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

by Felicia Wu Song

Through reification, I move closer to treating the dynamic between you and me as a “thing,” objectifying you and the messages you post as mere tasks that I need to read and respond to.

Indeed, it is when the dynamic between you and me takes on a static sense of “thingness” rather than remaining as an unpredictable and vulnerable encounter of sacred beings, that I feel the license to go online and flirt, gossip, gloat, or exact verbal violence on someone without the heat of shame or tremor of uncertainty getting stuck in my throat. 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 drive to reify is a subtle shift that happens in each of us when we are overwhelmed and trying to simply manage how we distribute our limited supply of attention and energy. To survive we can’t help but turn down our internal antennae for the sake of self-preservation. We grow an emotional and mental hedge between ourselves and the world around us. 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.

Social theorist Zygmunt Bauman pointedly observes that, in the context of our digital age, “making eye contact and thereby acknowledging the physical proximity of another human being spells waste: it portends the necessity of spending a portion of precious yet loathsomely scarce time on deep diving” into embodied interaction.

We all know that meaningful in-person interactions take a lot of energy and that the payoff can be great. It is, as Bauman puts it, a form of deep diving. But when we are preoccupied and tired and are still looking for some kind of payoff, it is far more appealing to give ourselves permission to disregard those who are next to us and indulge in social media’s promise of a dopamine hit and the promise of stumbling on a social interaction online that is far easier, even if not completely satisfying.

Our priority toggles toward the digital so that to give our attention to those who are physically proximate to us is, as Bauman asserts, “a decision that would interrupt or pre-empt” our hungry ritual of clicking through so many other potentially more interesting possibilities of social interactions.7 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.”

Our students “need to disperse themselves again, get away from the immediate, dissolve the present away.”

Classes themselves have become the interruption in their lives and students eagerly “dispatch” of their coursework as quickly as possible in order to get on with their “actual lives.”

we fall into habits that train us into the belief that hurrying, moving on to the next thing, accomplishing more, dwelling in possibility rather than the present, is the preferred way to live.

For a teacher who has invested his life in guiding students to appreciate the richness embedded in the slow and steady work of story on our lives, it is a travesty to see these impulses for control take hold. 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?

The more we seek control through the powerful tools and allure of digital media, the less we exercise and grow in our capacity to negotiate those real-life relationships that are so often not in our control. And as the iron cage of rationality continually works to strip human encounters of their unpredictability, inefficiencies, and intangible qualities that defy quantification and reification, it deprives us of having to experience all the quirky and wondrously surprising aspects of human beings.

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.

Put simply we used to define ourselves in relation to something outside ourselves. Now, we turn inward.

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.

As the consumer, you are your only source of orientation. The networks radiate out from the center—a center that is not a location, a cause, or a common identity—it is simply you.

vying for attention, people’s time, and positive reinforcement.

Tish Harrison Warren points out when comparing the economy of our contemporary culture to the economy of Christ: We are formed by our habits of consumption. And in contemporary America, this daily formation is often at odds with our formation in Word and sacrament. In this alternative economy of the true bread of life, we are turned inside out so that we are no longer people marked by scarcity, jockeying for our own good, but are new people, truly nourished, and therefore able to extend nourishment to others.

Most of all, I really don’t miss the peculiar feeling of my psyche being turned inside out, like a child’s sock lying in the hallway, as my corporeal life becomes the background noise to my online life. It’s that curious sense of feeling that the happenings in the digital realm glow with such an aura of excitement and significance that it’s not easy finding my way back to tending to the people and affairs in my immediate surroundings.

When I was on Facebook and regularly experiencing a delicious river of digital affirmation that flowed as much as I primed it, I sometimes felt like I needed to engage, post, and publish simply in order to exist. In fact, I saw how I had come to even wonder if all my relationships were primarily cultivated in terms of transactions and reciprocity as I liked or if I commented my way into trusting interdependence with others.

Every age is defined by a social imaginary. Charles Taylor explains that a social imaginary “incorporates a sense of the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life.”1 You might say that a social imaginary is a kind of story that a culture tells itself about what we believe to be our human condition and how we ought to live life together.

Our typical digital practices of keeping up, grasping for attention, and seeking the reward of affirmation begin to feel paltry and thin against the sheer magnificence of what is promised in the ritual of confession: to be invited to freely admit our failures and discover that we are still loved and welcomed.

Indeed most of the time we are far too easily pleased with the short-lived glow of pleasure we feel from getting a thumbs-up on our posts because we cannot imagine what it might mean to be fully embraced by an infinite and divine love.

the first part of this book sought to demonstrate how digital media and technologies industrialize our relationships and identities so that it becomes easy and normal to approach our social interactions as merely ways of advancing our own needs and desires.

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.

Jaron Lanier bluntly speaks the truth he recognizes when he says that living according to the flow of social media and its digital practices means you “implicitly accept a new spiritual framework. . . . You have agreed to change something intimate about your relationship with your soul. . . . You have probably, to some degree . . . effectively renounced what you might think is your religion, even if that religion is atheism.”4

Therefore, every time we find ourselves trying to optimize our online presence for more views, more likes, and more followers—and every time we begin to even think in terms of optimizing our identities or optimizing our relationships, we have effectively renounced our formal religious commitments and begun to serve a new master. “You have been baptized,” Lanier proclaims.

