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The buzz of social approval has conditioned us to feed on “regular micro-bursts of validation given by every like, favorite, retweet, or link.”31 This new physiological conditioning means that our lives become more dependent on the moment-by-moment approval of others. The problem is not just that we need to turn away from these micro-bursts of approval, but that we must deprogram ourselves from this online hunger.
This is one reason why we find it so hard to put our phones away. We fear one another, and we want admiration from one another, so we cultivate an inordinate desire for human approval through our social media platforms.
Donna Freitas, The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 20.
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961; repr., New York: Vintage, 1992), 45–76.
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (New York: Picador, 2016), 245.
Suzanne Franks, “Life Before and After Facebook,” The Guardian (Jan. 3, 2015).
The statistics show that Christians who struggle to read books are struggling to break free from poor smartphone habits as one root cause.
“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.
poor digital reading was not a result of the medium, “but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don’t realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book.”
With digital text on our phones, we are conditioned to skim quickly. With a printed book in hand, we naturally read more slowly, at a pace realistic for retention.
Simply put, “If you want to internalize a piece of knowledge, you’ve got to linger over it.”6 But we have been trained...
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the literacy problem we face today is not illiteracy but aliteracy,
whatever the medium (paper or pixels), and whatever the weakness of the medium’s users (forgetfulness or hastiness), we must become mindful and slow our pace.
“The more we take refuge in distraction, the more habituated we become to mere stimulation and the more desensitized to delight. We lose our capacity to stop and ponder something deeply, to admire something beautiful for its own sake, to lose ourselves in the passion for a game, a story, or a person.”
The Bible is our open door to hear God’s voice both alone and together in community.
to skim the Bible is to misread it,
the aim of the Bible is discipleship, to continually form and re-form our thinking, our habits, and our behaviors.
Stern internal warnings caution us to slow down and read with care, prayer, precision, and urgency.
“We readers don’t take dictation; we swim in metaphor.”16 And to appreciate those metaphors, we must deep-dive into the divine text for a lifetime.
when it comes to serious literacy, the faithful church is counterculturally positioned for success, because solid expositional preaching is essentially a model of healthy, slow reading.
God’s Word is an invitation to orient our affections and desires.20 Our challenge is to use social media in the service of serious reading.
So what sort of freaks of self-control must we become to resist the well-engineered marshmallows of distraction? Freaks who believe in 2 Corinthians 4:18, who “look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” And this challenge leads us to our next stop.
Matthew Crawford, The World beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 16–17.
Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (New York: Penguin, 2013), 135.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 7.
Scott R. Swain, Trinity, Revelation, and Reading: A Theological Introduction to the Bible and Its Interpretation (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 95.
Brad Littlejohn, “The Seven Deadly Sins in a Digital Age: 4. Sloth,” Reformation 21, reformation21.org (November 2014).
Daniel M. Doriani, “Take, Read,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 1123–24.
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (New York: HarperOne, 1994), 220.
C. Christopher Smith, Reading for the Common Good: How Books Help Our Churches and Neighborhoods Flourish (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), 27–28.
everything real finds its origin in God—meaning that all of creation is mediated.
God’s words and works always precede man’s words and works. God spoke creation into existence and spoke his definitive word to us in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. God ordered the world, wisdom, and redemption, and he set the stage for human art.
Phones with social connections transform us—and our friends and children—into actors.
perhaps the richest memories in life are better “captured” by our full sensory awareness in the moment—then later written down in a journal.
What if our rhythms of Snapchat selfies and our star-studded Instagram feeds are exposing the dimness of our future hope?
we must humbly admit that we are targets of digital megacorporations that can make us into restless consumers with strategic intermediated content. We cannot be naive here.
we must learn to enjoy our present lives in faith—that is, to enjoy each moment of life without feeling compelled to “capture” it.
we must celebrate. We cannot suppress our souls’ appetite for what is awe-inspiring.
Filled with mediated reality from God, we become eager in our celebration and shrewd in our discernment of intermediated art.
We refuse to be brainless carriers of the most recent viral meme. Instead, we live as Christians offering “dialogical resistance”—which means that we filter the messages of the world through our individual discernment and then share online through a robust theology of reality, possibility, and meaning in God.
“Compulsive social-media habits are a bad trade: your present moment in exchange for an endless series of someone else’s past moments.”
It is only in the absence of constant digital flattery that we can feel small and less significant, more human, liberated to encounter the world we are called to love.
I am not advocating cheesy religious memes, but deep, thoughtful, original reflections that emerge from the place where creation and biblical truth meet your life and worship.
Freedom in Christ is not freedom to do whatever you want; it is for sure-footed self-reflection and for avoiding the cultural bondage of sin.
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.
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?
every day we are leading each other in one of two directions: (1) toward Christ and an eternal beauty that will one day take our breath away or (2) toward rejection of Christ and an eternally distorted ugliness and soul decay, reminiscent of the evil only barely hinted at in modern horror films.
Behind the words in our mouths we find desires in our hearts, and those desires are always sparking new desires in the hearts of others.
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.
Our words destroy us if they are meant to destroy others, but our words build us up if they are meant to bless others. This means that for most of us, with our modest social-media platforms, the greatest influence of our smartphone words will be found in the power and influence they wield over us.
