12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke

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.

This all means that my phone marks a place in time and space—outside of me—where I can project my relationships, my longings, and the full scope of my conscious existence. In fact, hold up the word “desire” in a mirror and it will read “erised,” the name of the magic mirror in the Harry Potter books.21 In the ancient Mirror of Erised, you see the deepest longings of your heart revealed in vivid color. Our shiny smartphone screens do the same.

Partly this is because household gods of carved stone or wood and handheld idols of silver and gold, common in the ancient world, were not tools. These idols were more like our technologies, divine oracles of knowledge and prosperity, used by worshipers in an attempt to control and manipulate the events of life for personal benefit. The figurine and the iPhone appeal to the same fetish.

Driving every diversion, from international warfare to international tourism, is the promise of escaping boredom at home, said Pascal in his day: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

Staring at the ceilings of our quiet bedrooms, with only our thoughts about ourselves, reality, and God, is unbearable. “Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible.”10 To be without the constant availability of distraction is solitary confinement, a punishment to be most dreaded. That is why in those moments when we realize we have forgotten our phone, lost it, or let the battery run out, we taste the captivity of a prison cell, and it can be frightening.

“We live in a very loquacious, noisy, distracted culture,” says philosopher Douglas Groothuis, who has been tracking the digital world’s influence on Christians for more than twenty years since writing his 1997 book, The Soul in Cyberspace. “It is difficult to serve God with our heart, soul, strength and mind when we are diverted and distracted and multi-tasking everything.”20 Historian Bruce Hindmarsh adds, “Our spiritual condition today is one of spiritual ADD.”

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?

From the opening narrative of God becoming flesh, the New Testament is thick with the idea of embodiment. Keep reading, and Scripture describes the nature of God’s people: we are individual members of the church, and our unity amid diversity finds expression in metaphors of the multisensory and multifunctional nature of the human body.14 Keep reading, and Paul encourages holy kisses (awkward!).15 He also warns us not to neglect our gathering together,16 and focuses on two common church celebrations: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Both sacraments are essential to our gatherings and contain multiple layers of compound embodiments. We cannot be baptized or feast at the Lord’s Table on our phones.

First, the itch for human approval ultimately renders faith pointless.24 Why? Because faith is the act of being satisfied with Christ, says John Piper, “and if you are bent on getting your satisfaction from scratching the itch of self-regard, people’s affirmation, you will turn away from Jesus, because you can’t serve two masters.” In other words, he says, “In a solid, God-chosen relationship with Jesus, man’s disapproval cannot hurt you and man’s approval cannot satisfy you. Therefore, to fear the one and crave the other is sheer folly.”25 It is unbelief.

The trade is horrible. “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.”30 We wake up each day hungrier than ever for validation.

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?

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?

Whether or not we see it, worship is the fundamental dynamic of our molding. And this is why, no matter how fiercely independent we are, we never find our identity within ourselves. We must always look outside of ourselves for identity, to our group fit and to our loves. Both dynamics reveal the truth: we are becoming like what we see. We are becoming like what we worship. Or, to put this in Facebook terms directly, we are becoming like what we like.

preserving our isolation, we unwittingly walk right into one of the world’s most brilliant marketing traps. “For manufacturers and marketers, human beings are best when they are alone, since individuals are forced to buy one consumer item each, whereas family or community members share,” writes Slade. “Technology’s movement toward miniaturization serves this end by making personal electronics suitable for individual users. For today’s carefully trained consumers, sharing is an intrusion on personal space.”10

The most shaping conversations we need are full of friction, and we simply cannot have them on our frictionless phones.

Maybe I need to embrace the awkwardness of cross-cultural, cross-language barriers.

Perhaps it’s not going too far to say that we love social media “because it comes without the hazards and commitments of a real-world community” or because we really harbor “a deep disappointment with human beings, who are flawed and forgetful, needy and unpredictable, in ways that machines are wired not to be.”

Novelty Candy. We want to be informed about what is new in the world and new among our friends, and we don’t want to be left out of something newsworthy or noteworthy. 2. Ego Candy. We want to know what people are saying about us and how they are responding to things we’ve said and posted. 3. Entertainment Candy. We want to feed on what is fascinating, weird, strange, wonderful, shocking, or spellbinding. 4. Boredom Avoidance. We want to put off the day ahead, especially when it looks boring and routine, and holds nothing of fascination to capture our interest. 5. Responsibility Avoidance. We want to put off the burdens of the roles God has given us as fathers, mothers, bosses, employees, and students. 6. Hardship Avoidance. We want to put off dealing with relational conflicts or the pain, disease, and disabilities in our bodies.24

Therapeutic materialism is a scam. We order boxes of new goods that will never heal us and we buy bags of comfort food that will never truly comfort us, all because we are blind to the free gifts of God offered in his Son, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood have been given to us to sustain our eternal life and to feed the flourishing of our unceasing joy.20 Jesus quenches the deep thirst that consumerism cannot slake.

“when media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply, and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload.”

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?

We can sharevand receive prayer requests across the globe, but what does that do to us?

FOMO is the primeval human fear, the first fear stoked in our hearts when a slithering Serpent spoke softly of a one-time opportunity that proved too good to miss. “Eat from the one forbidden tree, Eve, ‘and you will be like God.’”

While there are many “one anothers” in the Bible, “compare one another” is not one of them, and yet this is the direction we tilt online.

Run with diligence. 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.

And if our digital technology becomes our god, our wand of power, it will inevitably shape us into technicians who gain mastery over a dead world of conveniences. Aimlessly flicking through feeds and images for hours, we feel that we are in control of our devices, when we are really puppets being controlled by a lucrative industry.

We can no longer simply worship God in admiration or pray to him without a compulsive fidgeting for our phones. We talk more about God than we talk to him.

In our love of mechanisms, techniques, and power, we lose our way—and we lose our worship and our prayer, because God has grown secondary to our technology. But God is the sovereign King who will not bow to our gadget mastery. Apps can help me stay focused on my Bible reading plans and help me organize my prayer life, but no app can breathe life into my communion with God.

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?

“has been a rapidity in things going stale; a rush downhill to the flat and dreary world of the prosaic; a haste of marvelous things to lose their marvelous character; a deluge of wonders to destroy wonder. This may be the improvement of machinery, but it cannot possibly be the improvement of man.”

Chesterton believed that materialism was behind both ideas: the phone will damn us or the phone will save us. It is just as idolatrous to blaspheme a phone as it is to worship a phone. The solution is for us to wisely enjoy the smartphone—imaginatively, transcendentally, as something that should deepen our wonder.

But our world is still only a dim reflection. Our strongest walls and our best roads are steel, concrete, and black asphalt, not clear gold. Glass cannot carry the weight of our cities, and until it does, glory cannot pass through our world like the new world we read about. For now, we are illuminated constantly by the flickering rectangles of our devices, but not continuously by the glory of Christ’s physical presence.