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

by Felicia Wu Song

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.

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.

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.

In a deeply sociological sense, technology works the same way that culture does. It tells a story about how life should be.

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. Interestingly, Google issued a report in 2018 noting that constant exposure to social media, email, and news apps on smartphones is contributing to mounting stress in users who feel obligated to keep up on the latest notifications.11 According to Greenfield because this stress creates discomfort, we often feel compelled to check our phones in order to relieve the stress. However once we do check, we usually encounter something newly unexpected that causes our cortisol level to rise yet again, and we feel further compelled to resolve that anxiety by further pecking at our phones. This is how we slip into a cycle of experiencing stress, attempting to alleviate the anxiety and only to elicit a new wave of stress—again and again. As our body’s main stress hormone is activated when we perceive a threat, our bodies physiologically prepare for a fight-or-flight response that rarely is quite what we need. 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-r...

“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.”

The fact that tech companies have knowingly used brain science and behavioral psychology to influence and control consumers’ attention is one thing. It is another problem altogether when we come to realize what tactics and tools they are willing to use in order to achieve these ends. Back in 2012, Facebook engaged in a series of covert experiments on “massive emotion contagion” in order to discover its potential to spread positive or negative sentiments across their network. Teen users as young as fourteen were targeted to receive strategic ads based on the emotional tone of their posts. Users whose posts included words like defeated, overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, nervous, useless, or failure were categorized as needing a “confidence boost” and had their data passed to marketers who were interested in targeting teens who are feeling particularly vulnerable. It is these sorts of projects that lead those disenchanted with Silicon Valley to describe social media as a system of behavior modification that preys on us when we are feeling lonely or depressed. Unfortunately, even though such practices have been criticized as social engineering or predatory advertising, such revelations have done little to alter companies’ practices, motivate governmental response, or stem the tide of young people flocking to the latest social media platforms.

The thought process that went into building these applications . . . was all about: “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 . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. . . . The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. . . . And we did it anyway.

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.

When companies use our trust as a conduit to spur their own growth or make it intentionally difficult to unsubscribe or unplug even temporarily, we pay for those abuses. Our lack of understanding, and control over, how our data is being used costs us real money and time. The next time a tech company forces you to sign a “terms of service” agreement, ask yourself why that company doesn’t have to sign a similar agreement with you.

Our dogged reliance on metrics to indicate something of value to us suggests that social media’s drive to quantify has struck a nerve in us somehow and forces us to consider how our imaginations and appetites are shaped—even in some small but substantive way—by what the industry has defined as important.

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? Who ultimately benefits when we are driven to post more, engage more, check more? 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.

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.

Social media platforms also enhance our performances by supplying us with a pre-fab toolkit of bitmojis and emojis, online gestures, gifs, and photo filters. These all help us express ourselves in a social environment that is generally stripped of the complicated dance of verbal and nonverbal cues, and the subtle pitch and tone of someone’s voice. Manufactured expressions of exuberance or outrage increasingly become shortcuts for how we choose to interact with each other on social media as these tools ingeniously shave down the phenomenological experience of embodied or aural communication to a mere click of a button. 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.

So often we are more caught up in the process of broadcasting our performance and miss out on living more deeply into the experience of an unfolding moment. When our collective consciousness becomes increasingly colonized by thoughts about how post-able our life’s moments are, we have not only conceded our data and our social interactions to the proprietary spaces of social media platforms, we have also conceded the very phenomenological experience of our passing lives. 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.

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.”

In what situations do I nearly always find myself using my phone (or device)? ■ Are there triggers that automatically motivate me to reach for my phone? ■ What is my emotional state right before I use my phone? ■ What is my emotional state right after I use my phone? ■ How does my posture change when I am using my phone? ■ How do I feel while I am using my phone? ■ Are there ever moments when I realize that I don’t have my phone? How do I feel then? ■ When in my day—either with or without the phone—do I feel most engaged, energized, joyful, effective, and purposeful? What am I doing? Who am I with? ■ When I am with other people who are using their phones, how does it makes me feel?

B. Ask yourself at each point that you find yourself reaching for your phone: ■ What for: What am I picking up my phone to do? ■ Why now: Why am I picking up my phone now instead of later? ■ What else: What else could I do right now besides check my phone?

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.

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.

