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threefold ethical paradigm for all of Christian living: (1) kill the sinful habits of life that misuse God’s good gifts while (2) magnifying the Giver for the gifts themselves by (3) employing the gifts 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?
Jeff Jacoby, “Free Your Eyes from the Shackles of the Shutter,” The Boston Globe (Oct. 4, 2015).
Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 45.
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965),
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.”
There is an old adage that says, “We are not who we think we are; we are not even who others think we are; we are who we think others think we are.”
for those celebrities and athletes still in their prime, emulation pays big, because they represent the glory we want to possess ourselves. To behold majesty is a phenomenon that begins to chip and sculpt the contours of our identity.
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.
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.
Our idols dehumanize us; they petrify our souls, and dumb and dull and deaden all of our spiritual senses.
The object of our worship is the object of our imitation. God designed this inseparable pattern. What we want to become, we worship. And what we worship shapes our becoming. This is Anthropology 101.
if people see us bored with God, absorbed with ourselves, and conformed to worldly celebrities, they will not see the image of Jesus reflected in us.
This form of idolatry—submitting human ends to the available technological means—is called reverse adaptation.
In the digital age, we idolize our phones when we lose the ability to ask if they help us (or hurt us) in reaching our spiritual goals.
We mistakenly submit human and spiritual goals to our technological possibilities.
When the means become our aimless habits, this is techno-idolatry.
When our relationships are shallow online, our relationships become shallow offline.
“The way we interact online becomes the norm for how we interact offline. Facebook and Twitter communications are pretty short, clipped, and rapid. And that is not a way to have a good conversation with someone. Moreover, a good conversation involves listening and timing, and that is pretty much taken away with Internet communications, because you are not there with the person. So someone could send you a message and you could ignore it, or someone could send you a message and you could get to it two hours later. But if you are in real time in a real place with real bodies and a real voice,
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As we image him, we invite the world to a welcoming Father, where the lost can find refuge and identity, and where thirsty sinners will find the all-satisfying living water.
Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
Peter J. Leithart, “Techno-god,” First Things, firstthings.com (Sept. 27, 2012).
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 46.
Alan Jacobs, “My Year in Tech,” Snakes and Ladders, blog.ayjay.org (Dec. 23, 2015).
Alan Jacobs, “I’m Thinking It Over,” The American Conservative, theamericanconservative.com (Jan. 4, 2016).
Andrew Sherwood, “The Sweet Freedom of Ditching My Smartphone,” All Things for Good, garrettkell.com (Jan. 21, 2016).
More fundamental to human life than money, food, and shelter is human friendship.
“it’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear.”
“The history of our use of technology is a history of isolation desired and achieved.”
Technology is always drawing us apart, by design.
By definition, to lock into our earbuds is to refuse to listen to silence, and “a refusal to listen to silence is a refusal to meet oneself or others.”
By them, we close ourselves off from the outside world, but we also close ourselves off from ourselves (à la Blaise Pascal).
By preserving our isolation, we unwittingly walk right into one of the world’s most brilliant marketing traps.
Note: an unthinking, poorly considered use of technology not only separates one from all others, but essentially boils down to one of life’s deep truths: someone is making money off of you. Your isolation is Big Business.
The smartphone is causing a social reversal: the desire to be alone in public and never alone in seclusion.
The most shaping conversations we need are full of friction, and we simply cannot have them on our frictionless phones.
We are not flawless; we are fallen repenters who require relational friction to grow and mature. We are authentic believers who are committed to replacing easy relationships with authentic ones.
Sherry Turkle, a respected psychologist of the digital age, says: “The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude. In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic.”
warns Alastair Roberts. “I fear that our hyperkinetic, cacophonous, and riotous audio-visual environments erode the art of silent and attentive listening, and with it, our sense of the presence of the invisible.”
“The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude.”
Isolation + feeding on vanity = soul-starving loneliness Isolation + communion with God = soul-feeding solitude
So as Christians, we push back our phones in the morning—in order to protect our solitude so that we can know God and so that we can reflect him as his children. And we push back our phones during the day—in order to build authentic eye-to-eye trust with the people in our lives and in order to be sharpened by hard relationships.
Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic magazine (May 2012).
Giles Slade, The Big Disconnect: The Story of Technology and Loneliness (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012).
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 378.
Egbert Schuurman, Faith and Hope in Technology (Toronto: Clements, 2003), 101.
Jonathan Franzen, “Sherry Turkle’s ‘Reclaiming Conversation,’” The New York Times (Sept. 28, 2015).
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (New York: Picador, 2016), 224.
Sherry Turkle, “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk,” The New York Times (Sept. 26, 2015).
