At Cairn University, all of our students have to take Apologetics as part of their required curriculum. Each semester, I start a class by asking students to look out the classroom windows and begin verbally listing everything they can see. The list goes on and on: people, buildings, cars, the parking lot, birds, trees, dogs, grass, clouds. After they exhaust their observations, I point out that they missed the pane of glass. They were looking through it, not at it, and therefore they didn’t take it into account.
I use that illustration to introduce an argument against naturalism that C.S. Lewis makes in his book Miracles. It illustrates the fact that we can easily become oblivious to that which we have come to take for granted due to familiarity and frequent usage. In class, we give attention to what we are accustomed to looking through, reason itself. But here, I want to examine something else we often look through, our digital technologies, with a view toward their formative powers and the challenges they pose to our aim of being conformed to the image of Christ.
Our digital technologies—such as the Internet and smartphones—are not all that old, yet they have become so interwoven into the fabric of our lives that it requires some degree of mental energy to recall life before them or to imagine life without them. And while it could be argued that the so-called “digital natives” have been most impacted by this digital revolution, it’s not only them. Our digital tools have become what Neil Postman called “mythic.” In a lecture he gave to religious leaders in 1998 called “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change,” Postman discussed a common tendency we have to “think of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things. . . . It is this way with many products of human culture, but with none more consistently than technology. Cars, planes, TV, movies, newspapers, they have achieved mythic status because they are perceived as gifts of nature, not as artifacts produced in a specific political and historical context.”
To put a slight twist on Socrates’ dictum, the examined digital life is worth living. What are the impacts of our increasing habitation of the virtual world on the formation and/or deformation of virtue? How might our devices be inclining us to vices? And what measures must we take if we are to live more faithfully as disciples of Jesus and less so as disciples of our electronic tools?
A disciple is one who places himself under the instruction and mentorship of another. To be discipled is to learn. To be a discipler is to teach. Both require agency and intention. So when I speak of our being discipled by our devices, I don’t mean to attribute either agency or intention to our digital devices themselves. And by speaking of them as virtue or vice-forming, neither do I mean to attribute moral agency to them. Our smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other devices are not persons, and moral agency is only properly ascribed to personal moral agents.
In one sense, it is therefore accurate to say that our digital tools are, in themselves, neither moral nor immoral. Certainly, they can be put to moral and immoral uses but they are in themselves void of moral attribution. However, it doesn’t follow that they are in all ways neutral. This is a point that numerous media theorists have made repeatedly, and one which I fear Christians have been slow to hear. It has been our tendency to assess technologies almost solely on the basis of the uses to which they are put with little to no thought to the ways in which our technological tools and the conventions that grow up around them may be shaping us.
I’d like to look at three areas that our inhabitation of the technological world can train or disciple us to think in certain ways that are antagonistic to the Kingdom of God: attention, autonomy, and humanity/embodiment.
Multiple factors have contributed to my interest in the relationship between theology, spirituality, and digital technology, but one that stands out in my recollection is reading Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” In it, he wrote, “I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. . . . Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
I resonated all too well with what Carr described. Clearly, you can see how what he’s saying can apply to our time in the Scriptures. But attention is vital to the entirety of the Christian life. We have a responsibility to steward our attention, because it is a gift from God that is to be employed in knowing and enjoying him above all else and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his classic book, Life Together, says, “The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them.” In other words, we must attend to one another. And practices and ways of life that threaten our ability to attend are therefore destructive to the life of discipleship.
With respect to autonomy, I have profited from Antón Barba-Kay’s book A Web of Our Own Making. He is not writing from a Christian point of view, but I think he makes helpful observations about how the connected life is designed to foster a sense of autonomy:
“The primary goal of all online services is to reflect your preferences. The constructive feedback between what you see and what you get is the order of the day. To the extent that I associate with others in the online mode, I am in a position from which I may retreat, refrain, abstract myself at any point. There are no (or few) strings attached, the setting puts little pressure on the shape of my own desires. . . . The net provides us with the most vivid, powerful, and constant experience of autonomy available to us. And where such an experience plays a greater and greater part in our ordinary practices, it will play a greater role in shaping each of us in its image. How we see and speak to others necessarily changes how we see and what we tell ourselves.”
We were created to be subservient to God, dependent upon him, dependent upon one another. We need to give serious thought to how the manner in which we interact with our devices may be working against that. That point was brought home to me by listening to what Christian philosopher Jamie KA Smith brought out in a talk about the formative effects of the cell phone. He said, “Even if you are reading Gospel Coalition content all day on your phone, you are still being shaped to expect that things should be served to you when you want them, how you want them.” It’s not just a matter of content; it’s a matter of form and practice.
