12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You E-Book

Tony Reinke

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 351

Beschreibung

Do You Control Your Phone—Or Does Your Phone Control You? Within a few years of its unveiling, the smartphone had become part of us, fully integrated into the daily patterns of our lives. Never offline, always within reach, we now wield in our hands a magic wand of technological power we have only begun to grasp. But it raises new enigmas, too. Never more connected, we seem to be growing more distant. Never more efficient, we have never been more distracted. Drawing from the insights of numerous thinkers, published studies, and his own research, writer Tony Reinke identifies twelve potent ways our smartphones have changed us—for good and bad. Reinke calls us to cultivate wise thinking and healthy habits in the digital age, encouraging us to maximize the many blessings, to avoid the various pitfalls, and to wisely wield the most powerful gadget of human connection ever unleashed.

Leseprobe

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“Are Christians using technology to transform the world or is technology transforming Christians in unhealthy ways? Especially since the era of Franklin and Jefferson, when inventing things and technological ways of organizing things became a way of life, Christians have needed to be alert to such questions. Tony Reinke’s reflections on the smartphone offer helpful advice as to how people today need to be vigilant regarding the impact of their favorite new technologies.”

George M. Marsden, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

“12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You is an incredibly convicting and profoundly insightful read. Smartphones have become a part of our lives, but Tony explores the devastation to the human mind and soul due to devotion to technology. He calls us to examine not merely the use of our smartphones but the motives that inspire it. This is a necessary book for our generation, to remind us that our phone habits will either amplify or get in the way of our most important longing of all: the soul-satisfying glory of our Savior.”

Jackie Hill Perry, poet; hip-hop artist

“In contrast to the television that dominates the modern living room, the smartphone is typically far less conspicuous in its presence. Perhaps on account of this subtle unobtrusiveness, surprisingly few have devoted sustained reflection to the effect this now ubiquitous technology is having on our lives. In this book, Tony Reinke plucks these devices from the penumbra of our critical awareness and subjects them to the searching light of Christian wisdom. The result is an often sobering assessment of the effect they are having on our lives, accompanied by much prudent and practical counsel for mastering them. This is a timely and thoughtful treatment of a profoundly important issue, a book that should be prescribed to every Christian smartphone owner for the sake of our spiritual health.”

Alastair Roberts, theologian, blogger

“Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You is one of the most important little books a twenty-first-century Christian could read. Highly recommended.”

Bruce Riley Ashford, Provost and Professor of Theology and Culture, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

“For many, the phone is an object of increasing anxiety, exhaustion, and dependency. The wise Tony Reinke leads us practically to find freedom from the phone without requiring us to huddle away in a monastery somewhere in the middle of Montana. If you want to know how to steward your technology and your life for Christ and his kingdom, read this.”

Russell Moore, President, Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

“If you feel uneasy about your constant relationship with your phone (and even if you don’t, but wonder if you should), you will find Tony Reinke to be a reliable guide for how we should assess the impact of our phones on ourselves and our relationships. A marvelous book that tackles a massive subject in clear and compelling language!”

Trevin Wax, Managing Editor, The Gospel Project; author, Counterfeit Gospels and Holy Subversion

“Two things strike me about this book. First, Reinke writes with great humility, including himself in the narrative to help us see him not only as a teacher but also as a fellow struggler. Second, this is not a guilt-ridden slog through what not to do. Tony keeps pulling us up into the glories of Christ and even helps us to dream of new ways to glorify God through our digital technologies. Helpful, hopeful, humbling, and inspiring, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You is a book for this age and wisdom for generations to follow.”

Trillia Newbell, author, Enjoy, Fear and Faith, and United

“Image is everything, and for a woman who has built her identity on the sands of how she’s embraced online, the eventual letdown will come like a crash. But there’s a better way forward, a way to use our phones in selfless service, to glorify God in our connectivity, and to image Christ by our phone behaviors. For this, we must evaluate our glowing screens and train our discernment to see the difference between the sight-driven habits of our age and the Scripture-lit pathway of faith. Every chapter of this book is like the right kind of push notification in our lives. Stop, read, process, and apply with care.”

