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.

the chronically filling email inbox advances on us like a permanent game of Space Invaders; the social media feed relentlessly keeps ‘refreshing’; the toxic discourse in our social media feeds and 24/7 news cycle sends our emotional and psychic state into overdrive; and the unrealistic expectations of always being available and immediately responsive to our colleagues or loved ones bind us to our texting impulses and devices. To recognize

However, what has noticeably changed in the last twenty years is that whatever honeymoon we had experienced with the thrill of feeling connected, and alive from the quick and witty exchanges of words and images in social media, we are now a culture that is beginning to experience an acute form of technological disenchantment.

The truth is: if we are serious about grappling with our digital habits, we will need more than apps, retreats, and yoga. What we need most is a realistic and motivating vision of our circumstances that helps us imagine what kind of life we are hoping to live and how it is we can get there. This book’s goal is to help us start down that road.

Part I of this book opens with an often ignored story of how our digital compulsions are driven not merely by our lack of willpower but by powerful external forces that act on us. It offers a sociological analysis of our current digital ecology to show how broader social and cultural structures make the digital practices of our day not only compelling and persuasive but inevitable and inescapable.

Taking a second look at existing spiritual disciplines and traditions of liturgy can renew our sense of how our daily lives are filled with practices that direct our loves and appetites and help us map out a path toward becoming the people we hope to become: freed from the tyranny of the digital and capable of manifesting the public witness of faithful presence and genuine community.

There are also so many aspects of our modern life that digital technologies touch—our families, our work, our leisure, our friendships, our spiritual journeys—that it is simply impossible to address all the different issues and questions about our digital life that need challenging, reframing, and rethinking.

The problematic that this book seeks to engage is the way in which the technological and institutional structures of our contemporary digital lives are fundamentally shaping our imaginations and appetites about what it means to experience satisfaction, goodness, and wholeness as a human being.

1. 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.

When we are at altitude, even if our minds don’t grasp it, our bodies do and they send out distress signals. Similarly, when we are living in a digitally saturated society, even if our minds don’t recognize it, our bodies and our spirits know—and arguably, they’ve been sending out distress signals for more than a few years now.

We turn to our screens because it is there that we find and experience friendship, family, and relationship. We are often excited about being connected to the internet today not because it connects us to the information superhighway or a limitless shopping extravaganza, but because it promises to connect us to the important people in our lives.

But Turkle points out that it can also serve as a crutch when we grow to become people incapable of solitude, fearful of being alone with ourselves, and prone to turning to our screens and away from our immediate surroundings whenever we feel awkward, bored, or anxious.

Moreover, being digitally tethered can foster a growing expectation of constant availability to one’s friends and family, regardless of time or day. Just as the digital is always accessible to us, we come to expect the same of people.

Indeed, being permanently connected means that, even if our devices are not powered on, or even in one’s possession, our consciousness has become sufficiently trained and thoroughly immersed in the habits of mind formed by an unceasing awareness of the constantly shifting landscape of what is being said and posted in the digital realm. 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.

Most of us think of digital technologies as merely tools. We think of our devices and digital media accounts as making our lives more convenient and efficient, helping us manage our education, our employment, or family lives, along with granting us access to friendship, romance, and entertainment.

According to Ong, every major shift in a communication medium set in motion a cultural and societal shift that catapulted new skills and new categories of people into the limelight. What’s helpful about this narrative of human history is that it reveals how every technology is not just a tool. Rather technologies are inextricably enmeshed in the very ways that societies distribute cultural power and define knowledge.

The creation of what seemed like a parallel universe in cyberspace amplified existing questions about the presumed nature of reality and its limitations, and offered new possibilities of unlocking humanity’s full potential. Internet technology became a cultural container that would catch all of our turn-of-the-century hopes of fixing the age-old quandaries of human suffering and global conflict. As such, the internet was always a value-laden technology. It was never neutral and it was never just a tool.

First, it is invested in shifting our starting assumptions about what freedom means.

Second, while curbing, limiting, or completely eliminating our digital usage might prove beneficial, we need to recognize that our souls have appetites.

And the more we can engage in habits and practices that yield deliciously tasty fruit that we enjoy and relish, we will want to come back for more.

I recognize that many of us may be fairly pessimistic about our capacity to will ourselves into a virtuous new life or sustain an effort that we know will be good for us. So this project is designed as experiments and exercises, not designed as a “plan” with a tangible destination or measurable indication of success. It is built more as a gentle resource that intends to inspire and from which one can learn, rather than a plan that one can succeed or fail in.

Friends, small groups, churches, and families can try using The Freedom Project as a way to begin exploring questions and discussions about their individual and corporate use of digital devices in their lives.

We think it’s the shared world that everyone experiences, when in fact, it’s a menagerie tailored just for you. It’s an informational and entertainment-based Truman Show with the tech companies and advertisers gazing at us, shaping our lives through the manipulation of their services and Big Data.

While users had turned to Google for information, users turned to Facebook for far more powerful goods like belonging, love, and affirmation.

Psychologist David Greenfield of the Center for Internet Addiction notes, with the ubiquity of the digital, the problem is that there are no structural barriers between desire and action.