Too often the Christian faith is animated by either an intellectual desire to make sure the right set of propositional boxes are checked off, a moral impulse to tighten the screws in order to become more virtuous, or a heart matter of feeling more spiritual warmth toward God. 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. When the apostle Paul asks the early church, “Who has bewitched you?” and pleads for their return to what they know to be true, we should take that as a sign for how much of the journey of faith is about undoing and unbelieving. Or as Elie Wiesel might have explained it, how faith is not so much a noun, but a verb.

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.

As a person walking within the Christian faith tradition, I’d like to propose that historical Christianity carries within it a story with an alternative account of the human condition that speaks meaningfully into our struggles over the digital today.

human beings and social institutions don’t necessarily change and adapt as quickly as the machines and science do. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that we do in fact try to change, and change we do. 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.

How do we begin to imagine solutions and interventions that can disrupt this sensation of being bulldozed into a future we don’t necessarily know that we want?

The significance of this chapter’s intent is to reclaim ourselves as created for communion, riven to the core, and ultimately beloved. It has sought to explore how the narrative arc in the Christian theological heritage consists of robust resources for guiding Christians for meaningfully responding to the prevailing digital ecology and its practices.

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.

Rather than new techniques or the sheer will of moral striving, it will take a wholly new imagination of what it is we are after in the end and a reestablishment of who we are as human beings—made for communion, riven, and Spirit-transformed. The Christian imagination is one that has the potential theological resources to help us remember that we are created to commune and to inhabit

A seed knows how to wait. Most seeds wait for at least a year before starting to grow. . . . What exactly each seed is waiting for is known only to the seed. Some unique trigger combination of temperature-moisture-light and many other things are required to convince a seed to jump off the deep end and take its chance—to take its one and only chance to grow. . . . In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you’re supposed to be. HOPE JAHRENS

we ought to identify and exercise counterliturgies that push back against the mis-formations of the heart. Instead of simply removing the bad, we ought to fill ourselves with something good.

Apparently, we are creatures who find boredom so distasteful that we will desperately pursue anything to distract our minds and fill our time rather than experience the discomforts of boredom.

the neuroscience around boredom is quite fascinating for it shows that contrary to how we may feel, boredom may actually have some serious benefits for our lives. It turns out that when we are not focused on a given task, our minds do not simply “switch off.” When we actually “zone out,” our brains are not simply made void of activity as commonly imagined. Our brains are actively engaged in what some scientists call “mind wandering.” In fact, the research suggests that the fortunes may have turned: It is precisely when we are engrossed in some goal-oriented task that significant parts of our brains are actually turned off! 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.

raising these sorts of concerns about social ties and interactions maintained online is complicated because these very platforms that can allow individuals to avoid genuine encounters with other people are the same platforms that brilliantly open up new avenues of sociability that are profoundly effective and even essential to so many who are marginalized or isolated in their proximate everyday lives.

To the extent that our digital devices and services offer us varying forms of mediated communication and interaction which mimic and alter our experiences of human presence, and to the extent that our human vulnerabilities usually sweep us into preferring modes of encounter that serve our personal desires and weaknesses in the moment—regardless of whatever long-term or greater good might be in store—we have to ask: What is the general effect of this digital ecology on how we (de-)value our embodied presence? And how does it shape our imaginations about what the full range of human engagement can look like and involve?

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. When we live out faithful presence in the world, we do it not to change it or get what we can out of it but to simply inhabit it.

the call to faithful presence is essentially a call to be like God when he lovingly guided Israel through the wilderness or to be like Jesus when he gave the disinherited his attention and did not flinch from touching their wounds. The invitation to participate in faithful presence is an invitation to show up, to intervene, to “go through” with others.

Faithful presence then calls us to seek out, learn from, or stand alongside those with whom we would otherwise be estranged.

the present digital ecology is leading us to fewer and fewer encounters with people and perspectives we find disagreeable. For the algorithms that are designed to give us what companies think we want tend toward creating echo chambers in which we are more likely to become accustomed to having our voices unquestioned and our views affirmed. In these sorts of environments, we risk growing unfamiliar with and even fearful of difference, and the troubling real-world effect of these digital silos is undeniable. In the past few years, the ratcheting up of political polarization and rise in adherence to conspiracy theories that we see not only in the US but around the world are phenomena directly tied to the digital design and structures of our contemporary social media platforms and services.