Gloria Furman, author, Missional Motherhood

“As a teenager and a smartphone user, I needed this book. Tony Reinke is compelling and convicting, yet continually meets us with grace. My generation needs this book, because we need to get technology right. If we don’t, the cost is great. 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You should be a must-read for every smartphone user, especially for us younger ones.”

Jaquelle Crowe, author, This Changes Everything

“It took more than a generation for the quaint ‘horseless carriage,’ with all its magic and horror, to become the ordinary, unexamined ‘car.’ But the device we once called a ‘smartphone’ has reached its status as ‘phone’—a common, everyday inevitability—with such breathtaking speed that it has left us little time for reflection on the true power it has in our lives. Tony offers us a distinctly Christian take on the little wonders in our pockets, seeing their goodness, beauty, and power, but also applying godly wisdom and well-researched cautions to help readers use their phones without being used by their phones.”

John Dyer, author, From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology

“Experience practical theology at its finest as Tony applies a thorough understanding of the Scriptures to a thorough understanding of our culture, resulting in a beautifully written and balanced guide to the dangers and opportunities in the palms of our hands. Yes, our phones have changed us for the worse, but this book will change us and our phone use for the better.”

David Murray, pastor; author; Professor of Old Testament and Practical Theology, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary

“The more widespread and influential something is, the more Christians should think carefully about it. In this wisdom-filled book, Tony Reinke helps us do just that with the smartphone. Without descending into technophobia or paranoia, he shows the various ways in which phones are changing our lives, highlighting both the problems with this and the solutions to it. A timely and thoughtful book.”

Andrew Wilson, author; speaker; Teaching Pastor, King’s Church London

“Rarely is a book as practically impactful as it is theologically rich. In an age in which daily we are drawn into a digital vortex, Tony Reinke warns of the implications and challenges us to examine whether our phones have displaced our spiritual priorities in Christ. With unflinching honesty, Reinke shares his own technological struggles, and in so doing, moves us to a posture of reflection, prayer, and even repentance. Thoroughly engaging and immediately applicable, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You is a must-read for our time.”

Kim Cash Tate, author, Cling: Choosing a Lifestyle of Intimacy with God

12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

Tony Reinke

12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

Copyright © 2017 by Tony Reinke

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover and wooden character design: Don Clark for Invisible Creature

Wooden character fabrication: Curt Clark

First printing 2017

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from The New American Standard Bible®. Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-5243-4ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-5246-5PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-5244-1Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-5245-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reinke, Tony, 1977– author.

Title: 12 ways your phone is changing you / Tony Reinke; foreword by John Piper.

Other titles: Twelve ways your phone is changing you

Description: Wheaton: Crossway, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016032849 (print) | LCCN 2016036242 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433552434 (tp) | ISBN 9781433552441 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433552458 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433552465 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Technology—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Smartphones.

Classification: LCC BR115.T42 R45 2017 (print) | LCC BR115.T42 (ebook) | DDC 261.5/6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032849

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-03-03 11:33:22 AM

To Karalee

“All things are lawful for me,”

but not all things are helpful.

“All things are lawful for me,”

but I will not be dominated by anything. . . .

“All things are lawful,”

but not all things build up.

—Apostle Paul

Contents

Foreword by John Piper

Preface

Introduction: A Little Theology of Technology

 1  We Are Addicted to Distraction

 2  We Ignore Our Flesh and Blood

 3  We Crave Immediate Approval

 4  We Lose Our Literacy

 5  We Feed on the Produced

 6  We Become Like What We “Like”

 7  We Get Lonely

 8  We Get Comfortable in Secret Vices

 9  We Lose Meaning

10  We Fear Missing Out

11  We Become Harsh to One Another

12  We Lose Our Place in Time

Conclusion: Living Smartphone Smart

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

General Index

Scripture Index

Foreword

By John Piper

Smartphones are dangerous, like marriage and music and fine cuisine—or anything else that can become an idol. They are also very useful, like guns and razor blades and medicinal cannabis—or lots of other things that can ruin your life. I personally like marriage very much, and use a razor blade every day. So I am with Tony Reinke in his chastened enthusiasm about the ever-changing world of modern technology.

