12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke

They tell us what to do and, more significantly, what to want to do. There is a current in the stream, and if we don’t know how to swim, we shall be carried by it. I see someone doing something and I want to do it, too. Then I forget whatever it was that I thought I wanted to do.”

Technology does not make our words more temporary—if anything, it makes them more durable. If we must give an account of every idle word, we are probably the first generation that can truly appreciate the volume of our idle words, since we have published more of them than any group in human history.

Can we agree that some of the most important smartphone questions will also apply to nondigital conversations?

My phone screen divulges in razor-sharp pixels what my heart really wants.

Technology is used to subdue creation for human good, but also to increase efficiency.

Technology is the reordering of raw materials for human purposes.

Every time we open our Bibles, our souls are being fed through centuries of technological advancement.

From trumpets and temples to gold-edged Bibles, God intended technology to play an essential role for us to know and worship him.

The mockery of this treasonous act is also partially comic—man builds his temple up as high as possible, and then the living God of the universe stoops down to his knees and puts his cheek on the ground in order to evaluate the progress.9 This is always what happens when technology is misused in unbelief.

Technology is not inherently evil, but it tends to become the platform of choice to express the fantasy of human autonomy.

Evil was defeated by technology, all by God’s sovereign design. Technology, even in the hands of the most evil intention of man, is never outside the overruling plan of God. In this case, Calvary was hacked. God broke into the technology of the cross “and with a little twist reversed its function.”14 God does this: he makes a mockery of our evil technologies through his sovereign hackery.

Or perhaps we adapt so readily because, as Jacques Ellul suggested, our technology exerts a sort of terrorism over us.18 We live under the threat that if we fail to embrace new technologies, we will be pushed aside into cultural obsolescence, left without key skills we need to get a job, disconnected from cultural conversations, and separated from our friends.

the more addicted you become to your phone, the more prone you are to depression and anxiety, and the less able you are to concentrate at work and sleep at night.

Unhealthy digital addictions flourish because we fail to see the consequences, so let’s begin our study by uncovering three reasons why we succumb to distractions so easily. First, we use digital distractions to keep work away. Facebook is a way of escape from our vocational pressures. We procrastinate around hard things: work deadlines, tough conversations, laundry piles, and school projects and papers. The average American college student wastes 20 percent of class time tinkering on a digital device, doing things unrelated to class (a statistic that seems low to me!).5 When life becomes most demanding, we crave something else—anything else. Second, we use digital distractions to keep people away. God has called us to love our neighbors, yet we turn to our phones to withdraw from our neighbors and to let everyone know we’d rather be somewhere else.

Third, we use digital distractions to keep thoughts of eternity away. Perhaps most subtly, we find it easy to fall into the trap of digital distractions because, in the most alluring new apps, we find a welcome escape from our truest, rawest, and most honest self-perceptions.

the human appetite for distraction is high in every age, because distractions give us easy escape from the silence and solitude whereby we become acquainted with our finitude, our inescapable mortality, and the distance of God from all our desires, hopes, and pleasures.

“We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us.” In fact, “we want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”

God feels distant because we are distracted.

First Corinthians 7 is the most detailed biblical theology of distraction and the pursuit of undistraction. Once we wrestle through what it means for marriage, we are positioned to apply those same categories to our digital lives.

To put it another way, our battle against the encumbering distractions of this world—especially the unnecessary distractions of our phones—is a heart war we can wage only if our affections are locked firmly on the glory of Christ. The answer to our hyperkinetic digital world of diversions is the soul-calming sedative of Christ’s splendor, beheld with the mind and enjoyed by the soul. The beauty of Christ calms us and roots our deepest longings in eternal hopes that are far beyond what our smartphones can ever hope to deliver.

To that end, here are ten diagnostic questions we can ask ourselves in the digital age: 1. Do my smartphone habits expose an underlying addiction to untimely amusements? 2. Do my smartphone habits reveal a compulsive desire to be seen and affirmed? 3. Do my smartphone habits distract me from genuine communion with God? 4. Do my smartphone habits provide an easy escape from sobered thinking about my death, the return of Christ, and eternal realities? 5. Do my smartphone habits preoccupy me with the pursuit of worldly success? 6. Do my smartphone habits mute the sporadic leading of God’s Spirit in my life? 7. Do my smartphone habits preoccupy me with dating and romance? 8. Do my smartphone habits build up Christians and my local church? 9. Do my smartphone habits center on what is necessary to me and beneficial to others? 10. Do my smartphone habits disengage me from the needs of the neighbors God has placed right in front of me?

We assume we can ignore the people we see in order to care for the people we don’t see, but that idea is all twisted backward.7

“Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink [modern technology for John]. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12). John used technology to communicate, but he knew that his letter was only part of the communication.

the epidemic of texting and driving (among many other epidemics) is an attempted escape from the limits of our flesh-and-blood nature. We try to break through the boundaries of time and space, and we end up ignoring the flesh and blood around us. In reality, we are finite. We assume that we can drive cars and read and write on our phones all at the same time, but we are weaker than our assumptions. To exist is to be walled in by physical limitations—boundaries and thresholds that limit what we can perceive and accomplish. When we always see our lives through glass, we forget that we are made of flesh and blood.

And nothing traps people in unhealthy social-media patterns like personal insecurity.

