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So when we talk about “smartphone addiction,” often what we are talking about is the addiction of looking at ourselves.
If we worship idols, we become like the idols.4 Idolatry is the vain attempt to find ultimate meaning in finite things that we can craft and hold in our hands.
It’s a chicken-or-egg question: Does Facebook make us lonely or does it appeal to those of us who are already lonely? That debate is hard to resolve, but it makes one point clear: we have begun giving up on the idea that Facebook, the map of all our human networks, can end our loneliness.
Our smartphones are portable shields we wield in public in order to deter human contact and interaction. When we step into an occupied elevator, we grab our phones like security blankets.
The smartphone is causing a social reversal: the desire to be alone in public and never alone in seclusion. We can be shielded in public and surrounded in isolation, meaning we can escape the awkwardness of human interaction on the street and the boredom of solitude in our homes. Or so we think.
Online, we offer up our lives in stories forged by self-interpretation, and only rarely is our interpretation called into question. In person, however, our interpretations can be pushed back, questioned, and challenged, all for our own good.
Anonymity is where sin flourishes, and anonymity is the most pervasive lie of the digital age.
Smartphones make it possible for users to help themselves to fresh forbidden fruit at any moment of any day, and thereby destroy themselves in secret.
Visual sugar cascades into our lives.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the substance of our hope is not found in the latest visible spectacles on our glowing rectangles. Instead, our hearts delight in and relish a Christ we cannot yet see, a Christ we take by faith, a Christ who is so true and so real to us that we are filled in moments of this life with a periodic and expressive joy that is full of glory. Our imaginations must come alive to Christ so that we can “see” that we live in him, so that we can turn away from the visual vices grabbing our eyes, and so that we can live by faith and share a present joy as we anticipate
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In the end, I wonder if most of the self-destructive patterns in our lives—from overeating to worrying to fighting to overspending to grabbing our phones first thing in the morning—are the result of starved imaginations, malnourished of hope.
When we live for what is visible and ignore what is invisible, we illustrate the definition of faithlessness. True faith lives for what is invisible and undisclosed.
“True freedom from the bondage of technology comes not mainly from throwing away the smartphone, but from filling the void with the glories of Jesus that you are trying to fill with the pleasures of the device.”29 Our challenge in the digital age is twofold: 1. On the external front: Are we safeguarding ourselves and practicing smartphone self-denial? 2. On the internal front: Are we simultaneously seeking to satisfy our hearts with divine glory that is, for now, largely invisible?
Online information is increasingly hyperpalatable, akin to alluring junk food. Breaking news, tabloid gossip, viral memes, and the latest controversies in sports, politics, and entertainment all draw us to our phones as if they were deep-fried Twinkies held out on sticks at the state fair. Digital delicacies are eye-grabbing and appealing, but they lack nutrition.
Social media is not replacing the mass media; it is becoming the filter through which the content produced by the mass media must now pass to reach untold masses.
We can be tech-savvy fools.
Yes, to have smartphones is amazing, but to have the Internet on our phones is to also have immediate access to all of the world’s major tragedies, sorrows, bombings, and acts of terrorism. Are we prepared to carry this burden?
“The sobering question for the disciple is whether our attention is being drawn to something worthwhile.
This desire for personal affirmation is perhaps the smartphone’s strongest lure, and it is only amplified when we feel the sting of loneliness or suffering in our lives. At the first hint of discomfort, we instinctively grab our phones to medicate the pain with affirmation. This habit could not be more damaging.
Behind the first sin was a desire for a “different” life. We can all imagine better lives, yes, and in the words of one novelist, “sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living.”12 The strain of living just one life is enough, but give yourself time to think about all the other lives you could be living, and the weight of possibilities will press down and lure you to a mirage of escapism just as it did for Adam and Eve. This is FOMO.
For those of us who are not “called” into a situation (the majority of us), our script calls for us to take the very countercultural posture of self-restraint, of not talking about the sins in question.
In fact, as the script makes clear, the conclusions of two or three believers who are called into a particular situation bear far greater weight in God’s eyes than those of two or three hundred people filled with anger, frothing up one another in Facebook comments.
The most viral emotion is anger; the most viral story is scandal.
We get lost in the virtual world and become oblivious to the flesh-and-blood world around us, and we lose our sense of time.
cultural idols are the most poignant expression of God-forgetting.7 Idols cut us off from remembering the past mercy of God and blind us to his future grace. Idolatry skews the whole way you see yourself inside of the story written by the Creator.
Cast off everything that distracts, unfetter your life from the chains that trip your ankles, and bolt with freedom and joy as you follow Christ.
We have one shot, one event—one life. We must shake off every sinful habit and every ounce of unnecessary distraction. We must run.
On and on I flicked down a list of disconnected and fragmented items, and most of them only barely important or interesting. I was not edified or served, only further fatigued because of missing a nap I should have taken or a walk I could have taken, and easily lured back to my phone for more.
Led by our unchecked digital appetites, we manage to transgress both commands that promise to bring focus to our lives. We fail to enjoy God. We fail to love our neighbor.
We must watch for signs that our worship is veering off course. We can no longer simply worship God in admiration or pray to him without a compulsive fidgeting for our phones.
Our bondage to technology is measured by our inability to thoughtfully criticize ourselves. What shall it profit a man if he gains all the latest digital devices and all of the techniques of touch-screen mastery but loses his own soul? Are we courageous enough to ask?
In an act of courageous self-criticism, I must ask three questions: Ends: Do my smartphone behaviors move me toward God or away from him? Influence: Do my smartphone behaviors edify me and others, or do they build nothing of lasting value? Servitude: Do my smartphone behaviors expose my freedom in Christ or my bondage to technique?
Technophobic pride says, “God, I thank you that I’m not like this gadget addict who is distracted by his devices and feeding on the banal trivialities of the fake world.” Technophiliac pride says, “God, I thank you that I’m not like this tech despiser who is too undisciplined to manage the digital distractions of the real world.” Both views are arrogant.
The essential question we must constantly ask ourselves in the quickly evolving age of digital technology is not what can I do with my phone, but what should I do with it? That answer, as we have seen, can be resolved only by understanding why we exist in the first place.
Giving up a smartphone is not only one of the bravest and most countercultural acts of defiance possible today, it is a gift to others.
in January 1935, Chesterton confronted technological amnesia in a column about modern marvels, titled “Our Indifference to Wonders.”6 It remains one of the most important contributions to Christians in the digital age.