Thirdly, our devices can influence how we answer the question: What does it mean to be human? In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how new technologies often provide new metaphors for explaining the workings of nature, and he uses the example of cartography, how the technology of map-making came about and how that became a metaphor for so many other areas of life. “We began to map our lives, or social spheres, even our ideas,” he says. “Under the sway of the mechanical clock, people begin thinking of their brains and their bodies, even the entire universe, in fact, as operating like ‘clockwork.’”
But think about the ways that the digital has become a predominant metaphor for how it is that we even think about ourselves. Antón Barba-Kay in A Web of Our Own Making notes several examples of language from the spheres of mechanization and digitalization that we routinely employ to describe our cognition and affect: feedback; being in the loop; making connections; being in sync; processing experiences; downloading information; uploading or upgrading aspects of our lives; storing or retrieving memories; having or lacking the bandwidth to tend to something; being triggered; and our mental hardware, brain power, and RAM. He points out that this kind of language suggests that we are just our brains and that we are just passive responders to things that are pressing our buttons.
I found a cartoon, interestingly tweeted out by Elon Musk, of a robot parent and child looking at an exhibit of a human brain and describing it as “the original processor.” There is a tragic irony captured here. We desperately try to create machines with humanlike capacities, and we speak of ourselves and each other in machine-like ways. While we stand in amazement and wonder at our human-simulating creations, we fail to exhibit a similar fascination with humans themselves, the images of God.
Our devices have also profoundly impacted our perceptions and conceptions about things like community, location, and friendship. Samuel D. James in Digital Liturgies says “The Internet which dominates our lives as the primary medium with which we encounter most of the world is an entirely disembodied habitat. Consequently, the Internet trains our consciences to think of ourselves and the world in disembodied ways. We do not exist bodily online but through photos and videos that we carefully manipulate to construct a preferred identity. On social media, our ‘community’ is not a room full of people physically present whom we can reach out and touch but a collection of usernames and avatars and timelines. This habitat itself tells us a story, a story that humans are not essentially people of flesh and blood, voices, and facial expressions, but users from whom we can sufficiently know from their words, profile pictures, and shares.”
When Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s name change to Meta in 2021, he shared, “The dream was always to feel present with the people we care about. Isn’t that the ultimate promise of technology? To be together with anyone? To be able to teleport anywhere? To create and experience anything? Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology and deliver an experience where we are present with each other. We will all need to work together from the beginning to bring the best possible version of this future to life. A future where, with just a pair of glasses, you’ll be able to step beyond the physical world and into the kinds of experiences we’ve been talking about today.”
It’s evident that his version of the ideal world is one in which connection and presence are possible without the encumbrance and limitations of our bodies. For real presence, our bodies are according to him, immaterial. This is a gnostic ideal, and it certainly conflicts with the biblical narrative according to which the triune God created humanity, including our physical finitude, and pronounced it good. And it remains so even after the Fall. The problem, according to God, is not physical but ethical. And in order to redeem and reconcile us rebels, the second person of the Trinity, the Word, assumed full humanity, a rational soul and a body.
We dare not allow ourselves to come to a point where we embrace the idea that our physicality is somehow getting in the way of connection. Spiritual formation in our technological age must be richly biblical and theologically informed. That’s not peculiar to our time. The people of God in every age are commanded to not conform to the world. There is nothing unique to that imperative to Christians of the technological age; however, as Francis Schaeffer points out in The God Who Is There, “We must understand the world’s spirit does not always take the same form. So the Christian must resist the form it takes in his own generation. If he does not do this, he is not resisting the spirit of the world at all.”
It’s a grievous error to conceive of worldliness as only gross debauchery and sensuality. In fact, I believe the enemy of our souls is grateful that we entertain such a myopic understanding. I know no better definition of worldliness than that offered by David Wells years ago in his book, Losing Our Virtue. He defined it as “that system of values in any given age that has at its center our fallen human perspective, which displaces God and his truth from the world and which makes sin look normal and righteousness seem strange. It thus gives great plausibility to what is morally wrong and for that reason makes what is wrong seem normal.”
A vital dimension of spiritual formation, especially in resistance to the ways in which we are encouraged to make autonomy and individual preference ultimate values, is that we must be intentionally corporate, in addition to personal, in our pursuit of holiness. The digital world will only strive to further persuade us to conceive of ourselves primarily as individual consumers, whose every desire should be fulfilled in accordance to our liking. Standing against that lie will require a commitment to deep, rich relationships that help us remain mindful of who we are, why we are, and who life is ultimately for. We need the body of Christ. We need each other. We need to prioritize presence over convenience and efficiency.
Efficiency, speed, convenience, and choice are the values embedded in our devices and essential to the picture of the good life that they tell. But search for them in the Apostle Paul’s description of love in 1 Corinthians 13 or his description of the Fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 and you will not find them. They are not the marks of love or of the Spirit. In their proper place, they are good, but when they rise to the level of virtues, as our devices and those who create them would have us think, we are at odds with the Kingdom of God.
This article is an excerpt from a presentation Dr. Plummer gave at the 2024 Summer Conference of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.
