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Jonathan Franzen, “Sherry Turkle’s ‘Reclaiming Conversation,’” The New York Times (Sept. 28, 2015).
Sherry Turkle, “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk,” The New York Times (Sept. 26, 2015).
“And I mean ‘impotent’ here in a clinical as well as a metaphorical sense; no symptom of compulsive pornography use seems to be so widespread as complaints of erectile dysfunction and other sexual disorders. Many porn addicts seem to remain virgins far longer than their peers, struggling to form meaningful relationships with the opposite sex or develop much enthusiasm for sexual activity.” In the end, digitally available porn “is driven primarily by that trademark of curiosity, the thirst for novelty, in which the gaze objectifies and devours its object almost immediately, and must move
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It means that what we see is given its fullest meaning by what we cannot see. The physical gifts we enjoy seemingly are “thickened” by our capacity to see and treasure the unseen Giver.
Second, the bigger challenge for us in the digital age is not the mental pollution of information overload, but the nutritional deficiency of the content that has been engineered, like modern snacks, to trigger our appetites. Online information is increasingly hyperpalatable, akin to alluring junk food. Breaking news, tabloid gossip, viral memes, and the latest controversies in sports, politics, and entertainment all draw us to our phones as if they were deep-fried Twinkies held out on sticks at the state fair.
it is “our ungoverned appetite for connectedness with the immediacy and insistent urgency of the ‘great communicative drama’ of our society.”6 Our phones draw us into unhealthy habits not because we want unlimited information, but because we want to stay relevant and entertained.
If we try to stay current, however, we will grow weary, because the accumulated libraries of wisdom have no end, and “much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Michael Barthel et al., “The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook,” Pew Research Center, journalism.org (July 14, 2015).
FOMO can be diagnosed through more basic symptoms of “disconnection anxiety,” also known as “no-mobile-phone phobia”—nomophobia—the fret when we find ourselves prevented from accessing our digital worlds.
At the first hint of discomfort, we instinctively grab our phones to medicate the pain with affirmation. This habit could not be more damaging.
But when suffering hits, we forget that social media calls for a one-dimensional, carefully manicured projection of the self. Then we trudge our sorry selves to social media in order to confirm just how awful our lives are compared with everyone else’s togetherness!
You start to resent them. You start to grow in anger against them. ‘Really? Me, Lord? I’m enduring this trial? What about them?’ In your trial, your insidious, wicked heart will be exposed, and comparison is how it plays itself out.”
Olga Khazan, “Escaping the Amish for a Connected World,” The Atlantic magazine (Feb. 17, 2016). 3. Kate Hakala, “There’s a Special Kind of ‘FOMO’ Stressing Us Out—And We’re Doing It to Ourselves,” Mic, mic.com (May 21, 2015).
See Donna Freitas, The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), and Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Nancy P. Rothbard, and Justin M. Berg, “When Worlds Collide in Cyberspace: How Boundary Work in Online Social Networks Impacts Professional Relationships,” Academy of Management Review (Jan. 2, 2013).
What is done in the name of “exposing truth,” with the single goal of undermining someone’s character, is an expression of slander.
God wants us to practice the discipline of covering the sins of others in love17 as we give them space for discipline (when needed) and for personal repentance.18 We acknowledge the often unseen and invisible work of the Holy Spirit in the world to bring conviction of sin. And so we walk by faith, knowing that God is at work in his children.
Interested readers can find the quotation by searching letsbegamechangers.com through web.archive.org.
Caitlin Dewey, “Everyone You Know Will Be Able to Rate You on the Terrifying ‘Yelp for People’—Whether You Want Them to or Not,” The Washington Post (Sept. 30, 2015).
“Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” The New Yorker
Tim Kreider, “Isn’t It Outrageous?” The New York Times (July 14, 2009). The phrase “outrage porn” was coined here.
