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watch the triumph of useful efficiency over meaningless habit.
the time is short. Don’t waste it parading your mule. Make him work. His Maker will be pleased.
A tool of communication is a tool for communicating something.” He then echoed the question from Wells: “Media don’t just lie around passively, waiting for us to come along and find them useful for some project we have in mind. 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 feel the squeeze of this catch-22. I want to become skilled at winning attention online (for Christ), but I also want to ask critical questions about my own phone impulses, habits, and assumptions.
The question of this book is simple: What is the best use of my smartphone in the flourishing of my life?
we must ask ourselves: What technologies serve my aims? And what are my goals in the first place? Without clear answers here, we can make no progress in thinking through the pros and cons of smartphones as Christians.
we all need to stop and reflect on our impulsive smartphone habits because, in an age when our eyes and hearts are captured by the latest polished gadget, we need more self-criticism, not less.
I pray that this book educates and equips you to enjoy freedom in life to taste deeper the infinite joy we have in Christ, leaving mediocre indulgences behind for deeper and more satisfying pleasures ahead.
Just because a struggle we face in our digital lives also relates to nondigital contexts does not mean that the conversation with digital communication is averted—it means that Scripture proves its ongoing relevance in the digital age.
technology is always an extension of the self.
Too often what my phone exposes in me is not the holy desires of what I know I should want, not even what I think I want, and especially not what I want you to think I want. My phone screen divulges in razor-sharp pixels what my heart really wants.
whatever happens on my smartphone, especially under the guise of anonymity, is the true exposé of my heart, reflected in full-color pixels back into my eyes.
God is the genesis of all knowledge and technological advance, and he is the author and finisher of a glorified city to come. Why would a mud skyscraper impress him?
For better or worse, technology fundamentally changes how we talk about God. And technology shapes the way God communicates himself to us. God makes himself clear to us through metaphors of technology, and we find it possible to define him, and also to distort him, by projecting metaphors of technology onto him.
Ofir Turel, a psychologist at California State University-Fullerton, warns that Facebook addicts, unlike compulsive drug abusers, “have the ability to control their behavior, but they don’t have the motivation to control this behavior because they don’t see the consequences to be that severe.”
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.
if the study of online trends shows a tsunami of digital distractions crashing into our lives, we need situational wisdom to answer three spiritual questions: Why are we lured to distractions? What is a distraction? And, most foundational of all, what is the undistracted life?
“dividing attention is a typical expression of disdain.”
we retreat into our phones—projecting our scorn for complex situations or for boring people. In both cases, when we grab our phones, we air our sense of superiority to others—often without knowing it.
if you “take away their diversion, you will see them dried up with weariness,” because it is to be ushered into unhappiness “as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self, and have no diversion.”
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.
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
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 run away like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, our masters”—clicking, scrolling, tapping, liking, sharing . . . anything. “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
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A distraction can come in many forms: a new amusement, a persistent worry, or a vain aspiration. It is something that diverts our minds and hearts from what is most significant; anything “which monopolizes the heart’s concerns.”
True distractions include anything (even a good thing) that veils our spiritual eyes from the shortness of time and from the urgency of the season of heightened expectation as we await the summing up of all history.
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.
Here’s the warning: as Christians, if we fail to manage life’s distractions wisely, we will lose our urgency and—in the sobering words of one smartphone-addicted mom of young children—we may “forget how to walk with the Lord.”37
The more distracted we are digitally, the more displaced we become spiritually.
God calls his children to stop, study what captures their attention in this world, weigh the consequences, and fight for undistracted hearts before him.
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
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Rebecca Strong, “Brain Scans Show How Facebook and Cocaine Addictions Are the Same,” BostInno, bostinno.streetwise.co (Feb. 3, 2015).
Derek Rishmawy, “Forget Me Not (Twitter and the Fear of Death),” Reformedish, derekzrishmawy.com (April 6, 2016).
Tracy Fruehauf, “Airing My Dirty Laundry,” One Frue Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, onefrueoverthecuckoosnest.com (Aug. 18, 2015).
As we drive, our phones ping, our brains get a shot of dopamine, and very often our decisions express our own neighbor negligence.
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.
We are more likely to bubble with rage toward others screen to screen instead of face to face, and researchers call this phenomenon “anonymous anger.”
“relative anonymity, a lack of authority and consequences, and solipsistic introjection—
Our typing thumbs lack empathy without living faces in front of us. It is much easier to slander an online avatar than a real-life brother.
In the smartphone age, when our cognitive actions are separated from our bodily presence, we tend to overprioritize the relatively easy interactions in the disembodied online world and undervalue the embodied nature of the Christian faith.
Matt Richtel, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age (New York: William Morrow, 2015).
Alastair Roberts, “Twitter Is Like Elizabeth Bennet’s Meryton,” Mere Orthodoxy, mereorthodoxy.com (Aug. 18, 2015).
“That’s the dream of replication,” Laing says with stinging insight, “infinite attention, infinite regard.”11 But it’s a lie of the celebrity culture: replicated images of the self will never deliver the intimacy they promise.
online attention proves to be an incapable substitute for true intimacy, and the addiction to a crafted online image renders true intimacy impossible.
Communities that fail to embrace the benefits of disagreements and fail to work through tensions and differences tend to become homogeneous and unhealthy, because they “tend to have exaggerated blindspots and unaddressed weaknesses.”
it’s hard to grow together as a team when each player is preoccupied with individual performance and popularity,
it’s hard to grow as a family when children bring the hyperapproval climate of school into the home through their ubiquitous phones.
Boring team meetings and boring family times are truly opportunities for personal growth in places of unconditional love, providing the soul a respite from t...
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this mingling with people we don’t know or understand in our local churches is incredibly valuable for our souls. Church is a place for real encounters with others and for true self-disclosure among other sinners. In the healthy local church, I do not fear rejection. In the healthy local church, I can pursue a spiritual depth that requires agitation, frustration, and the discomfort of being with people who conform not to “my” kingdom but to God’s. The challenge for us is to “cherish corporate worship, that most counter-cultural of practices, for which no virtual substitute can be found.”
The fear we feel in our hearts when we are engaged online is the impulse that drives our “highly selective self-representation.”