But I could never have written this book. I don’t have the patience, and I don’t read fast enough or widely enough. Tony has done more research for this book than for anything else he has written. And those other books were not thrown together. His commitment to being informed, and being fair, demanded remarkable attentiveness to subtleties and persistent commitment to ever-clearerreedits. Add to this the gift of theological insightfulness, and this book becomes something very few people could have written. I surely couldn’t.

But I do have one small advantage in pondering smartphones. I’m seventy years old. This is an advantage for two reasons. One is that I’ve been an adult during the entire computer revolution—from the beginning. The other is that I can feel the onrush of eternity just over the horizon.

I got my first real job as a teacher in 1974. I was twenty-eight. The first personal computer was introduced in 1975. It was a kit. I don’t do kits. I wait. In 1980, I left academia and became a pastor. Virtually no churches used computers in 1980. They were more like expensive toys and fancy calculators.

But things soon began to get serious. IBM produced its first personal computer in 1981, and Time magazine called 1982 “The Year of the Computer.” Pricing was prohibitive. But I wanted in for one main reason: word processing. Writing. The price was right in 1984, and my journal entry for June 16 reads: “I bought a computer yesterday. IBM PC, 256K of RAM, double disc for $1,995.00.” The monitor was extra. The disk operating system (DOS 2.1) was $60.

Twenty-three years later the iPhone was created. Computer and phone were now one. I was on board within a year. Calling. Texting. Keeping up with the news. Playing Scrabble with my wife. And reading my Bible, saving verses, memorizing on the go. For all the abuses and all the devastation of distraction, wasted hours, narcissistic self-promotion, and pornographic degradation, I see the computer and the smartphone as gifts of God—like papyrus and the codex and paper and the printing press and the organs of mass distribution.

If you live long enough, pray earnestly, and keep your focus on the imperishable Word of God, you can be spared the slavery to newness. Over time, you can watch something wonderful happen. You can see overweening fascination give way to sober usage. You can watch a toy become a tool; a craze become a coworker; a sovereign become a servant. To cite Tony’s words—and his aim—you can watch the triumph of useful efficiency over meaningless habit.

I wish I could give every young adult the taste of eternity that grows more intense as you enter your eighth decade. A happy consciousness of the reality of death and the afterlife is a wonderful liberator from faddishness and empty-headedscreen-tapping. I say “happy consciousness” because, if all you have is fear, your smartphone almost certainly becomes one of the ways you escape the thought of death.

But if you rejoice in the hope of the glory of God because your sins are forgiven through Jesus, then your smartphone becomes a kind of friendly pack mule on the way to heaven. Mules are not kept for their good looks. They just get the job done.

The job is not to impress anybody. The job is to make much of Christ and love people. That is why we were created. So don’t waste your life grooming your mule. Make him bear the weight of a thousand works of love. Make him tread the heights with you in the mountains of worship.

If that sounds strange to you, but perhaps attractive, Tony will serve you well in the pages ahead. Where else will you find the iPhone linked to the New Jerusalem? Where else will someone be wise enough to say that “our greatest need in the digital age is to behold the glory of the unseen Christ in the faint blue glow of our pixelated Bibles”? Where else will we hear fitting praise of Bible apps along with the honest confession that “no app can breathe life into my communion with God”? Who else is writing about the smartphone with the conviction that “the Christian imagination is starving to death for solid theological nourishment”? And who else is going to confront the presumed hiddenness of our private sins with the truth: “There is no such thing as anonymity. It is only a matter of time”?

Yes. And the time is short. Don’t waste it parading your mule. Make him work. His Maker will be pleased.

