This is the first installment in a six-part series, “Reclaiming Humanity in the Digital Age.” Check back for more installments soon.
By Josh Pauling
In recent years, there has been a significant rise in public concern about the impacts of the digital revolution on human life — everything from rising anxiety to declining attention. Increasing numbers of people are now willing to acknowledge we have a problem.[1] But what are we to do about it?
There has been no shortage of recent books, documentaries, and essays diagnosing the problems and suggesting remedies. But few of them ground the discussion in the larger question of what it means to be a human being: an embodied creature made in the image of God, consisting of a body and a soul, who, though fallen, still longs for true communion and relationship with God and one another. Without this proper grounding, the solutions, even if helpful and practical, will ultimately be lacking.
Christians have something substantial to offer in this critical conversation, because our understanding of humanity is truest to reality. From this foundation, we can develop a better framework for understanding the digital world, responding to it, and living humanely and faithfully within it.
Robin Phillips and I have explored these topics and many others in great detail in Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine. But here in this multi-part series, I will specifically focus on practical tips and advice for faithfully living out our vocations in the stations and stages of life in which God has placed us. Here in Part 1, we are laying the groundwork for why this conversation is so important and why Christians are uniquely situated to contribute to it. The rest of the series will build upon that foundation to address pressing concerns where the rubber meets the road for all of us:
- Part 2 – Parenting in the Digital World
- Part 3 – Coming of Age in the Digital World
- Part 4 – Adulting in the Digital World
- Part 5 – The Church in the Digital World
- Part 6 – The Future in the Digital World
An Invitation to Something Better
Consider this series as an invitation to develop a healthier and more intentional relationship with digital technologies for yourself, your family, and your church — or to put it more provocatively, to reclaim your humanity from the ever-growing reach of screen-based internet-connected devices. Not because such things are bad; but because there is something better. This is not about just saying no; it is about providing a better yes to something richer and more lasting than the allures, distractions, and malformation of the digital world. There are positive alternatives that we can embrace and enjoy as our instincts are refined, our attention is retrained, and our desires are redirected towards the permanent things. As St. Paul exhorts us in Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
Lent is an especially fitting time to consider these things. Think of how the practice of fasting develops one’s strength of will and resolve, or how the self-discipline of exercise develops a sense of confidence and grit. Just as the spiritual life is punctuated by times of fasting and feasting, so, too, our technological habits can be characterized by the type of balance that emerges from self-discipline and intentionality. Such practices are ultimately a means to a higher end, namely, connecting to what is good, true and beautiful.
As we travel this path together, first we have some work to do in pulling some weeds and clearing some brush.
Step 1: Debunk Society’s Technological Myths
Perhaps the first step along the path to living an intentional Christian life in the digital age is to clear away society’s reigning technological myths.
Correcting Myth #1: Technology equals progress tradeoffs.
Instead of saying technology equals progress, it is more accurate to say technology equals tradeoffs. As social critic Neil Postman put it, “Technology giveth and technology taketh away.”[2] Sometimes a new technology creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. By recognizing that technology does not de facto equal progress, we are freed from going along with the crowd. Instead, we can consider what we gain and lose with each new technology, and we can challenge the assumption that just because we can do something technologically, we should, especially considering our embodied, relational nature as human beings.
Correcting Myth #2: Technology is neutral a nudge.
The common refrain that “technology is neutral; it’s just a matter of how you use it” is too simplistic. Such a position fails to recognize that technologies are designed for certain uses and purposes. Thus, it is much more accurate to say that technology is a nudge. We all intuitively know this. We know the common adage that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And every left-handed person knows that most tools, from school desks to scissors, from power tools to cars, encode a narrative of the human as right-handed. Hence, when we approach any technology, we must develop a self-awareness that enables us to see where it might be nudging us. If even simple technologies like hammers or scissors nudge us towards certain behaviors and ways of thinking, how much more the digital omni-tools we hold in our hands — tools of unending use and versatility that talk back, respond to our touch and voice, that are purposefully designed to capture our attention, and seamlessly become lenses through which we view and experience the world.
Seeing these two technological myths for what they are frees us to think for ourselves and be more discerning in how, or if, we adopt certain technologies.
Step 2: Understand Why the Digital World Affects Us
The next step along the path to freedom in the digital age is understanding why digital technologies pose unique challenges for developing human relationships, skills and virtues in the first place.[3] It is not being old-fashioned to recognize that something significant changes for humans when we take our lives online and live through a glowing glass rectangle. Such a recognition is entirely reasonable and truthful — and supported by the evidence. We just need to say it: Many aspects of the internet-connected digital environment are antithetical to human flourishing and human design. In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt provides a concise four-point framework of the core differences between “real life” and “virtual life,” and why these differences make such an impact on our well-being. “Real world” relationships and social interactions that have been typical for all of human history are:
- embodied.
- synchronous.
- primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communications.
- within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit.
Haidt argues, however, that the digital habitat frequently works in the exact opposite direction. “Virtual world” relationships and interactions that have been typical for just a few decades are:
- disembodied.
- asynchronous.
- one-to-many communications where multiple interactions can be happening in parallel.
- within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit.[4]
With these differences in mind, the puzzle pieces start to fit together as to why the digital world affects us the way it does. It goes against the grain of our natural embodied and relational nature. A framework like this helps us better understand what is happening and chart a path forward.
Step 3: Live Intentionally
The next step is to intentionally craft a healthier relationship to technology based on your values. Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism, suggests that everyone needs a “full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”[5]
Over the course of this series, we will explore this type of intentionality, with suggestions, ideas, and models for what this might look like in our homes, families, and churches. I invite you to join us on this path towards reclaiming our humanity in the digital age.
[1] The list of books, articles and studies published on this topic gets longer by the day. Some highlights are Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (he also publishes new research at his Substack After Babel), Jean Twenge’s iGen (she publishes new research at her Substack Generation Tech), Nicholas Carr The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brians, Clare Morell’s The Tech Exit. Governments and institutions are also realizing the need to take action. The Surgeon General has issued an advisory about social media’s effects on youth mental health; growing numbers of schools are limiting or eliminating phones from the school day; state and federal government are also proposing various measures to require social media companies to use age minimums or age verifications.
[2] Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xii, 5–11.
[3] I think the evidence is mounting that digital technologies are different in kind from prior technologies because of their immersive, addictive, ubiquitous, and versatile qualities. For more on this claim, see Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now? and Anton Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making. Jacob Shatzer also gives three reasons why digital is different: “First, the type of access that we have to digital technology is different from previous tools. Second, studies on addiction demonstrate that digital technology is a game changer. And third … technology does an excellent job of recruiting disciples into its way of viewing the world” (Jacob Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today’s Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship [Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019], 21). However, even if you prefer to view digital technologies not as a change in kind but only as a change in degree, the reality still stands: We could all benefit from rethinking our relationship to our devices.
[4] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (NY: Penguin Press, 2024), 9–10.
[5] Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (London: Penguin Business, 2020), xiv.