Too rarely is Christian faith seen to be what it actually is: a lively and holy process of having inner dragons slain and having spells that have been cast broken on our behalf.

I have observed how such learning actually does little to help me tame and properly situate the digital in my own life. Even when I gain insight and understanding intellectually, my life praxis does not seem to change substantially. As a result, I have come to surmise that perhaps our energies are better devoted toward getting more serious and more creative about how to genuinely live more deeply into what it means to be human. Maybe what we need is not so much more knowledge about technology but more knowledge and understanding about being human—in particular, what it means that being human is an experience that is situated in time and in place within our corporeal bodies and in our relationship with the divine and our neighbor.

theological anthropology. This vision asserts that human beings are created to enjoy communion with God and our neighbor within the possibilities and limitations of place and time. Every person’s winding journey of faith involves the challenge of rooting one’s life and self in this kind of story. And yet such a challenge is worth our while because it is, among other things, the source of a hopeful resistance against having our social imaginary be exclusively defined by permanent connectivity.

the church runs the risk of either naively promoting or remaining dangerously silent about digital habits that are slowly but surely distorting the very understanding and experience of soul formation and genuine Christian discipleship.

For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them, but our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

IN OUR TIMES of unprecedented connection—connection to people, connection to breaking news, connection to information and entertainment—one would think we would be satisfied.

connection within our digital ecology is more like being on a fast train that has no intention of slowing or stopping to assess where we are going.

This quality of permanent connectivity that our online capacities offer us has not proven to grant us peace. To the contrary, we remain restless and hungry for something we can’t put our fingers on. Why? Because even though we desire connection, what we long for and are actually created for is something far deeper. What we actually need is communion.

They offer a data-driven mechanism for establishing mutual interest that requires little risk and little commitment. And yet under all the layers of sexual attraction, social status, and affirmation we may acquire through these apps, most of us would admit that what we actually long for in our most intimate of relationships is to know and be known, to trust and be trusted, and to experience the freedom in disclosing our most vulnerable and weak selves and finding that we are still loved.

When we look at our digital ecology, we can arguably see evidence of our contemporary attempts to “escape from the human condition.” Our infinite digital options promise to liberate us from the uncertainties, inconveniences, and constraints that come with the finitude of our bodies, the givenness of our locations, and the narrow scope of the people in our lives.

Much of the trauma comes with being human, and thus being burdened with the awareness of mortality and other miserable fates that await us. “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance,” wrote Pascal, “we have decided in order to be happy, not to think about such things.” Social media helps us not to think about such things.

But as a culture and society, we often do so with our eyes so fixed on the thrill and progress gained, that we tend to let slide the costs of some of the consequences. We try to absorb and ignore the apparent fraying of edges, insistent that the trains of progress continue to run at their given pace, even as the compounded strains of modern life increasingly yield troubling trends in depression, anxiety, gun violence, suicide, and drug abuse.

what if the central problem isn’t that we can’t adapt fast enough to our changing environment, but rather that as modern people we do not possess a clear enough sense of what is at our “core” as human beings?

We can try to assemble a small army of productivity apps and digital detox weekends in order to moderate our digital usage, but living a life that is free from feeling compelled to respond to the pulsing digital flow of notifications is not one that can be exclusively achieved through acts of negation. We need a paradigm that helps us down a journey of actually becoming a different kind of person than who we are now.

In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you’re supposed to be.

For liturgy to “work,” you’ve just got to show up and “do” the liturgy. Simply by regularly reciting prayers, kneeling, and just breathing, you are participating.

Years from now, when I look over my shoulder and reflect on how I have changed, what will I see? Will my life’s assortment of humble liturgies turn out to have widened the path that leads me deeper into the realm of God? Or will they have obscured that same path with the pressing urgencies and ceaseless abundance of the digital?

In this age of information abundance, we may be well-acquainted with the importance of being informed, but how many of us have ever given much thought to how it is that we are formed?

The way our . . . desire gets aimed in specific directions is through practices that shape, mold, and direct our love.

stop underestimating the power of your bodily routines.

What we enact or perform with our bodies are not merely secondary aspects of how we express our beliefs, commitments, or values. Rather, the practices we embody do a work on us in a way that is separate from and external to whatever cognitive meaning, moral intention, or cultural logic we may also bring to the table.4

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.

“secular liturgies.” These are personal and cultural habits that we routinely practice with our bodies and which have the effect of mis-forming our desires. These secular liturgies ultimately mis-direct our desires toward those things that falsely claim to fulfill our longings and that manage to draw us away from the very communion with God for which we were created. Whether it is manifested through how we seek out some inchoate satisfaction when we go shopping, how we absent-mindedly eat prepackaged meals in front of a screen, or how we daily feel discontented when we step on the bathroom scale, these secular liturgies routinely encourage us to bow down to the culturally endorsed gods of our society rather than the Creator God who loves and seeks to make us and all of creation whole.