Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age

by Felicia Wu Song

While we are so grateful and even love so much of what we get from our digital technologies, we often feel frustrated, harassed, and exhausted by them. And we don’t know what to do about it.

we are equally concerned about how our search engine algorithms results and social media feeds are driving our country toward increased incivility, polarization, and extremism.

Mounting research on the psychological well-being of today’s young people delivers a grim diagnosis showing that our digital natives are not sleeping and are more lonely and more depressed than ever.2

And the truth of the matter is: these are not just the problems of “kids these days.” Parents and adults are just as unable to moderate their usage and control their digital compulsions.4

Overall, temporarily unplugging and stepping away from our screens has become so popular and accepted—particularly among young people—that it is common to see someone announce their plans for a brief hiatus on their social media feed.

Given the degree to which American culture has been so deeply steeped in ideologies of progress and histories of technological utopianism, it is no small feat to have arrived at this particular juncture of cultural disenchantment.7

It is difficult to maintain the disciplines that we know are life-giving and even more difficult to resist the old habits of scanning the headlines in our feeds. The inner conflict we experience is an age-old one famously summed up by Saint Paul, “I do not understand my own actions. . . . For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:15, 19).

Our contemporary dilemmas about living with technology are not going to be solved merely through critique and lament but through reconsidering the formative work of spiritual disciplines and practices that ground us in the sustaining reality and presence of God, the physical world, and our neighbor. 2. Such disciplines and practices are only generative when rooted in a robust view of human embodiment. 3. These disciplines and practices are only sustainable when practiced not as an individual but together in community.

Interspersed between the chapters of this book is a set of experiments and exercises called The Freedom Project.

Life is constantly “being lived elsewhere” as our bodies are in one place,2 but our minds and consciousness reside focused on the stuff of our screens.

In the same way that Jesus called his disciples to abide in him as he would abide in them, we too have become a people who abide in the digital, and the digital abides in us.

Is it any wonder that young adults who have spent significant portions of their formative years catering to the whims of social media’s notifications and algorithmic gatekeeping now express the staggering discovery that something has gone very wrong? Many speak of how “the internet broke my brain” and are on the search for some kind of relief.

What Freud understood was the fact that, even when a technology may be used for good, the very opportunity that created that possibility for good may simultaneously expose us to a new risk, a new conundrum, or a new social ill that we had been previously protected from.

Unfortunately as we have all seen, this starry-eyed belief—that any emergent problem can be fixed with better programming or better algorithms—fed a willful blindness to the polarizing and radicalizing tendencies of social media and the digital landscape.

If we are to recognize how our digital technologies carry within them the values and perspectives of their makers, their culture, and their societal assumptions, perhaps we should be asking: Whose values or dreams are embedded in the design of our apps, platforms, and digital experiences? What type of world was this technology supposed to make possible and encourage? What kinds of lives are these technologies meant to enhance? And how is it shaping mine?

Each digital device and each app are emblematic of, and enmeshed in, an entire structural and cultural universe that values freedom, information, personal choice, and expression.

our digital technologies are flush with values, hopes, fears, biases, and beliefs. In a deeply sociological sense, technology works the same way that culture does. It tells a story about how life should be.

The Freedom Project is uniquely motivated by three convictions: First, it is invested in shifting our starting assumptions about what freedom means.

As Justin Earley asked in his book about habits, “What if the good life doesn’t come from having the ability to do what we want, but from having the ability to do what we were made for?”2

it is only when we experience a freedom from what has been controlling us that we encounter a genuine kind of empowerment. This kind of freedom is rooted in the understanding that as worshiping creatures, we will always be drawn to serve someone or something. The question is whether that master is going to love us back or not. The Christian tradition’s answer to what the good life entails is rooted in the assertion that the God of the universe who created us and gave us meaning and purpose is a good, trustworthy, and loving Lord to serve.

The Freedom Project is designed to move us down a path of becoming free from the digital habits that would otherwise control us, so that we can pursue the kind of freedom that comes from knowing and being known by the triune God.

Second, while curbing, limiting, or completely eliminating our digital usage might prove beneficial, we need to recognize that our souls have appetites. Given our predisposition to love something, we can’t just concern ourselves with removing what might be detrimental to our soul formation. We also need to be ac...

Mahatma Gandhi once taught, “Only give up a thing when you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has any attraction for you, or when it seems to interfere with that which is more greatly desired.”

this project is designed as experiments and exercises, not designed as a “plan” with a tangible destination or measurable indication of success.

