12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke

solid expositional preaching is essentially a model of healthy, slow reading.19

All of creation is a footpath back to God.

everything real finds its origin in God—meaning that all of creation is mediated.

Every artist works only with the raw materials of God’s generosity, and this leads to two conclusions.

Negatively, to express godless art means that no higher purpose exists than the fame of the artist.

to express Christ-honoring art means that everything we create, share, and spread on our phones—paintings, music, photography, poems, and books—can amplify God’s natural and special revelation. So we aim to produce art that reflects God’s glory in undiminished splendor.

all the content on the “small screen” of our phones is intermediated. This is not good or bad, just a reality that calls for discernment and discretion. On our phones, we have high-definition portals into the vast beauties and glories of creation, but every message we receive has been cut, edited, and produced for a purpose.

The high-resolution cameras built into our phones are simply one of the most incredible blessings of the digital age—convenient, portable, and potent. But they also raise three questions.

First, we need to think about the social capacity of our phones and how that capacity shapes our impulses.

Phones with social connections transform us—and our friends and children—into actors. That’s huge.

Second, we need to rethink our memories.

Third, and most insidious of all, I wonder if this unchecked impulse exposes something deeper and darker in us, a certain unbelief that drives us, something more similar to the lie that maybe a given moment is our last opportunity to get close to greatness.

How, then, can we walk (and click and share) with wisdom?

First, we must humbly admit that we are targets of digital megacorporations that can make us into restless consumers with strategic intermediated content.

we must see that we are being conditioned to turn to our phones when we want to be amazed and wowed, and in turn, we are being milked for corporate profit. Likewise, social-media platforms are huge businesses with public stock prices, and they can grow in value only if they condition us to become actors in front of our phones.24

Second, we must learn to enjoy our present lives in faith—that is, to enjoy each moment of life without feeling compelled to “capture” it.

Third, we must celebrate. We cannot suppress our souls’ appetite for what is awe-inspiring. The goal is not to mute all smartphone media but to feed ourselves on the right media. We were created to behold, see, taste, and delight in the richness of God’s glory—and that glory often comes refracted to us through skilled artists.

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.

every time we speak, we birth words into the world. We speak a legacy. Our words linger around us, they grow in power, and they either improve us or—like uncontrolled fire—turn against us.

Our words destroy us if they are meant to destroy others, but our words build us up if they are meant to bless others.

Humor or not, self-expression alone is never an adequate reason for Christians to communicate online. To what eternal destiny am I influencing others, and even myself?

Herman Bavinck: “If we had not heard God speaking to us in the works of grace and by that means also discerned his voice speaking to us in the works of nature, we would all be like pagans, for whom nature speaks in a cacophony of confusing tongues.” Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 75.

Entrepreneur Seth Godin: “Social media wasn’t invented to make you better, it was invented for you to make the company money. By it you become an employee of the company. You are the product they sell. And they put you in a little hamster wheel and throw treats in now and then. . . . The big companies of social media went from being profoundly important and useful public goods that created enormous value, to becoming public companies under pressure to make the stock price go up.”

C. S. Lewis’s summary of Satan’s driving motive in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Having traversed heaven, hell, and the whole cosmos, Satan finally becomes focused only on himself—an infinite boredom inescapable. Adam, born into a small park, is so quickly filled with awe and wonder at the creation that he seems to almost forget himself in the grandeur of it all. See C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 101–3.

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.

God “created little images of himself so that they would talk and act and feel in a way that reveals the way God is. So people would look at the way you behave, look at the way you think, look at the way you feel, and say, ‘God must be great, God must be real.’ That is why you exist.”13 In other words, we were created to stand in opposition to the techno-worldliness that inevitably makes God look irrelevant in the new world of technique and device mastery.

To be made in God’s image means we exist for two reasons: (1) to be satisfied in the infinite worth of the Creator and (2) to show the world how precious and deeply satisfying he is.

When our relationships are shallow online, our relationships become shallow offline. Douglas Groothuis, a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary, warns: “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.

our online habits change our relational habits: both become clipped and superficial, and we become more easily distracted and less patient with one another.

When Andrew Sherwood, a graduate student, decided to do the same (ditch social media and the smartphone), his wife said it was the greatest gift he ever gave her. Why? “When you had your smartphone, you were a walking vending machine of whatever you’d ingested that day,” she told him. “It was difficult to talk about deeper things that mattered, because you were constantly distracted by Internet litter. You’re now able to focus and give necessary attention to deeper issues. More of what we talk about comes from your heart rather than your Twitter feed.”21

technology offers us many benefits, but with one major pitfall: isolation.

Technology is always drawing us apart, by design. Our isolation is desired and achieved.

Our smartphones are portable shields we wield in public in order to deter human contact and interaction. When we step into an occupied elevator, we grab our phones like security blankets.

Headphones give us a buffer from both healthy introspection and social conversation.

“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,”

It is no surprise that we relinquish our morning hours by turning to our phones, but why? What is the lure? I asked Piper, and he pointed to six instinctive reasons—three “candy motives” and three “avoidance motives.”

1. 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 t...

3. Entertainment Candy. We want to feed on what is fascinating, weird, strange, wonderful,...

4. Boredom Avoidance. We want to put off the day ahead, especially when it looks boring and routine, and holds nothing of f...

5. Responsibility Avoidance. We want to put off the burdens of the roles God has given us as fathers, mothers, ...

6. Hardship Avoidance. We want to put off dealing with relational conflicts or the pain, disease, and...

“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.”25

These equations seem to hold true for our early morning hours: Isolation + feeding on vanity = soul-starving loneliness Isolation + communion with God = soul-feeding solitude

consumerism is the idea that all of life can be converted into commodities, then controlled and monetized.

In a culture that can reduce relationships to a personal score in a competitive game, every experience, hope, and longing in life can just as easily be rendered into digital merchandise—even the most intimate parts.

Technology does this—it makes us think we can indulge in anonymous vices, even conceptually, without any future consequences. Anonymity is where sin flourishes, and anonymity is the most pervasive lie of the digital age. The clicks of our fingertips reveal the dark motives of our hearts, and every sin—every double-tap and every click—will be accounted for.

Digital pornography is catastrophic to our souls, not only because it degrades its users, but also because (just like the Mirror of Erised) it exposes the invisible curiosities, idols, and desires of our hearts. Thus, we come to see what God has seen all along.

our private sexual practices measure our proximity to God.10

In the warning of Sinclair Ferguson, “It is better to enter heaven having decided to never use the Internet again, rather than going to hell clicking on everything you desire.”12