We live in a deeply connected world. There are some signs that geopolitically that might be changing, but individually it’s as true as ever. The distraction devices in our pockets keep us connected to each other, people with our specific interests, what’s going on in the world, things somewhere we should be anxious about that will never affect us personally, and an unending swirl of banality.
It’s now patently obvious that, at best, the digital revolution has been ambivalent for us as people. Every purported blessing, some of which are real, is met by an equal and opposite curse. It is ever thus. We all know that smartphones are terrible for kids and yet because everyone else does we end up trapped in giving them to ours as well. We all know that they are notably mixed blessings for ourselves as well, but we haven’t managed to build a world hospitable enough that we could chose to give them up.
We can rage against the madness of it all—and honestly there’s a place for that—but it doesn’t appear that the page is turning in the next decade at least. With several of these developments the genie can’t be put back in the bottle even if we thought that was the best idea for all of us, we just find ourselves and the way we think notably changed by a succession of huge structural changes to society through technological revolutions.
This has happened before. We might think of the end of feudalism in the enclosing of common land to farm sheep for wool or, much more obviously, the industrial revolution with its numerous shifts in everyday life that changed who we think we are and how we operate as people.
We live in a time of great change.
What we have to do as a result is figure out how to live in the world we find ourselves in. What does digital discipleship even look like? Should churches use digital tools to help congregations or does this dehumanise us? Should we bring our phones to church or not? Should we even own them? What do healthy limits and rhythms look like with work and play in digital spaces? How should we use social media? What should we think about videogames? A thousand more similar questions could easily arise. Before you get too excited, I’m not about to answer them, that’s the work of more than 800 words.
What I’d like to do instead is tell you about a practice that I’ve started in my own life.
Disconnection
If we are connected all the time, there is great value in deliberately choosing to be disconnected. While not technically fasting—fasting explicitly requires the abstention from food as part of a wider Christian doctrine of food—we are working in a similar vein: the principle that limited abstention from good or neutral things can be good for us is a Christian one.
To that end I’ve started turning my phone off one day a week.
The first couple of times were surprisingly difficult. I felt that itch to look at it, despite it being off and elsewhere. My pocket felt notably empty, even though I’m not that consciously aware of my phone sat in that pocket right now. That phantom notification buzz that you get if you haven’t had one in a while, you still get if your phone isn’t on you. They’ve rewired our brains.
That’s faded after a couple of months, I don’t really notice anymore. I find I leave my phone lying around more than I used to the rest of the week too. I’m just that little bit less aware of where it is. That has to be a good thing.
However, the number of times I have to break my own rules for something is galling. I turn my phone off on my day off, which is currently the day I’m trying to get my Masters finished. Surprisingly often I need an app to get access to some paper or to contact someone about something. Life can be difficult to navigate without one. I’d prefer to turn it off on a Sunday, but working for a church makes that awkward.
It frustrates me when I have to break my own rules, but it does highlight the challenge of living an analogue life in a digital world, even one day a week. This should drive home to us the need to restructure society to make analogue options possible for people. Or even digital options that don’t require a smartphone, I was surprised when I couldn’t find a way to access a paper, despite being online on my laptop, without turning my phone on.
I wonder if the most freeing thing has nothing to do with the digital tools themselves and instead is simply being uncontactable. The main reason not to is ‘what if someone really needs me?’ Maybe I’m not that important; maybe they will cope without me. Maybe being uncontactable will mean that I realise I’m not that important either. We aren’t essential. The world does turn without us. We don’t need to be contactable.
There are of course edge cases when we are needed. All of our minds rush to the family emergency. We have to work these things out—certain people knowing my phone is off that day is helpful, for example, because if they really need me they can contact me another way—even when the working out is itself a sign that we haven’t really disconnected.
There are other ways to disconnect. We’ve spent a long time discipling twenty-somethings. You’d be surprised how revealing the question ‘does your phone come to bed with you?’ can be. Put your phone to bed when you go to bed, in another room in the house, or off. You’ll feel a lot happier after a few days. This should be basic common sense but it’s unusual; we’re so embedded in a digital plausibility structure that it doesn’t occur to us to live differently.
In a connected world, digital discipleship includes practising disconnection. Perhaps it’s not time to throw your phone in the river just yet, but do consider switching it off.
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash
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