We all have them. we all use them. But what are they doing to us, and to our culture and communities? Consider this - Six Ways Your Phone is Changing You by Tony Reinke
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld Expo 2007, and I got my first one a year later. I can’t remember life without it.
For seven years an iPhone has always been within my reach, there to wake me in the morning, there to play my music library, there to keep my calendar, there to capture my life in pics and video, there for me to enjoy sling-shooting wingless birds into enemy swine, there as my ever-present portal to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
My iPhone is such a part of my daily life, I rarely think self-reflectively about it. That’s precisely what concerns David Wells, 75, a careful thinker who has watched trends in the church for many decades.
Wells asks Christians to consider the consequences of the smartphone. “What is it doing to our minds when we are living with this constant distraction?” he said recently in an interview. “We are, in fact, now living with a parallel universe, a virtual universe that can take all of the time we have. So what happens to us when we are in constant motion, when we are addicted to constant visual stimulation? What happens to us? That is the big question.”
That’s a huge question. What is life like now because of the smartphone? How has the iPhone changed us? These self-reflective questions may seem daunting, but we must ask them.
The Internet Age
Wells is quick to remind us we are only 20 years into this experiment called “The Internet Age” (or “The Information Age”). All of our digital communications technology is relatively new. One day we will stand back and look with more precision at what our smartphones are doing to our brains, our hearts, and our souls, but we don’t have the leisure to postpone self-reflection for the future. We need to ask ourselves questions now.
We have wise Christian fathers in the faith who are asking important questions, if we’re willing to listen. One such man is Dr. Douglas Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary. Groothuis has been tracking the impact of the Internet on the spiritual life since he published his book The Soul in Cyberspace in 1997.
I recently talked with Groothuis about how our iPhones are changing us. He suggested we think about six areas.
Change 1: We are becoming like what we behold.
At first that statement sounds abstract, but it’s one of the most simple (and profound) psychological realities we learn in Scripture: We become like what we behold. To worship an idol is to become like the idol; to worship Christ is to become like Christ. Passages in Scripture abound to this end — Psalm 115:4–8, Romans 1:18–27, 12:1–2, Colossians 3:10, and 2 Corinthians 3:18.
What we love to behold is what we worship. What we spend our time beholding shapes our hearts and molds us into the people we are. This spiritual truth is frightening and useful, but it raises the questions: What happens to our soul when we spend so much time beholding the glowing screens of our phones? How are we changed? How are we conformed?
One way we become like what we behold shows up relationally, Groothuis warns. Our digital interactions with one another, which are often necessarily brief and superficial, begin to pattern all our relationships. “When you begin to become shallow in your interactions with people, you can become habituated to that.” All of our personal interactions take the same shape. The barista at the coffee counter gets a DM-like response. When we hang out with friends, we offer a series of Tweet-like responses in a superficial conversation with little spiritual meaning.
“The way we interact online becomes the norm for how we interact offline. Facebook and Twitter communications are pretty short, clipped, and very rapid. And that is not a way to have a good conversation with someone. Moreover, a good conversation involves listening and timing and that is pretty much taken away with Internet communications, because you are not there with the person. So someone could send you a message and you could ignore it, or someone could send you a message and you get to it two hours later. But if you are in real time in a real place with real bodies and a real voice, that is a very different dynamic. You shouldn’t treat another person the way you would interact with Twitter.” But we do, if we’re not careful.
Change 2: We are ignoring our finiteness.
Fundamentally I am a finite man, severely limited in what I can know and what I can read and what I can engage with and (perhaps most importantly) very limited in what I can really care about. Yet my phone offers me everything — new news, new outrages, new videos, new music, new pictures, and new updates from all my Facebook friends.
One reason we own smartphones is to avoid being left behind. We don’t want to miss anything gone viral. We track hashtag trends mostly out of fear of being left out. And little by little we ignore our finiteness, we lose a sense of our limitations, and we begin lusting after the forbidden fruit of limitless knowledge in a subconscious desire to become infinite like God.
