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While some writers claim our phones are making us cognitively sharper and relationally deeper,11 others warn that our phones are making us shallow, dumb, and less competent in the real world.12 Both arguments ring true at times, but “social media are largely what we make of them—escapist or transforming depending on what we expect from them and how we use them.”13
my aim is to avoid both extremes: the utopian optimism of the technophiliac and the dystopian pessimism of the technophobe.
Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) reminded his generation that technology is always an extension of the self. A fork is simply an extension of my hand. My car is an extension of my arms and my feet, and no less so than Fred Flintstone’s footmobile. Likewise, my smartphone extends my cognitive functions.19 The active neurons in my brain are a crackling tangle of skull lightning, and my thought life resembles a thunderstorm over Kansas.
My phone screen divulges in razor-sharp pixels what my heart really wants.22 The glowing screen on my phone projects into my eyes the desires and loves that live in the most abstract corners of my heart and soul, finding visible expression in pixels of images, video, and text for me to see and consume and type and share.
First, life in the digital age is an open invitation for clear, biblical thinking about the impact of our phones on ourselves, on our creation, on our neighbors, and on our relationships to God. Thoughtlessly adopting new technology is worldliness.
We check our smartphones about 81,500 times each year, or once every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives, which means you will be tempted to check your phone three times before you finish this chapter.
The impulse is not hard to understand. Our lives are consolidated on our phones: our calendars, our cameras, our pictures, our work, our workouts, our reading, our writing, our credit cards, our maps, our news, our weather, our email, our shopping—all of it can be managed with state-of-the-art apps
the more addicted you become to your phone, the more prone you are to depression and anxiety, and the less able you are to concentrate at work and sleep at night. Digital distractions are no game. Because we are all so interconnected, hundreds of people (friends, family members, and strangers) can interrupt us at any moment. And when we are bored, with the flick of a thumb we can skim an endless list of amusements and oddities online.
First, we use digital distractions to keep work away. Facebook is a way of escape from our vocational pressures. We procrastinate around hard things: work deadlines, tough conversations, laundry piles, and school projects and papers. The average American college student wastes 20 percent of class time tinkering on a digital device, doing things unrelated to class (a statistic that seems low to me!).5 When life becomes most demanding, we crave something else—anything else.
And if my phone is in my hand, and I am responding to texts and scrolling social media, I project open dismissiveness, because “dividing attention is a typical expression of disdain.”
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”9
Rebecca Strong, “Brain Scans Show How Facebook and Cocaine Addictions Are the Same,” BostInno, bostinno.streetwise.co (Feb. 3, 2015).
Leslie Reed, “Digital Distraction in Class Is on the Rise,” Nebraska Today, news.unl.edu (Jan. 15, 2016).
Laws banning texting are nearly unenforceable, but the states that crack down the hardest only make the practice more clandestine. In a car, you can send texts with one thumb under the window-level view of onlookers. The harder police clamp down on texting, the lower the phones go, and the lower the phones, the further drivers’ attention is drawn off the road, requiring slightly more time for them to read and send texts, and more time to reorient their attention to their driving.
Jesus boiled down the Christian life to two basic questions: “How do I love God?” and “How do I love my neighbor?”5 And when Jesus was asked to define “neighbor,” he pointed to a road.
Studies back this up on a more personal level, showing that a joyful comment is likely to bless your following but not go much further, whereas a furious comment is far likelier to spread outside of your following and enrage many more people. “Anger is a high-arousal emotion, which drives people to take action,” said one researcher of this trend. “It makes you feel fired up, which makes you more likely to pass things on.”10 Rage spreads.
the epidemic of texting and driving (among many other epidemics) is an attempted escape from the limits of our flesh-and-blood nature. We try to break through the boundaries of time and space, and we end up ignoring the flesh and blood around us.
We easily settle into digital villages of friends who think just like us and escape from people who are unlike us. Our phones buffer us from diversity, warns Roberts. Although “generational differences are fundamentally constitutive differences for the human race . . . new media is one of many ways our elders are rendered invisible.”
In effect, our online communities “render invisible the majority of the human race.”
