How the Amish Adopt Technology Selectively to Protect Community Life

In 2012, when Facebook had reached one billion monthly users and about half of Americans regularly used smartphones, a doctoral researcher in media studies at Indiana University began studying Amish communities in northern Indiana, located within a few hours of settlements in Elkhart, LaGrange and Daviess counties. The researcher had expected to find that the Amish prize simple living, communal values and religious discipline, and resist technologies such as cars, television and electricity. In early conversations, Amish leaders said they worried that new tools such as smartphones and social media might diminish the sense of purpose people feel in their communities and disrupt rituals, traditions and established communication patterns. Over three years of fieldwork, the researcher said, the focus shifted from the restrictions themselves to the social life those restrictions were meant to protect. The researcher concluded that the Amish are technology-agnostic and care most about what a new technology would mean for the surrounding community.

The researcher described a device called the “black-box phone,” which was the subject of much debate in one settlement. A business owner named Joe said the device, a landline phone connected to the cellular network through an attachment, was developed because roughly 100 construction crews left the settlement each day and needed to communicate while away from home. Several ministers in that settlement, according to the account, believed that cell phones already owned by some members should be abandoned, partly because private text messages could facilitate extramarital relationships and smartphones could expose users to pornography. The black-box phone allows only public, audible conversation, with no texting or internet access, and it is shared among crew members. Ministers hoped the device would make individual cell phone ownership unnecessary.

A second example was the “plain computer.” The researcher wrote that the first such machine, the “Classic Word Processor,” was created in 2005 by Allen Hoover, a “horse and buggy” Mennonite, for fellow Anabaptists. Plain computers can run word processing, spreadsheet and invoicing programs and can draw and print, but they lack a modem, a phone port, an internet connection, outside programs, sound, photographs and games, according to an advertisement cited in the essay. The researcher also described a furniture maker named Daniel, whose non-Amish customers had moved their ordering online. Daniel does not use the internet or email, and he found a service called PcFreeMail, popular among the Amish, that exchanges email through a fax machine or word processor. The researcher said the process is slower than modern customer-management systems, but that it allows Daniel to keep his business running without compromising his values.

The researcher said such arrangements often reflect both deference to Amish authorities and resistance to non-Amish ways, and that questions about “proper usage” are continually negotiated by members and leaders. The essay profiled Noah, a 57-year-old entrepreneur and minister who uses a smartphone, email, text messages and a Facebook account. Noah described his approach through three C’s: conviction, meaning modeling right behavior; confession, meaning asking others to hold you accountable; and contrition, meaning being willing to own up to mistakes. He told the researcher, “Whether or not you use a technology is less important than how you use it.” The researcher said that many Amish people belong to churches with rules against owning cell phones yet own them anyway.

The researcher addressed how this might look to outsiders. “At a cynical first glance, one might simply read this as blatant hypocrisy,” the essay states, but interviews with Amish leaders suggested that such inconsistencies were not evidence of people exploiting loopholes in the Ordnung, the church rules. Instead, the researcher wrote, members have the freedom to adapt, choosing tools suited to their work and their values, and these individual decisions are made through sustained conversation within families and churches but are not written into the Ordnung.

The researcher identified three informal mechanisms that operate alongside formal rules to shape how tools are used: teaching the “proper use” of a technology, relying on older arrangements to guide future action, and presenting proper use as a symbol of group identity.

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