Preface

This blasted smartphone! Pesk of productivity. Tenfold plague of beeps and buzzing. Soulless gadget with unquenchable power hunger. Conjuror of digital tricks. Surveillance bracelet. Money pit. Inescapable tether to work. Dictator, distractor, foe!

Yet it is also my untiring personal assistant, my irreplaceable travel companion, and my lightning-fast connection to friends and family. VR screen. Gaming device. Ballast for daily life. My intelligent friend, my alert wingman, and my ever-ready collaborator. This blessed smartphone!

My phone is a window into the worthless and the worthy, the artificial and the authentic. Some days I feel as if my phone is a digital vampire, sucking away my time and my life. Other days, I feel like a cybernetic centaur—part human, part digital—as my phone and I blend seamlessly into a complex tandem of rhythms and routines.

iPhone 1.0

Tech wiz Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld Expo on January 9, 2007, as a “giant” 3.5-inchhigh-res screen requiring no physical keyboard or stylus. Unlike the clunky smartphones to date, he announced: “We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with—born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers.” From that moment, the magic of multitouch technology would introduce highly accurate fingertip gestures to a pocket device, bringing humans into more intimate proximity to their computing technology than ever before. When Jobs later announced, as an aside, “You can now touch your music,” the magnitude of the statement was too mystical to grasp in the moment.1

Apple officially released the first iPhone on June 29, 2007, and I bought one that fall. I marveled at the technology stuffed inside this glossy handheld phone: a legitimate computer operating system, a newly engineered iPod for my music, a rapid new mechanism to text friends, super-sharp video combined with a new mobile browser to preserve the full look of the web, an accelerometer to sense how I tip and twist and rotate my phone—all on a screen with intuitive tactile controls guided by fingertip taps, swipes, and pinches.

On a road trip a few days after the sacred unboxing, I stood outside a snowy Iowa rest stop, unlocked my new iPhone, and replied to my first rural email. Wirelessly. Effortlessly. I was hooked, and so were millions of others. In ten years, nearly one billion iPhones have been sold.

Apple’s mobile phone was followed by Android, and smartphones spread over the globe and over every corner of our lives. We now check our smartphones every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives.2 Since I got my first iPhone, a smartphone has been within my reach 24/7: to wake me in the morning, to deejay my music library, to entertain me with videos, movies, and live television, to capture my life in digital pictures and video, to allow me to play the latest video game, to guide me down foreign streets, to broadcast my social media, and to reassure me every night that it will wake me again (as long as I feed it electricity). I use my phone to keep our always-changing family schedule in real-time sync. I used my phone to research, edit, and even write sections of this book. I use my phone for just about everything (except phone calls, it seems). And my phone goes with me wherever I go: the bedroom, the office, vacation, and, yes, the bathroom.

The smartphone combined several budding technologies3 into the most powerful handheld tool of social connection ever invented. With our phones, all of life is immediately capturable and shareable. So I was not surprised when the editors of Time named the iPhone the single most influential gadget of all time, saying that it “fundamentally changed our relationship to computing and information—a change likely to have repercussions for decades to come.”4

Oh, yes, the repercussions. What is the price of all this digital magic? I have since discovered that my omnipresent iPhone is also corroding my life with distractions—something Apple execs unwittingly admitted on the eve of the launch of the Apple Watch, marketed as a newer and less-invasivetechno-fix to all the techno-noise brought into our lives by the iPhone.5

Unknown to me at the time I was unboxing my first iPhone, Jobs was actively shielding his children from his digital machines.6

Should I be shielding myself?

