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The statistics show that Christians who struggle to read books are struggling to break free from poor smartphone habits as one root cause.
One trick works like this: the more I like and click online, the more precisely web algorithms feed me images, ideas, and products tailored to my previous engagement. It may seem I am simply stumbling over a litany of randomly scattered things online, but what’s offered up to my eyes today is increasingly aligned to the bread-crumb trail I left behind in my digital diet yesterday (for good or ill).
So what I see now has been tailored to what I liked in the past, creating a custom-built vortex of content, a swirl of new objects, filling my screen as I flick and scroll, all with the aim of keeping my eyes glued to the screen by feeding very specific appetite patterns of my craving heart and ultimately reinforcing my smartphone obsession.
“Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.”
The digital age hurries us and shatters our concentration into a million little pieces, says ethicist Oliver O’Donovan, and now the greatest challenge to literacy is a short attention span, “caught now by one little explosion of surprise, now by another. Knowledge is never actually given to us in that form. It has to be searched for and pursued, as the marvelous poems on Wisdom at the beginning of Proverbs tell us.”7
And it is always wise to contrast our social-media
habits with the disciplined wisdom-seeking habits celebrated in the first thr...
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Those who are aliterate have difficulty separating what is eternally valuable from what is transient.
“The more time I spend reading ten-second tweets and skimming random articles online, the more it affects my attention span, weakening the muscles I need to read Scripture for long distances.”9
But before we delete our Bible apps, we should consider that studies also tell us that Christian readers are more faithful to follow digital Bible reading plans on smartphones (with daily prompts) than print plans and offline reading.
The Bible is a covenant document from God to us. It spells out the relationship we enjoy with him, teaches us the blood-bought promises he has made, and instructs us how to live in this world to display our covenant faithfulness to him.
“The commerce and communion between God and his people is an inherently textual phenomenon. The eternally eloquent God has stooped to speak a word of saving consolation to us,” writes theologian Scott Swain.
God has given us the power of concentration in order for us to see and avoid what is false, fake, and transient—so that we may gaze directly at what is true, stable, and eternal.
Our joy in God is at stake. In our vanity, we feed on digital junk food, and our palates are reprogrammed and our affections atrophy.
“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.”
We are called to suspend our chronic scrolling in order to linger over eternal truth, because the Bible is the most important book in the history of the world.
The Bible is our open door to hear God’s voice both alone and together in community. It is intended to be bottomless in its profundity and endless in its relevance. It is less of a book and more of a world of revelation in which we live and move and have our being. This book gives us life, and it moves and pushes God’s redemptive plan forward. In fact, “the whole purpose of God for the universe stands or falls on the book. If the book fails, everything fails.”14
First,
the aim of the Bible is discipleship,
Second,
the Bible’s Author warns us over and over again that the book will be rejected, distorted, or misunderstood in various ways.
Third,
“the Bible’s Author and authors have chosen to reach their goals not by straightforward lecture, proceeding proposition by proposition, but through songs and poems, dark sayings, and half-interpreted stories.”
We need the life-living gust of the Spirit in the ancient book. And 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.19
In the smartphone age, we are bombarded daily by the immediate: Facebook updates, blog posts, and breaking news stories. Yet the most important book for our soul is ancient. God’s Word demands our highest levels of literary concentration because it requires relational reading: not the superficial chitchat of a cocktail party, but the covenantal concentration of marriage vows. 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.
Not only do our smartphones have sharp cameras that capture quality images and video, those cameras are always with us, and we have developed fidgety “shutter” trigger fingers, ready to capture anything in the moment. Taken together, we not only consume celebrity culture, we now feed the culture, too.
But add another level, a middleman—and now we are talking about intermediated experiences. Everything we read, hear, see, or watch on our phones falls under this category. On the screens of our smartphones, we find only copies of what exists in the world. We read messages only as they are intermediated to us by others, by the gatekeepers of the creative world—from musicians, artists, movie producers, and even our friends and family members.
First, we need to think about the social capacity of our phones and how that capacity shapes our impulses.
Second, we need to rethink our memories. What if the point-and-shoot cameras in our phones make us less capable of retaining discrete 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.
Sin lies about the future.
How, then, can we walk (and click and share) with wisdom?
First, we must humbly admit that we are targets of digital megacorporations
getting us hooked on our phones is a commercial commodity
Second, we must learn to enjoy our present lives in faith—
Third, we must celebrate. We cannot
suppress our souls’ appetite for what is awe-inspiring.
Our insatiable appetite for viral videos,
memes, and tweets is the product of an appetite for glory that God gave us.
For our online networks, we become filters—salt and light—as an act of love in what we publish, share, and like.
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 t...
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“Compulsive social-media habits are a bad trade: your present moment in exchange for an endless series of someone else’s past moments.”
Our social-media lives can stop our own living.
We inevitably grow blind to creation’s wonders when our attention is fixed on our attempt to craft the next scene in our “incessant autobiography.”
This astounding opportunity presses one big question: What is the ultimate purpose of my art? Technology is pragmatic; it presses us to ask how, not why.
In principle, Paul continually presses Christian creators to ask three questions: 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?
We are constantly pushing and shoving the trajectories of one another by our tongues (through our thumbs).
In summary: “the people you text and tweet,” said David Platt, “are going to spend the next quadrillion years either in heaven or hell.”39 And his timeline is understated. 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.
