Marketing, where they help small businesses and non-profits use technology intelligently to thrive online. Erin is also a spiritual seeker and a third-generation Unitarian, and currently serves as Communications Coordinator for the Unitarian Universalist Community of Victoria.

To connect with Erin about this reflection, please e-mail TCS at admin@contemplative.org.  Your e-mails will be forwarded onto her.