“The passage of time, which creates and establishes the hero, destroys the celebrity. One is made, the other unmade, by repetition.”10

The physical defects, limitations, and awkwardnesses that we are born with, or that we now live with, can all be dissolved and glossed over online. Hiding our unflattering features is very natural and easy online, but excruciatingly hard and unnatural offline, in healthy local churches and honest friendships. Self-editing is less possible in genuine face-to-face relationships.

Maybe this is a key function of church attendance in the digital age. We must withdraw from our online worlds to gather as a body in our local churches. We gather to be seen, to feel awkward, and perhaps to feel a little unheard and underappreciated, all on purpose. In obedience to the biblical command not to forsake meeting together,21 we each come as one small piece, one individual member, one body part, in order to find purpose, life, and value in union with the rest of the living body of Christ. This feeling of awkwardness, this leaving the safety of our online friendships, this mingling with people we don’t know or understand in our local churches is incredibly valuable for our souls.

The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation.

“You lose something great, and you gain something pitiful,” Piper explains. “What do you gain? You gain the praise of man. You want it? You get it. It’s like a drug. It gives a buzz, and then it is gone. You have got to have another fix. And it leaves you always insecure. You are always needy of other people’s praise in order to be happy or to feel secure. You are never satisfied.”

Those who feed on little nibbles of immediate approval from man will eternally starve. But those who aim their entire lives toward the glory and approval of God will find, in Christ, eternal approval.

The fragmentary nature of the online world makes this type of concentration difficult to maintain—all by design.

“Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.” Without the ability to focus our minds, our attention is led by others, and we are easily captured by “the omnipresent purveyors of marshmallows”—the alluring distractions on our phones.

It can be said that literacy has fallen to such a degree that, for many Christians today (perhaps most Christians today), the Bible stands as the oldest, longest, and most complicated book we will ever try to read on our own. Simultaneously, every lure and temptation of the digital age is convincing us to give up difficult, sustained work for the immediate and impulsive content we can skim.

All of creation is a footpath back to God.

to express Christ-honoring art means that everything we create, share, and spread on our phones—paintings, music, photography, poems, and books—can amplify God’s natural and special revelation. So we aim to produce art that reflects God’s glory in undiminished splendor.

In either case, in everything we make, we add a layer of interpretation. So I must always ask myself, does my digital art dim glory or reflect glory?

We must be aware that all the content on the “small screen” of our phones is intermediated. This is not good or bad, just a reality that calls for discernment and discretion. On our phones, we have high-definition portals into the vast beauties and glories of creation, but every message we receive has been cut, edited, and produced for a purpose.

This distinction also keeps our smartphone screens in proper context when it comes to God’s massive glories—seen and unseen—that surround our lives.

What is true of our cameras is true of every smartphone behavior—the power to immediately share anything we see or do conditions what we capture in the first place.

What if the point-and-shoot cameras in our phones make us less capable of retaining discrete memories? One psychologist calls this camera-induced amnesia the “photo-taking impairment effect,”19 and it works like this: by outsourcing the memory of a moment to our camera, we flatten out the event into a 2-D snapshot and proceed to ignore its many other contours—such as context, meaning, smells, touch, and taste.

If the cameras in our pockets mute our moments into 2-D memories, perhaps the richest memories in life are better “captured” by our full sensory awareness in the moment—then later written down in a journal. This simple practice has proven to be a rich means of preserving memories for people throughout the centuries. Photography is a blessing, but if we impulsively turn to our camera apps too quickly, our minds can fail to capture the true moments and the rich details of an experience in exchange for visually flattened memories. Point-and-shoot cameras may in fact be costing us our most vivid recollections.

Again, this medium is not inherently wrong. Digital art and messaging can be done for God’s glory, and done well. But we must see that we are being conditioned to turn to our phones when we want to be amazed and wowed, and in turn, we are being milked for corporate profit.

Second, we must learn to enjoy our present lives in faith—that is, to enjoy each moment of life without feeling compelled to “capture” it.

My freedom in Christ gives me eyes to see that not all things are helpful for me, helpful for others, or acceptable for my witness in the world. In principle, Paul continually presses Christian creators to ask three questions: Ends: Do my art and social media point others toward God? Influence: Do my art and social media serve and build up my audience? Servitude: Do my art and social media imprison me into an unhealthy bondage to my medium?

Sticks and stones may break bones, but my texts and tweets are pushing eternal souls in one of two directions. Let this sobering truth guide your art.

Kill the sinful habits of life that misuse God’s good gifts of digital media while praising the Giver for the gifts of digital media by employing digital media with missional purpose.

Before you text, tweet, or publish digital art online, honestly ask yourself: Will this ultimately glorify me or God? Will this stir or muffle healthy affections for Christ? Will this merely document that I know something that others don’t? Will this misrepresent me or is it authentic? Will this potentially breed jealousy in others? Will this fortify unity or stir up unnecessary division? Will this build up or tear down? Will this heap guilt or relieve it? Will this fuel lust for sin or warn against it? Will this overpromise and instill false hopes in others?

In the gospel, we find our message and our commission in the digital age. So we pray, “Lord, let no corrupting talk come off my thumbs, but only what is good for building up, as fits the occasion, so that my social-media investment will give grace to those who see it.”

like Narcissus staring down into the water, enchanted with himself, we bend over our phones—and what most quickly captures our attention is our own reflection: our replicated images, our tabulations of approval, and our accumulated “likes.” Social media has become the new PR firm of the brand Self, and we check our feeds compulsively and find it nearly impossible to turn away from looking at—and loving—our “second self.”