12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You by Tony Reinke

12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You by Tony Reinke

"...life in the digital age is an open invitation for clear, biblical thinking about the impact of our phones on ourselves, on our creation, on our neighbors, and on our relationships to God. Thoughtlessly adopting new technologies is worldliness" (37).

"I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber...Hence it comes than men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible."--quoting Pascal. "Pascal's point is a perennial fact: the human appetite for distraction is high in every age, because distractions give us easy escape from the silence and solitude whereby we become acquainted with our finitude, our inescapable mortality, and the distance of God from all our desires, hopes, and pleasures" (45).

"It is difficult to serve God with our heart, soul, strength and mind when we are diverted and distracted and multi-tasking everything"--quoting Doublas Groothuis, philosophy prof at Denver Seminary (47).

"From the onset of this study, we must die to the idea that a distraction-free life is possible--it is not, and it never has been. the holy life is piously complex, meaning we must learn how to apply distraction management in every situation" (50).

"If anger is the viral emotion of online disembodiment, then joy is the Christian emotion of embodied fellowship" (59).

"All writing that is remote--like the ancient letter, the modern text message, or this book--is more like ghost-to-ghost communication than person-to-person interaction. Yes, there is something of us in written words, but not everything in true fellowship can be typed out on phone screens...This is the reality of communication. Joy is a precious emotion of our integrated existence" (60).

"We easily settle into digital villages of friends who think just like us and escape from people who are unlike us. Our phones buffer us from diversity"..quoting Alistair Roberts--although"generational differences are fundamentally constitutive differences for the human race...new media is one of the may ways are elders are rendered invisible." "And it's not only our elders, but also the impoverished, the cognitively disabled, children, the less educated, the less literate, the less cosmopolitan, and non-Westerners. In effect, our online communities 'render invisible the majority of the human race'" (71).

Again quotes are from Roberts: "In fact, our online communities of like-minded friends are often marked by a 'positive feedback loop,' where 'affirmation and assent merely reinforce existing prejudices. In such contexts, communicties become insular, echo chambers of accepted opinion, closed to opposing voices,' which means they breed a 'homeostatic stifling of difference'" (72).

"The literacy problem we face today is not illiteracy but aliteracy, a digital skimming that is simply an attempt to keep up with a deluge of information coming through our phones rather than slowing down and soaking up what is most important" (85).

"God's word demands our highest levels of literacy concentration because it requires relational reading: not the superficial chitchat of a cocktail party, but the covenantal concentration of marriage vows. God's word is an invitation to orient our affections and desires. Our challenge is to use social media in the service of serious reading" (89).

In a footnote quoting Douglas Wilson: "Creation is a gift meant to bring glory to the Creator. All Christians agree here. But Christians throughout the ages have put their suspicions in different places. Take C.S. Lewis and Augustine. I love them both, but I would rather have a beer with Lewis. Lewis would order us a really good beer, just because it was a really good beer, with his understanding of God suffusing the whole. For him, while the thickness of creation can become an idol, a rival to God, it is intended for us as a sermon by God about God. And you cant't honor the preacher by ignoring the sermon. But Augustine would perhaps think that a thin beer would help us think of Jesus more, not distracting us quite so much, and that when we had really advanced in grace, we might be able to get the same effect with water. I say this in the full recognition that I am not worthy to have been Augustine's boot boy. So then a right approach to a thick creation honors the Creator more fully; we honor his work as he gave it, instead of trying to dilute it in misguided zeal for his glory." Reinke says: "Intended or not, Wilson's illustration of alcohol density coincides with the display of diving glory echoed in the first miracle of Jesus (John 2:1-11). He did not flex his sovereign power by turning party wine into water, but by turning ceremonial washing water into dark, undiluted party wine--the 'good wine' that caught attention. Not only did the water-to-wine thickening of creation not cloud Christ's glory, it manifested it" (95).

"...We must humbly admit that we are targets of digital mega-corporations that can make us into reckless consumers with strategic intermediated content. We cannot be naive here. Our attention spans have been monetized, and getting us hooked on our phones is a commercial commodity measured in billions of dollars, not kiosk change" (99).

"...We must celebrate. We cannot suppress our souls' appetite for what is awe-inspiring. The goal is not to mute all smartphone media but to feed ourselves the right media. We are created to behold, see, taste, and delight in the richness of God's glory--and that glory often comes refracted to us through skilled artists. Our insatiable appetite for viral videos, memes, and tweets is the product of an appetite for glory that God gave us" (100).

"Social media has become the new PR firm of the brand Self" (109).

"In the digital age, we idolize our phones when we lost the ability to ask if they help us (or hurt us) in reaching our spiritual goals. We grow so fascinated with technological glitz that we become captive to the wonderful means of our phones--their speed, organization, and efficiency--and these means themselves become sufficient ends. Our destination remains foggy because we are fixated on the speed of travel. We mistakenly submit human and spiritual goals to our technological possibilities" (115).

"Friction is the path to genuine authenticity, and no amount of online communication can overcome a lack of real integrity. We must be real with the people God puts in our lives....We are authentic believers who are committed to replacing easy relationships with authentic ones" (126).

Sherry Turkle: "The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude. In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come into conversation with something to say that is authentic" (126).

"Every morning we must take time to stop, to be still, to know that God is God and that we are his children. Digital technology must not fill up all the silent gaps of life" (129).

"The great term 'by faith' is a synonym for confidence in the unseen spiritual realities. Yet on what your heart loves, your eyes will linger." In a footnote on page 138, the great insight that "This is a recurring theme in the book of Isaiah, where the verb 'look to' is simultaneously applied to physical sight and spiritual sight (loyalty) in contrasting the categories of idols/God, visual/faith, and the immediate/anticipated" (138).

"...it is of the nature of technology to dislocate us historically. In principle, writes Craig Gay, 'the technological habit of mind is anti-teleological. It is largely uninterested, and indeed incapable, of appreciating the notions of final causality or ultimate purpose'" (180).


Future Reading:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/opinion/david-brooks-building-attention-span.html
Interesting because it's an opposing view to what most seem to have to say about technology turning our brains to mush: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707600-smarter-than-you-think
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/being-a-better-online-reader
http://www.reformation21.org/articles/the-seven-deadly-sins-in-a-digital-age-4-sloth.php
https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s22-money-love-desire/creation-is-thick-i-tell-you.html
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22240772-the-things-of-earth?ac=1&from_search=true
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14568717-big-disconnect
I'll just read this instead of reading Turkle's new book: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/books/review/jonathan-franzen-reviews-sherry-turkle-reclaiming-conversation.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/opinion/sunday/stop-googling-lets-talk.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/take-the-pledge-no-more-indulging-porn-1472684658