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

by Felicia Wu Song

while we may need to soberly examine and account for what responsibility we may personally carry for the state of our disordered lives, we need to also see that our personal struggles are inextricably bound by and framed within deeply structural realities of institutions, norms, and forces that are beyond an individual’s control. And because these structural realities are constructed, they can therefore be reimagined and reconstructed for the common good.

the internet was always a value-laden technology. It was never neutral and it was never just a tool. It was designed to promote individual freedoms over structural constraints, and the market for its subsequent digital media and services wrapped the technology within a morally valanced story about information being power, and digital connection promising prosperity, equality, and happiness.

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.

what is largely driving the pattern of notifications and posts we receive is an algorithm that promotes and withholds the delivery of new content in such an intermittent and alluring manner that its intentional unpredictability will drive us to a degree of psychological insecurity that yields the most checking, most posting, and most commenting.

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.

As regular users of social media, we are being trained into modes of relating and understandings of the self that increasingly reflect the double-edges of industrialization and may in the long run prove undesirable and even damaging to ourselves and our society.

Social media platforms have taken something as dynamic and vulnerable as our social experience and stripped it down into something calculable.

As social media platforms perpetually update our numbers, so too do we perpetually check our numbers. And when we check, what exactly are we looking for? What do the numbers mean and what do they mask? Is it an assurance of belonging? Legitimacy? Being desired? And as we check and keep checking our numbers, we have to ask: Who do these numbers actually serve in the end? How is our chain being yanked when these numbers feel like they signal our worth?

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 pressing anxiety to keep up with our feeds and accounts is real, and we become exhausted and overstimulated even when we objectify our “friends” and “followers” as we scroll through. We swipe through our feeds as if paging swiftly through a retail catalog or supermarket circular. In an effort to protect ourselves from feeling too much and feeling overly exposed to too much, it is understandable that we adopt a blasé attitude and become muted.

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?

Together the design and norms of digital life ultimately immerse us in a story about the human condition that bends our assumptions to regard embodiment as a nuisance, attention as the measure of our worth, the other as an object, and time in terms of scarcity.

we severely underestimate the deeply spiritual function that digital technologies actually play in our struggles against isolation, fear, and meaninglessness.

If we begin to pay attention to not only the cerebral and cognitive content of our lived experience but also the visceral and bodily, we might begin to see how our mundane digital practices are hardly docile or inconsequential. They are in fact doing a work on us, developing in us capacities, desires, and longings for a particular version of the good life.

When our minds are preoccupied with something “productive,” the areas of the brain that specialize in our capacities to process autobiographical memory, craft a coherent sense of self, and imagine how others are feeling are all muted. So, the great irony is that the more we demand our brains to attend to being productive, the less our brains are able to grow us as persons in key areas of identity construction and empathy. This doesn’t even address the more widely known contention that sometimes it is only when “nothing is happening” that something actually can happen. Sometimes it is only in our repose or cessation of activity that we actually come to realize solutions to puzzles that have stumped us or experience joys that we had been running too fast to even receive.

the choices we often make when we multitask or when we take a quick peek at our screens are not merely half-conscious efforts to “save time” or half-hearted attempts to thwart boredom. Rather, they are meaningful choices that add up to a lifetime of who we become and how we go about experiencing the reality of being human.

Under the imperative to “be productive,” we may be unknowingly dragged toward a cultural deadening of our capacity to imagine a cosmos loved by a divine presence.

Given social media’s propensity to drive us to perform and broadcast a particular version of ourselves, self-forgetfulness is the last thing we are given opportunity to cultivate and learn in our lives.

If, in our daily haste, our hearts are chastened to remember who we are proximate to, perhaps we would think twice before hiding behind our technologies to avoid that dull and uninteresting person or putting on our head phones to excuse ourselves from exercising “the awe and circumspection” appropriately due to our holy neighbors.

Therefore, we ought not underestimate the weight of God’s glory that is fixed in our bodies and voices. For just as Jesus’ embodied self was the means through which he worked to love and intervene in the world, so too are our embodied selves endowed with a gravitas that can help make God’s love present in the world. To take seriously the call to incarnational presence then means taking our bodies to the hard and broken places and “developing the patience and discipline necessarily to stay long enough to see the needs.”9