You carry in your pocket a whole world. That hand-sized brick of black glass is a window to anything and everything that there is.
You could find out what is known publicly about anyone you meet. You could learn from someone else how they think you should complete any tasks you’re about to do. You could read news or opinion on any thing in the world. You could also read a huge amount of utter nonsense, much of which presents itself as something else.
This is massively complicated by the fact that the portals you use to access that information on your black brick consider you a product and throttle your access to that information with algorithms that are challenging to circumvent in order to present you with the content most likely to prolong your time on that specific portal so that they can flog you more stuff.
Even putting that aside viewing a Smartphone as a window to everything is very web 1.0. Long before the digital revolution I remember my Dad teaching me how to use a thorough Boolean search to find what I wanted to on Altavista down our dial-up connection; at that point you had to go through successive searches to find anything useful but it truly seemed that with enough searching skill (Google-fu as we now call it) you could find anything. The world was at your fingertips.
This got easier as search engines got better, and now it has gotten much worse as they are even better at pushing you towards the results they want you to read rather than the thing you really wanted to read.
Nevertheless, we still feel intrinsically like we carry the world in our pockets. Anything is possible. That isn’t true, in fact as a ‘device’ the smartphone removes possibilities as well as adding them, but it feels like it true. That feeling then changes us and how we view the world.
All technology has this potential effect of changing how we view the world. Smartphones and the apps they carry change the way we look at the world, indeed they change the way that we think. Here are four ways they have changed us:
Instant Culture
They let you do things immediately, without involving other people. It’s easier to order takeaway online via one of the various apps that do that rather than to call the place you want food from and pop over to collect it. You don’t have to move off the sofa.
Everything works like this, and we now instinctively Google everything before we do anything. We get frustrated when things take time or involve difficult human interactions. Everything works instantly so we expect everything to work instantly.
We didn’t use to.
This expectation will necessarily infect the church. We expect instantaneous discipleship, as though it were magic, where the process of being pruned to grow into a tree shaped like Jesus is a slow one. We expect fast decision-making and fast change and to be able to influence things easily and simply.
Church is an antidote to this problem. Firstly, because its slow: it’s taken 2000 years so far and we aren’t there yet. Secondly, because it isn’t about us: it’s a generational project that we just do our part in. Thirdly, because it’s full of people: and people have stubbornly resisted the attempt to treat them like machines.
Satisfaction Loops
Smartphones train our bodies with haptic feedback that releases various happy chemicals in our brains. If you’ve ever felt the phantom buzz of your phone in your pocket when you didn’t have a notification, you just haven’t looked at it for a while, this is a learned response that the designers have been trying to elicit in you by hacking your body as best they can.
The phone is designed to make you happy as you tap things and get likes and respond to stuff. It is also true that social media companies are deliberately trying to make you mad because they discovered you spend longer on their apps that way, but we get hooked on the dopamine release through our smartphone’s design.
This then trains us to expect things to involve lots of little hits of a drug we’ve become addicted to. This is a deliberate design choice of the manufacturers. This means that anything where the pay off comes as a result of doing hard things over a long period of time, which is everything that is worth having, seems dour and unappealing compared to fleeting ephemeral highs.
Good things are hard and take time. They’re supposed to be. Church is not the antidote here, but it is the place where we get told that maturity comes through suffering, and lifelong projects where the true payoff is decades away—like childrearing, marriage, or the Christian life—are extolled as virtues.
Redefined Communication
Communication is asymmetric and impersonal. This should be easy to see the impact of: we find it harder to look people in the eye and have all the messy challenges of actual conversations with people who disagree with you. This has been well documented in the work of Sherry Turkle.
There’s a second challenge though: we’ve become post-literate. We don’t read anymore. This is ironic since technically we’re reading more than ever, but what we’re reading are primarily short snippets of text. Even this very short blog post is longform for many readers these days. Following an argument that is sustained across a book is beyond us. The riches of human literary history are increasingly only for a very privileged few.
The Church is again the antidote here, though it’s an uphill struggle. We gather with people and need to actually talk to them over mediocre coffee each week. We pray and mourn and suffer alongside them, even when we lack the words to communicate how we’re feeling. We read a book, a long, sustained, and complicated amalgam of a book that requires sustained reading to begin to master.
These are both the antidotes and the points of particular challenge for us. All we can do is acknowledge the differences and keep going. Once we start telling people that they don’t need to read the Bible ‘because it’s too hard’ I think we’re sunk.
Redefined Reality
It is unsurprising that ideologies that claim we can decide who we are, or what ‘gender’ we are, or are free to define ourselves in whatever way we please, come to the fore after the smartphone.
We are able to use them to present ourselves however we desire. We are able to access and define reality however we please through them. We can find whole worlds to ‘play’ in that cohere with how we construe things without having to come face-to-face with the people next door who construe the world very differently.
This is not trying to claim that gender ideology is downstream of the smartphone, but I am claiming that part of the widespread adoption of that ideology required a plausibility structure buttressed by our continual use of devices that seem to centre us as the main character of our own stories and give us the resources to redefine our own realities as we please.
The Church is again the antidote here. As we worship weekly, we are retold the story of the cosmos in which we are neither the main nor a particularly major character. We are told that reality has an author (not us) and a specific shape (that we can’t change) and that as part of that we are not our own. In fact, that’s our only comfort in life and death.
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash
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