The Big Question

The makers and marketers of the smartphone wield great power over us, and I want to know what effect this technology has on my spiritual life. As in every area of the Christian life, I want to learn from the history of the church and from older Christians. My first interview of many in the path of producing this book was a phone call to seventy-five-year-old theologian David Wells (1939–). His most recent book on God’s holiness was surprisingly filled with talk about technology (a relevant subtopic now in any conversation).7

“It is only since the mid 1990s that the web has been widely used in our society, so we are talking here about two decades,” Wells told me. “And so we—all of us—are trying to figure out what is useful to us and what damages us. We can’t escape it, and probably none of us wants to escape it. We cannot become digital monks.” To my surprise, Wells seemed personally familiar with the temptations: “There is no doubt that life is more highly distracted, because we get pings and beeps and text messages. We are, in fact, living with a parallel, virtual universe, a universe that can take all of the time that we have. What happens to us when we are in constant motion—when we are almost addicted to constant visual stimulation? What is this doing to us? That is the big question.”8

Wells is exactly right—our phones are constant variables, always changing and morphing new behaviors in us. Many years ago, Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) prophetically warned of this danger of the technological age, writing that “unpredictability is one of the general features of technological progress.”9 The unpredictability of the tech age carries with it a certain level of unabated insecurity that pushes us far from an answer to Wells’s question. We don’t know what our smartphones are doing to us, but we are being changed, that much is clear.

I later emailed seventy-one-year-old Oliver O’Donovan (1945–), an accomplished Christian ethicist in Scotland, to ask him if Christians should feel uneasy about the rise of digital communications technology. “Electronic communications are a question for the younger generation more than for mine,” he admitted. “It is they who have really to learn to understand the powers and threats that they embody, partly through trial and error, but also, and very importantly, through remembering what was of greatest importance before the communications revolution kicked in.

“Nobody has ever had to learn this before,” he said of the questions we now face. “Nobody can teach the rising generation how to learn it. It is a massive challenge to conscientious intelligence, handed uniquely to them. The danger they face, of course, is that the tools set the agenda. A tool of communication is a tool for communicating something.” He then echoed the question from Wells: “Media don’t just lie around passively, waiting for us to come along and find them useful for some project we have in mind. They tell us what to do and, more significantly, what to want to do. There is a current in the stream, and if we don’t know how to swim, we shall be carried by it. I see someone doing something and I want to do it, too. Then I forget whatever it was that I thought I wanted to do.”

O’Donovan concluded the interview with a striking warning: “This generation has the unique task assigned it of discerning what the new media are really good for, and that means, also, what they are not good for. If they fluff it, generations after them will pay the price.”10

My Tensions

I wanted to write this book in conversation with elders in the church, but my questions for Wells and O’Donovan boomeranged a question back at me: How can we who are most familiar with our smartphones do our best to flesh out the consequences?

I also find myself in a tricky place—asking critical questions about how my phone is changing me while also working full time online and trying to leverage my skills and experiences to grab the attention of a virtual audience. As the online world is growing global, and growing mobile, new gospel opportunities are opening, too.

Broadly speaking, the power of the digital age to pool human intelligence and factual data is unprecedented (Wikipedia is only one example of what’s to come). Every Christian is now given unmatched opportunities for online ministry. Our prominent preachers today can reach hundreds of thousands of people through social media. Even the most average Christian can speak to an immediate audience of two hundred or three hundred friends on Facebook, a reach unparalleled in human history.

So I feel the squeeze of this catch-22. I want to become skilled at winning attention online (for Christ), but I also want to ask critical questions about my own phone impulses, habits, and assumptions.

My Intention

This book about phones could easily grow thicker than a phone book, so to keep it short, I must address only the essentials and navigate with care and brevity. While some writers claim our phones are making us cognitively sharper and relationally deeper,11 others warn that our phones are making us shallow, dumb, and less competent in the real world.12Both arguments ring true at times, but “social media are largely what we make of them—escapist or transforming depending on what we expect from them and how we use them.”13 The question of this book is simple: What is the best use of my smartphone in the flourishing of my life?

To that end, my aim is to avoid both extremes: the utopian optimism of the technophiliac and the dystopian pessimism of the technophobe. O’Donovan is exactly right when he says that our temptation is to watch someone doing something and then merely to copy the behavior and lose sight of our personal callings and life goals. In other words, we must ask ourselves: What technologies serve my aims? And what are my goals in the first place? Without clear answers here, we can make no progress in thinking through the pros and cons of smartphones as Christians.