We grow emotionally distant with our expressions. We become content to “LOL” with our thumbs or to cry emoticon tears to express our sorrow because we cannot (and will not) take the time to genuinely invest ourselves in real tears of sorrow.
then there is one uncomfortable question a Christian must ask in an entertainment-driven culture, a question that never leaves me feeling more affirmed after asking it: Am I entitled to feed on the fragmented trivialities online? In other words, am I entitled to spend hours every month simply browsing odd curiosities?
I was not edified or served, only further fatigued because of missing a nap I should have taken or a walk I could have taken, and easily lured back to my phone for more. And then I remembered I skipped my personal disciplines this morning. My battle against all the slothful smartphone tendencies I see in my own heart has only begun.
What I am coming to understand is that this impulse to pull the lever of a random slot machine of viral content is the age-old tactic of Satan. C. S. Lewis called it the “Nothing” strategy in his Screwtape Letters. It is the strategy that eventually leaves a man at the end of his life looking back in lament: “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
Led by our unchecked digital appetites, we manage to transgress both commands that promise to bring focus to our lives. We fail to enjoy God. We fail to love our neighbor.
Satan’s “Nothing” strategy aims at feeding us endlessly scrolling words, images, and videos that dull our affections—instead of invigorating our joy and preparing us to give ourselves in love.
Self-criticism in the digital age is a necessary discipline—an act of courage. “It is by being able to criticize that we show our freedom. This is the only freedom that we still have, if we have at least the courage to grasp it.”
Even something as simple as pulling out your smartphone in a crowd is “the new yawn”—everyone else around you will feel the immediate pull and lure to check their own phones.
To draw out the full benefit of my van, there is no need for me to use all the features at maximum capacity. If, in fact, my van can reach 140 mph (which I doubt!), that’s so it can travel at 70 mph legally, safely, and comfortably.
But by avoiding the overreach of these misdirected longings for techno-redemption, we can simply embrace technology for what it is—an often helpful and functional tool to serve a legitimate need in our lives.
Study after study has shown that too much time on our phones has profound effects on our physical health, including (but not limited to) inactivity and obesity, stress and anxiety, sleeplessness and restlessness, bad posture and sore necks, eye strain and headaches, and hypertension and stress-induced shallow breathing patterns.
Go to YouTube, search for “texting and walking accidents,” and you’ll find a growing collection of video clips of smartphone users so engrossed with their phones that they unconsciously walk right into street traffic or walls, fall into public water fountains, or slip and get caught in sidewalk grates.
“I’m Still Here: Back Online after a Year without the Internet,” The Verge, theverge.com (May 1, 2013).
Donna Freitas, The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 218.
“Distracted in 2016? Reboot Your Phone with Mindfulness,” tristanharris.com (Jan. 27, 2016).
John Dickerson, “Left to Our Own Devices,” Slate, slate.com (June 24, 2015).
See David M. Levy, Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
The onslaught of digital technology in our day seems almost like magic, a kind of enchantment that should expand the awe and wonder of our souls. But typically it does not. The magic fizzles, warned Chesterton.
Rather, 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 electronic starters on our car engines are a good example. Think of it: with nothing but the turn of a little metal magic wand, sparks ignite an explosive liquid refined from an ancient organic sludge—a sludge somehow sunk deep in the earth, covered over, liquefied by age and pressure to become a potion later sucked from subterranean cavities and processed into flammable fuel that is then pumped into tanks and finally into smooth cylinders carved from solid steel, where it meets those sparks—causing choreographed eruptions that pop so powerfully, so perfectly, and so consistently that we
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Yes, they are glowing tools made mostly by men and women who are not submitted to God, he reiterated, and they are tools that open up his life to a thousand convenient temptations, but used with care and discipline, the digital tools are, he said, “a treasure chest of the glories of God.”
True wonder requires humility. Wonder is the special joy of God reserved for those who have become childlike and humbled under the awe of a divine Father. In humility, we become “wonderers,” freed from secular disenchantment, from commercially driven promises that materialism cannot deliver, and from temporal entrapments in order to more clearly behold God’s glory in and through our technology.
“Happiness Is a Warm iPhone,” The New York Times, nytimes.com (Feb. 22, 2014).