Third, the original version of The Freedom Project was carried out in the context of a college course. My students did it together. They fasted together. They did their digital stocktaking together. They tried new counterliturgies together. They dreamed of alternative futures together.

The algorithms driving such services like Netflix and YouTube are geared to deliver to us a “junk food” diet of content that our consumer selves crave. The problem is that in order for us to maintain our health, we actually need to be served with “veggie-type” media from time to time in order to nurture our citizen selves.

The special sauce of the Instagrams, Snapchats, and Twitters of this world is a built-in feedback mechanism that preys on our human desire for quantifiable and repeated peer acknowledgment and affirmation.

“Social-media executives . . . have designed their platforms to be feedback machines, giving us not what we claim to want, nor what might be good for us, but what we actually pay attention to.”16

As users, we are the ones who bear the cost. The substance of our time and our lives are the treasures being mined, and we are just giving it away without a care or thought. We absorb the cost not just by handing over the precious details revealing what we value and what motivates us but by opening ourselves and our perceptions of the world to be modified and adjusted by actors and agents who have an interest in steering us in a direction that benefits them, not us.

More than any other discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us.

Ritzer identified four key principles of industrialization that McDonald’s had perfected: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control through nonhuman technology.2

four industrializing drives: the drive to quantify; the drive to perform; the drive to reify; and the drive to control.

the invitation to begin gamifying our identities or social lives can lead to undesirable outcomes.

And for our young people who are growing into themselves and still in search of their tribe, does it surprise us when their struggles against loneliness are sometimes laced with the scent of betrayal or abandonment when the measurable degree of their unbelonging or exclusion is made certain and public for all to see through social media?

Like a vine being trained by the trellis of social media, so grows our inner being.

While social media was not intentionally designed to instigate this psychological desire to perform, its structure makes it practically inevitable.

And so, when we communicate through social media, rather than relational communication, our dominant mode of self-expression inclines toward broadcasting. In a social space constructed to cut off and paralyze our capacity to activate the mechanisms of intimacy, exclusivity, or context that typically characterize the wide range of relationships we have, we are left on social media with only one option: to perform our lives for mass consumption.

The more we participate and engage in the instantaneous and public social feedback loop of likes and retweets that envelopes each other’s performances, the more homogenous and predictable our performances tend to become.

We grow to rely on these shortcuts and often circumvent the training grounds of learning how to genuinely express these sentiments through our own voice, words, or embodied presence.

My mom

As we fall into the routines of perpetually treating our lives as a potential source of click-worthy fodder that can be laid on the altar of social media, the tragic result is that the phenomenon of self-forgetfulness is almost impossible to achieve in this age of social media. And to lose out on the experience of self-forgetfulness is to lose the very cornerstone of love and delight.

this quandary of managing abundance drives us toward what Georg Lukacs called reification: a process where “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing.”6

Without the impinging authority of your embodied presence before me, the drive to reify is easy to indulge for I feel little need to acknowledge or contend with what the author C. S. Lewis would have described as “the weight of your glory.”

The troubling outcome is that the drive to reify not only normalizes the inclination to objectify the people in our lives and the sentiments they utter in social media, but it also blunts our capacity to mobilize our care and concern for issues that actually deserve our investment.

In our digitally saturated society, at best, the people next to us become merely interruptions. At worst, they are to us—waste.

“They want to dispatch it, do it well and quickly. Then get on to the many other things that interest them. For my students live in the future and not the present. . . . They dwell in possibility. . . . The idea is to keep moving, never to stop.”

students today grasp for their phones at the end of class like oxygen tanks.

And so many of us feel the itch to peek and know. The result is that whatever is taking place around us, whatever proximate reality we find ourselves in, it begins to feel less interesting, more stifling, and more like something we want to be released from or bypass altogether.

What becomes of us when we are so driven to control who gets to interact with us and how much we can accomplish that the internal act of allowing ourselves to be engulfed by the presence of another—whether it be a person or a piece of literature—is felt to be waste?

And here we quickly find ourselves at the epitome of humanity’s conundrum with technology: the more we look to technology to give us control, the less we actually develop internal resources for negotiating and coming to grips with those aspects of life that will always be out of our control.

Americans today understand “community” in terms of multiple networks of friends, contacts, and acquaintances that span time and place—but which orient around the self.

Long ago the church was in the center of a town