And yet, if you own a smartphone, you have likely abused it. Such abuse is the target of countless magazine features, books of lament, and powerful videos that reveal just how foolishly our smartphone overuse influences our lives. A moment of guilt can be a powerful motivator, but it won’t last. As time wears on and guilt subsides, we revert to old behaviors. This is because our fundamental convictions are too flimsy to sustain new patterns of behavior, and so what seems immediately “right” (turning off our phones) is really nothing more than the product of a moment’s worth of shame. What we need are new life disciplines birthed from a new set of life priorities and empowered by our new life freedom in Jesus Christ. So I cannot tell you to put your phone away, to give it up, or to take it up again after a season of burnout. My aim is to explore why you would consider such actions in the first place.

Small Print

Here are a handful of notes to keep in mind as we begin.

First, this book is written to me as much as it is written by me. Not only do I need this message, I bear its greatest burden. If the title seems to imply that I’m preaching at you, I’m not. I’m preaching at me. Not many of you should become authors, for we who write books of ethics are held to our words more strictly than anyone.

Second, to keep this book’s title short, I have implied that everything in this book is relevant for every individual reader. In truth, I have never been more aware of the variety of smartphone behaviors. We grab our phones as content creators or content consumers, and we focus on timeless content or timely content. Likewise, our smartphone relationships trend in certain directions: as part of virtual communities or as complements to our face-to-face relationships. And those conversations constantly drift toward edification or chitchat (see Figure 1, p. 22). All of us are sliding around these grids constantly, and each trend has its own strengths and pitfalls to address in the pages ahead. But none of us can plot ourselves exactly in the same spot. I mention this at the front of the book as a way to ask for patience when we discuss behaviors that may not immediately apply to you.

Figure 1. Smartphone behaviors and relationships

Third, this book is not antismartphone; it was written for people who, like me, benefit from the smartphone and use it daily. You will probably hear about this book on your phone in social media, and some of you will read this book on your phones, maybe even quote from it on Facebook—that’s not oxymoronic, ironic, or paradoxical; it’s the fulfillment of why I wrote it and how I intend to get the message out.

Fourth, this book is not prosmartphone, either. I want this book to be balanced, but balance is not my driving concern. Whether or not I strike the prophone/antiphone balance throughout (or even section by section) is of little concern because I know that, in the end, readers will be split. I concede this point up front in order to speak more directly to my readers who intend to rethink life patterns (and to avoid bloating this book with a million conditions, caveats, and qualifications). I proceed under the assumption that we all need to stop and reflect on our impulsive smartphone habits because, in an age when our eyes and hearts are captured by the latest polished gadget, we need more self-criticism, not less.

Fifth, since you are reading a book titled 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, I assume you are likely the type of reader who bravely welcomes such self-critique. I applaud you for it. The old philosopher Seneca was exactly right when he said, “Be harsh with yourself at times.”14 Sometimes. Not always. At certain key moments in life, lean into the bathroom mirror, squint your eyes, and project pessimism at the person you see. We all need healthy critique. But if you are only harsh with yourself, let me speak a word of caution. This book fails if, having read it, you only hate yourself more; it succeeds only if you enjoy Christ more. So if you are easily weighed down with conviction and self-doubt, I pray that this book educates and equips you to enjoy freedom in life to taste deeper the infinite joy we have in Christ, leaving mediocre indulgences behind for deeper and more satisfying pleasures ahead.

Sixth, I’ll be quoting theologians, philosophers, professors, pastors, popes, perceptive non-Christians, and public atheists—which means that inclusion in this book is not a full endorsement of someone’s theology or a wholesale endorsement of the links, apps, books, or mobster movies mentioned ahead.

Finally, as the title suggests, this book centers on diagnostics and worldview more than application. We won’t ignore important practices, but the application will be implied generically throughout and addressed specifically at the end.