In fact, our online communities of like-minded friends are often marked by a “positive feedback loop,” where “affirmation and assent merely reinforce existing prejudices.
In such contexts, communities become insular, echo chambers of accepted opinion, closed to opposing voices,” which means they breed a “homeostatic stifling of difference.”17 Communities that fail to embrace the benefits of disagreements and fail to work through tensions and differences tend to become homogeneous and unhealthy, because they “tend to have exaggerated blindspots and unaddressed weaknesses.”18
If you follow Christ, the world will unfollow you. You will be shunned. You will be despised. If the glory of man is your god, you will not celebrate the glory of Christ. Or, if you come to Christ and treasure his glory above all other glory, you will be forced to forfeit the buzz of human approval.
Megan McCluskey, “Instagram Star Essena O’Neill Breaks Her Silence on Quitting Social Media,” Time magazine (Jan. 5, 2016). 3. Essena O’Neill, “Dear 12 Year Old Self (re-upload),” YouTube, youtube.com (Nov. 8, 2015). 4. Ibid. 5. Essena O’Neill, “Social Media Addiction and Celebrity Culture,” letsbegamechangers.com
See Suzanne Franks, “Life Before and After Facebook,” The Guardian (Jan. 3, 2015).
“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. Crawford asks, “What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?”
that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book.”5 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.”
“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words,” laments writer Nicholas Carr. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”8
“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.”
To be changed and challenged, we need the clean sea breeze of old books, said C. S. Lewis.
David Brooks, “Building Attention Span,” The New York Times (July 10, 2015), emphases added.
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.
Maria Konnikova, “Being a Better Online Reader,” The New Yorker (July 16, 2014), summarizing Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith, “Metacognitive Regulation of Text Learning: On Screen versus on Paper,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (March 17, 2011), 18–32.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 7.
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.
We must be aware that 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.
“People used to do things and then post them, and the approval you gained from whatever you were putting out there was a byproduct of the actual activity. Now the anticipated approval is what’s driving the behavior or the activity, so there’s just sort of been this reversal.”18 Phones with social connections transform us—and our friends and children—into actors.
“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.27 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.”
Idolatry is the vain attempt to find ultimate meaning in finite things that we can craft and hold in our hands.
Yet our online habits change our relational habits: both become clipped and superficial, and we become more easily distracted and less patient with one another.
“The chief reason is not that people are ill-tempered or dim-witted—though Lord knows one of those descriptors is accurate for a distressingly large number of social-media communications—but that so many of them are blown about by every wind of social-media doctrine, their attention swamped by the tsunamis of the moment, their wills captive to the felt need to respond now to what everyone else is responding to now.”
“Katie Couric to Grads: Get Yourself Noticed,” Time magazine (May 18, 2015).
“My Year in Tech,” Snakes and Ladders, blog.ayjay.org (Dec. 23, 2015).
“I’m Thinking It Over,” The American Conservative, theamericanconservative.com (Jan. 4, 2016). 21. Andrew Sherwood, “The Sweet Freedom of Ditching My Smartphone,” All Things for Good, garrettkell.com (Jan. 21, 2016).
We were made to connect with other humans for true fellowship, all because we were made in the image of the triune God. And this is why loneliness stings like an open gash in our skin.
“Loneliness is the nucleus of psychiatry.” He also wrote, “If loneliness didn’t exist, we could reasonably assume that psychiatric illnesses would not occur either.”
When we hit refresh and stare at a screen with no new updates, it can seem that no one is on the other side. We feel the sting of loneliness in the middle of online connectedness. Sometimes we feel as if we are walking through a museum of relational relics and holograms. In reality, “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.”5
Many of these technological trajectories converge in the smartphone—the supreme invention of personal isolation. 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.
We need face-to-face time, and even then we are hardly prepared for the friction that God intends to use as we and our spouses are sharpened and shaped over the years into couples who reflect Christ and his bride. This is part of the genius (and the mystery) of marriage as a covenant bond between two people of differing genders and often differing ethnicities, talents, and interests.
Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic magazine (May 2012).
