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

by Felicia Wu Song

the more instructive parallel is in the heart of expectancy that many of us have come to cultivate in our posture toward our digital lives.

Our hearts are attuned like one of Jane Austen’s disadvantaged maidens waiting in the parlor for the suitor to visit. When we hear the digital footsteps approaching, however, rather than having one’s desperation bridled by a code of etiquette to achieve a state of refined decorum, we reflexively leap with our fingers to tap on our screens to ravenously devour whatever comes through the door.

we diligently tend to our devices. Why? Because we are waiting and searching for joy, for satisfaction, for purpose, for love. We are waiting and therefore abiding in the digital. What would it be like if we were to cultivate such a permanent state of expectancy for God’s desire to communicate with us?

To be with someone who delights in you is a precious thing that we all long to experience. To live with the permission to be fully oneself, fearless because we know we are loved, not condemned or pegged as a sad-sack failure or disappointment. This is what it is to hear from God.

It is not so much that Internet technology impoverishes personal and emotional life, but rather that it creates unprecedented possibilities for sociability and relationship but empties them of the emotional and bodily resources which have until now helped them carry on. EVA ILLOUZ

when we remain with those who we love, not only when they are at their best and most delightful, but also when they are at their weakest or at their worst, we often come to gain a new clarity about ourselves and the substance of our lives.

nothing in our digital ecology can adequately translate the weight of the sheer presence of another. Nor can our digital practices help us cultivate the capacity to recognize the enduring light and breath of life that emanates from each moment of genuine encounter, no matter how small or ordinary.

our digital world is one in which the ordinary seems like dross when compared to its offer of the hyperreal. It primes us ever more to avoid and filter out the inconvenient reminders of our frailty and vulnerabilities. In such a world, how do we build a life that gives us the will to journey through and not avoid, avert, or go around? How do we build such a life in an age that is so rich with ways to circumvent the mundane and avoid the fellowship of suffering? What we need is a story that can fortify us with sufficient assurances that our presence and proximity remain precious and meaningful in God’s economy.

Indeed, throughout Jesus’ life and ministry, we see that at the heart of Christianity is a steadfast promise that God will come and be with us, and his very presence is what gives us hope and helps us through.

In his book To Change the World, James Davison Hunter advances the idea that if Christians are going to actually “change the world,” they need to cease trying to do just that and learn to be faithfully present. He argues that faithful presence looks like being wholly committed to one’s given relationships, local communities, and workplaces.

And we are only capable of being faithfully present to the world when we have first learned how to become fully present to God “as a worshipping community and as adoring followers.”

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

In a time when permanent connectivity has caused the pull of presence and place to grow weak, practicing faithful presence becomes an investment in a counterclaim about the significance of where our bodies are and the relevance of place.

If we take to heart the significance of our human nature as being both communing and embodied, then we might begin to re-form our imaginations about our human experience as something indelibly marked by and to be enjoyed within the phenomenological possibilities and limitations of time, place, and presence.

Much of this book has sought to demonstrate how living in our digitally saturated society inadvertently trains us to view embodiment as a nuisance, time in terms of scarcity, and the other as an object to be managed or manipulated for one’s pleasure. And if following the way of Jesus Christ entails leaning into a robust social imaginary that calls us to live into genuine communion, the fullness of time, and faithful presence, we will inevitably run headlong against our digital ecology’s competing social imaginary of grasping, performing, objectifying, and controlling.

In my desire to be fully human as God has created me, I will endeavor to keep the following commitments as I live in this digital age: 1. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus. 2. Remember that embodied presence is a powerful gift I can offer and receive. 3. Walk, talk, text, and post in the manner of love as Jesus would. 4. Pray daily for wisdom and understanding of how God wants me to use my technologies. 5. Live a life with my eyes up and heart open to performing regular service for others and for the world. 6. Set aside my device when I am physically present with other people and strive to be mentally and emotionally present to them as well, even if they are not to me. 7. Fix my eyes only on whatever is true, lovely, pure, and right. 8. When I am sad, bored, angry, lonely, or anxious, reach for another person, nature, or God before turning to a screen.

9. Set aside my devices in order to enjoy the sacred times of eating meals with someone, spending time with my loved ones, or going to bed. 10. Strive for times of solitude and silence in order to rest and to not hide from myself or God. Having seriously considered how my digital habits shape the essence of who I am becoming each and every day and with the determination to do my very best to live well, I resolve to keep these commitments because I want to become a person who can be genuinely present to God and others, and who has the capacity to respond in obedience to God’s call in my life.

The exhilaration we may encounter from our digital lives often make the boring and complex nature of our everyday lives seem all the more onerous. In many ways, these unintended outcomes of our digital ecology merely bring to the fore what has circumscribed our human condition from the start: as human beings who have strayed from the source of life, we often feel trapped by our circumstances, unable to satisfy our appetites, and bent on establishing control as a source of security. While these very human instincts have always existed, the digital ecology we have created powerfully reinforces and amplifies these tendencies.