Call for Humility

Self-doubt is a hallmark of wise creatures.15 And self-critical conversations about our personal behaviors require a big dose of humility. Conversations about our smartphones often do not raise new questions; they return us to perennial questions every generation has been forced to ask.

Take Snapchat, the latest phenomenon in “instant expression.” In one of my interviews, a theologian suggested to me that it is difficult to let your “yes” be yes when your words disappear in a few seconds.16 But defensive techies immediately negate this claim with a simple fact: while ephemeral words shared on Snapchat disappear in seconds, our vocalized words disappear from the air in hundredths of a second. Technology does not make our words more temporary—if anything, it makes them more durable. If we must give an account of every idle word, we are probably the first generation that can truly appreciate the volume of our idle words, since we have published more of them than any group in human history.

So although we can examine our authenticity when we speak through intentionally self-destructing messages (such as Snapchat), our phones do not make our words more transient or empty; they merely raise questions asked in every generation. Only when we acknowledge these questions can we then get back to examining Snapchat.

That is often how conversations on digital media work. So I begin the book by asking for a truce. Can we agree that some of the most important smartphone questions will also apply to nondigital conversations? Just because a struggle we face in our digital lives also relates to nondigital contexts does not mean that the conversation with digital communication is averted—it means that Scripture proves its ongoing relevance in the digital age.

Who Am I?

As you can see, this journey to untangle my relationship with my phone is very personal (i.e., self-critical of me), so you need to know who I am from the outset.

I’m “an early adopter”—a nice way of saying “self-professed iPhone addict and techno-junkie.” I am also a Christian of nearly two decades who holds the Bible as the ultimate and final authority over my life. Educated in business, journalism, and liberal arts, I now work as an investigative reporter of the complex dynamics of the Christian life in tension with the current pressures of cultural conformity. I research and write in concert with many other voices in the church, both living and dead.

Married for nearly two decades, my wife and I have three kids, and we are trying to raise them to be technologically competent and digitally self-controlled.17 In our home, we currently run one desktop computer, three laptops, three tablets, three smartphones, and one iPod.

At the time this book was published, I had compiled 32.6 years of experience in four platforms: blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.18 I have worked online for nonprofit ministries for a decade, and never without an iPhone. And those labors have not insulated me from the pressing questions of the digital age—rather, they have amplified them. At the same time, my work has put me in contact with several of the most thoughtful Christian philosophers, theologians, pastors, and artists who are thinking carefully about helping the church respond wisely to the digital age, and here I will share some of the best insights from my many conversations with them.

Simultaneously, I wrote this book in dialogue with a variety of Christians: students, singles, married couples, parents, homemakers, business professionals, and ministry leaders. Each of us faces similar questions about how to live healthy and balanced lives in the digital age.

Backward Desires

Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) reminded his generation that technology is always an extension of the self. A fork is simply an extension of my hand. My car is an extension of my arms and my feet, and no less so than Fred Flintstone’s footmobile.

Likewise, my smartphone extends my cognitive functions.19 The active neurons in my brain are a crackling tangle of skull lightning, and my thought life resembles a thunderstorm over Kansas.20 This tiny electrical storm in the microscopic space of my nervous system quite naturally extends out to my thumbs to create tiny digital sparks of electricity inside my phone that beam out to the world by radio waves.

This all means that my phone marks a place in time and space—outside of me—where I can project my relationships, my longings, and the full scope of my conscious existence. In fact, hold up the word “desire” in a mirror and it will read “erised,” the name of the magic mirror in the Harry Potter books.21 In the ancient Mirror of Erised, you see the deepest longings of your heart revealed in vivid color. Our shiny smartphone screens do the same.

