Lately I have been reading Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, a thoughtful treatment of the distortions wrought by our “very online” existence. She recalls a story, from not so long ago, of having a meal with a friend at a restaurant she had not been to before. She heard about the restaurant via word of mouth, and tried some unfamiliar foods on the recommendation of the waiter. She paid in cash, then hailed a taxi, and also paid the driver in cash.
Thus far, this seems like an unremarkable story, until you realize that the whole experience lacked digital engagement. No restaurant recommendations via blogs or Google ratings. She didn’t look up the unfamiliar meal option on her phone. She didn’t pay with credit card, or request an Uber. She found out about the restaurant through a relationship, ordered her food based on a conversation, and best of all, had a meal with a friend.
There has been a great deal of discussion in recent years about the perils to our mental and physical health, especially for children and teens, caused by constantly being online. Anecdotally, we all see wreckage of broken relationships, non-stop outrage, and warping of personalities caused by incessant social media use. Creatives and scholars also see the special temptations of connecting one’s career to social media notoriety.
I am not necessarily a doom-and-gloomer about our increasingly online existence, and I recognize the irony of bringing up this topic in a Substack newsletter. Humans have regularly adapted to technologies that have shifted our perceptions of the world (the printing press, transportation technologies, television, etc.). These changes have typically had both upsides and downsides.
But constant engagement on the internet and social media does present new reasons for concern. Never before have humans been able to spend the bulk of their lives inhabiting digital instead of analog worlds. Doing so seems to be causing ever-greater levels of loneliness and depression.
Thank goodness that we have not figured out a way to sleep digitally! Thus there’s at least a third of our lives that we’re largely disconnected from the digital world - though even then we can use devices to track and log our sleep patterns, and we can disrupt our sleep by keeping our notifications going through the night.
As a Christian and an educator, I raise the dangers of always-online living for my students. I generally do not allow phone use in my classes. Increasingly some students find this requirement not just objectionable but incomprehensible. It’s as if I am asking them not to exist for two and a half hours a week!
What can you do to keep such digital madness at bay? One is to simply do what I am asking students to do: put your phone away for significant stretches each day. Tech companies use addictive qualities (notifications etc.) to try to keep us “on.” We have to practice not being “on” to get used to it.
The place to start is during your sleeping hours. Notifications off, and leave phones away from your bed!
Do not have your phones at family meals, either. Especially in the teen years, even having a family meal can be a challenge, but when you do have family meals, put the devices away.
I would also recommend not using your phone at church, unless you have truly (be honest) mitigating, occasional reasons to do so. Focus on the Lord, and on your precious relationships in the church, not digital stuff. In my experience, parents are as likely as teenagers to be tapping away at their phones during worship or the sermon. This is bad for the parents, but also sets a dismal example for children. Children need to see that people can go long stretches without being online. You will survive.
Finally, cultivate at least one regular chore or activity during which you are not online. For me, this includes yardwork and fishing, but you could do it with walking, running, cycling, gardening, and more. One of the reasons I love fishing so much is that it is hardcore analog - being outside, no devices, paddling the kayak, tying on the lures, catching and cleaning the fish.
I will admit that I watch some fishing YouTubers, and I do even have a couple fishing apps on my phone, but I don’t use them during a typical fishing outing. And there’s nothing that I enjoy more than being out on the kayak and bringing home a mess of fish for dinner.
How do you practice analog habits in your daily life?
THANK YOU to those who have bought or gotten faculty review copies of Christian History: From the Reformation to the Present. For those of you who teach courses in modern church history, I hope you will consider adopting the book.
Midwestern Seminary just released a For the Church Institute course (free) featuring me and my colleagues Patrick Schreiner and Jason Duesing. The topic is “Politics and the Christian Life.”