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See the helpful app-management tips from Tristan Harris, “Distracted in 2016? Reboot Your Phone with Mindfulness,” tristanharris.com (Jan. 27, 2016).
the technological revolution “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.”
the premodern pagan was better suited for the technological age than the secular materialist is now.
“The modern system presupposes people who will take mechanism mechanically; not people who will take it mystically.”
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.
At worst, our phones are handheld wands of power that promise to protect our sinful isolation, showcase our self-aggrandizement, prop up our digital towers of self-praise, feed our materialism, lure us to so-called “anonymous” vices, and offer an “escape” from our creaturehood.