Too often what my phone exposes in me is not the holy desires of what I know I should want, not even what I think I want, and especially not what I want you to think I want. My phone screen divulges in razor-sharp pixels what my heart really wants.22 The glowing screen on my phone projects into my eyes the desires and loves that live in the most abstract corners of my heart and soul, finding visible expression in pixels of images, video, and text for me to see and consume and type and share. This means that whatever happens on my smartphone, especially under the guise of anonymity, is the true exposé of my heart, reflected in full-color pixels back into my eyes.

Honestly, this may explain the passcodes. To get into a phone is to peek into the interior of another’s soul, and we may be too ashamed for others to see what we clicked and opened and chased around online.

What could be more unsettling?

If we are honest enough to face our smartphone habits, and use the pages ahead as an invitation to commune with God, we can expect to find grace for our digital failures and for our digital futures. God loves us deeply, and he is eager to give us everything we need in the digital age. The spilled blood of his Son proves it.23 We need his grace as we evaluate the place of smartphones—the pros and the cons—in the trajectory of our eternal lives. If we fluff it, not only will we suffer now, but generations after us will pay the price.

1. Mic Wright, “The Original iPhone Announcement Annotated: Steve Jobs’ Genius Meets Genius,” The Next Web, thenextweb.com (Sept. 6, 2015).

2. Jacob Weisberg, “We Are Hopelessly Hooked,” The New York Review of Books (Feb. 25, 2016).

3. This book is far too short to retell the riveting history of the smartphone. For that, see Majeed Ahmad, Smartphone: Mobile Revolution at the Crossroads of Communications, Computing and Consumer Electronics (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2011).

4. Lisa Eadicicco et al., “The 50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time,” Time magazine (May 3, 2016).

5. David Pierce, “iPhone Killer: The Secret History of the Apple Watch,” Wired (April 2015).

6. In 2010, just after Apple launched its innovative tablet (the iPad), a reporter asked Jobs, “So, your kids must love the iPad?” He responded: “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Nick Bilton, “Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent,” The New York Times (Sept. 10, 2014). Later, Apple’s vice president of design, Jonathan Ive, admitted to setting “strict rules about screen time” for his ten-year-old twin boys. Ian Parker, “The Shape of Things to Come,” The New Yorker (March 2, 2015).

7. David Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014).

8. David Wells, interview with the author via phone (July 9, 2014).

9. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 60.

10. Oliver O’Donovan, interview with the author via email (Feb. 10, 2016).

11. Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (New York: Penguin, 2013) and Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

12. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011) and Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2009).

13. Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk & True Flourishing (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), 87.

14. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, trans. Robin Campbell (New York: Penguin, 2015), 67.

15. Prov. 3:5–8; 12:15; 26:12.

16. James 5:12.

17. Tony Reinke, “Walk the Worldwide Garden: Protecting Your Home in the Digital Age,” Desiring God, desiringGod.org (May 14, 2016).

18. I have been blogging for 565 weeks, posting on Twitter and Facebook each for 441 weeks, and using Instagram for 248 weeks.

19. “If the wheel is an extension of feet, and tools of hands, backs, and arms, then electromagnetism seems to be in its technological manifestations an extension of our nerves, and becomes mainly an information system.” Marshall McLuhan, video interview, “The Future of Man in the Electric Age,” marshallmcluhanspeaks.com (BBC, 1965). Throughout the book, I will distinguish between our lives as embodied anddisembodied, not as precise terms but as useful terms of contrast. Of course, on our phones, we always use our bodies—our eyes, thumbs, ears, brains, and even our nerves to sense the phantom vibrations. The usefulness of the terms will become clear later in the book when we address the influence of our phones on our physical health, something we often ignore. They will also serve as a good contrast to the embodied life, a term I use in reference to scenarios in which all of our personhood—mind, body, soul, emotion—is displayed and used simultaneously (as in a face-to-face conversation).

20. A metaphor from N. D. Wilson’s address, “Words Made Flesh: Stories Telling Stories and the Russian Dolls of Divine Creativity,” Vimeo, vimeo.com (April 25, 2015).

21. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1998), 207–8.

22. A haunting heart reality vividly described in James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016), 27–38.

23. Rom. 8:32.