In addition to the addictive potential of the digital in our lives, the general effect of screen time and digital usage on the health and resilience of our brains has been of increasing concern. Some research shows that our brains fatigue considerably after heavy multitasking and are unable to reason or be creative at full capacity. Other cognitive studies suggest that even the sheer anticipation of email or other digital stimulation is taking up working memory in our brain.

Psychologists and neuroendocrinologists are increasingly concerned that our current digital practices are causing our cortisol levels to rise more frequently. The mere sight of our phones nearby or even the perception that we have heard a notification has the capacity to elevate our cortisol levels.

A rise in cortisol causes temporary spikes in our blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar which increases one’s risk to a whole gamut of serious health problems over the long haul. It also impairs our brain’s prefrontal cortex, having the effect of decreasing our ability to self-regulate and control our behaviors.

According to behaviorism, our behaviors are perpetually being shaped by a series of incentives and rewards. But like Skinner’s rats, we have been trained to repeatedly check our apps in hopes of landing on a piece of unpredictable stimuli.

What makes the core principles of behaviorism work is its application within a context of human vulnerability for the social. 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.

“How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” . . . We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments. . . . It’s a social-validation feedback loop

So convinced of the power of manipulation that has been built into the system, Palihapitiya has stopped using social media altogether in his personal life because he “innately didn’t want to get programmed.” Interestingly, many industry leaders are so aware of what is going on beneath the hood of all of these alluring technologies that they not only have sworn off social media but also have chosen to keep their children away from it in their households and send them to tech-free schools.

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

Changing how we use our digital and social media is not easy, but if we know something about how these platforms and devices are tied into an industry that monetizes our most basic needs for relationship and belonging, we might become a people who are a little more intentional and think twice about how these technologies are actively industrializing our identities and relationships.

Indeed, social media grants us easy access to people we admire, people who make us laugh, people who teach us, and people who make us feel good about ourselves in a way that magically defies physical space and time of day—making social media delightful, comforting, and satisfying.

But, as we saw in the previous chapter, if we don’t seriously weigh these genuine gains against the genuine losses that we incur with any significant shift in how we experience interacting with each other, we run the risk of forgetting fundamental aspects of our personhood. In a social landscape increasingly defined by the industrialization of you and me—which regularly narrows us down to being merely consumers and even products to be evaluated and consumed—we will need to be more intentional about cultivating practices and habits that help us recognize that the integrity of our relationships and our personal identities are defined by more than the market.

When the industrializing impulse has penetrated even these institutions that have historically been regarded as safe havens from economic pressures and mentalities, our contemporary life looks increasingly like the “iron cage of rationality” that Weber warned of over a hundred years earlier. When we acknowledge how we are a people who have inherited a society built on the mature foundations of industrialization, we can better see how thoroughly we are primed to having even our experience of friendships, families, and our most intimate of relationships “rationalized” through the digital technologies of social media.

Rather than merely attempting to measure time spent on- or offline, the more pressing question is how are we being formed in our relationships when it is often easier and more convenient to conduct them through social media and digital interfaces? How does our posture and mode of relating to each other become shaped by the parameters and expectations of these digital platforms?

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

This realization ought to raise a number of questions for us: What is important? Does having larger numbers say something meaningful about the quality of relationships I participate in or the quality of person I am becoming?

Unlike the concentric circles of intimacy that organize human relations, social media platforms are generally designed with the effect of leveling out this hierarchy of friends and contacts and collapsing the contexts of those relationships into one setting.

we are left on social media with only one option: to perform our lives for mass consumption.

We quickly learn that the ability to create a cleverly constructed hashtag that condenses an entire argument into a lexical punch in the face is more greatly rewarded than a lengthy but carefully nuanced claim that underscores the complexity of an issue. With everyone’s utterances publicly tagged with status-revealing metrics, our desires for positive reinforcement and a sense of belonging compel us to seek out more “likes” as a way to establish our bona fides on the digital playground.

When we are so thoroughly immersed in a social environment filled with easily constructed and hyped-up versions of people’s lives, the drab reality of our actual lives can feel comparatively pathetic and even intolerable.

In such a digital ecology, we have become people who are well trained at mugging for the selfie and precrafting clever hashtags in our minds. As a result, sometimes I wonder if we are capable anymore of experiencing sublime sunsets and landscapes without feeling the impulse to possess it, pin it down, and integrate into our social media performance? Are our habits of mind so shaped already that we are moving through our lives in a ceaseless search for fodder that will merely draw attention to our feed?

It seems we often have difficulty simply experiencing the moment on its own terms. So often we are more caught up in the process of broadcasting our performance and miss out on living more...

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.

The fun of social media is that like cable television or a Las Vegas buffet, there is always something new to consume. Unlike the scarcity of relationships that humans have historically had to make do with, the blessing of social media is the promise of limitless choices.

As we straddle multiple platforms each day, the sheer volume of interaction and content forces us to develop standard techniques of allocating our attention. The overflow that we find in social media tends to lead us to search for ways to “process” efficiently, and we grow to regard our social lives as a set of tasks to manage.

Ultimately, 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.”