Christians and Digital Media: Benefits and Burdens

by C. Ben Mitchell

We were having an early dinner at one of our favorite mom-and-pop restaurants in a sleepy little Southern town just outside where we live. As Nancy and I were talking about our day, a lad about 10 or 12 years old came through the door with an older woman who appeared to be his grandmother. It was as close to a Norman Rockwell scene as one might imagine. Grandmother and grandson were out for a quiet meal together on a Friday evening. One could even imagine this being a weekly treat for them both, a regular liturgy of life in this tiny community.

Bob, the owner of the restaurant, is also the cook. The owner’s wife waits tables, delivering daily specials, superb hamburgers, or house-made pizzas to mostly local customers who sit at formica-top tables while drinking sweet tea and watching the sparse traffic pass by on the other side of the plate-glass windows of the storefront restaurant. The scene was about as bucolic as it gets these days. It could just as easily have been 1956 as 2016. Except.

As we waited for our burger baskets, I noticed that the young lad was using a smartphone. That’s not unusual for someone his age or, for that matter, any age these days. His grandmother quickly surveyed the menu, asked the boy what he wanted to eat, and placed the order. The lad never looked up from his phone. I mean he never looked up from his phone. While he and his grandmother waited for their order, both of his thumbs were busy on the phone. Meanwhile, the grandmother gazed from one direction to another, trying to find something to interest her while the lad played on. He never looked up. When their meals arrived, he switched from two hands on the phone to one hand on the phone and one hand holding his hamburger. He did not look up for the entire 20 minutes it took him to bolt down that sandwich. After they had both eaten their meals, the boy followed his grandmother out of the restaurant, still never looking up from his phone.

What could have been an emotionally bonding experience between a grandmother and her grandson, turned out to be dinner alone, together. Instead of receiving the wisdom of her years of life experience, the lad spent all his time on a digital device. The most disheartening reality of this picture is that we’ve all seen or experienced something similar and it’s not as disturbing to us as it ought to be. Familiarity has eroded contempt. Or, at the very least, we have no idea what to do about it, so we just move on while the proverbial water boils the frog in the kettle.

Digital technology is here to stay. And on our best days, I don’t think we’d want it to go away. We’ve become quite comfortable with digital technologies and even dependent on many of them. We like the speed, efficiency, and connectivity they offer. We have come to depend on a quick text message, an informative email, or an entertaining meme on Facebook. As the number of so-called digital natives continues to swell—those individuals born after 1980 who have always had access to computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and whatever is next—rapid adoption of new digital technologies will continue to be the norm rather than the exception.

Yet despite the number of technologies we use, there seems to be large scale naïveté about technology’s effects, especially the impact of digital technologies. Even otherwise helpful theologians and social analysts sometimes make the unsophisticated claim that technologies are morally neutral; that in and of themselves they are neither good nor bad, but it is the use of the technology that may be right or wrong. If it were that simple, answers to our questions would be much simpler. Unfortunately, the morality of technology is more complicated than we have imagined. Emerging biotechnologies—like genetic augmentation, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and robotics, for instance—mean that the human technologist may become the technology, the engineer may become the engineered. That is, beings themselves may become the artifacts of biotechnological innovation. More about that later.

As Stephen Monsma and his colleagues at Calvin College pointed out decades ago in their book Responsible Technology,¹ and the French philosopher Jacques Ellul² before them, technologies are hardly value neutral. That is not to presume that technology is by nature evil. Far from it. But every tool has an impact on its user and the choice to develop and adopt any technology is a morally freighted choice. We must assume that the technology makes life better or we would most likely reject it. And since “better” implies some notion of the good life, the invention and adoption of a particular technology is informed by certain values, almost always nowadays the notion that efficiency is better than inefficiency and that faster is necessarily better than slower.

Despite the fact that we make certain choices about technology, as founding editor of WIRED magazine, Kevin Kelly, has put it, there seems to be an inevitability about it. Some people even speak of a kind of technological determinism; if the technology exists we must use it. Although technological determinism may overstate the case, Kelly’s point is that there is a certain momentum to technological developments, including digital innovation, that continues to propel them. “The strong tides that shaped digital technologies for the past 30 years,” he predicts, “will continue to expand and harden in the next 30 years.”³ If he’s right, and I suspect he is, where is technology going, and what will our technoculture look like in 30 years? These are profound questions, especially for Christians who, as the apostle has said, are not to be conformed to the world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2).

Let’s begin with where we are today. The accumulated data are breathtaking. According to the World Economic Forum’s report, Digital Media and Society: Implications in a Hyperconnected Era,⁴ in 2015 there were approximately 3 billion internet users, 2 billion active social media users, and more than 1.6 billion mobile social accounts.

Consumers of digital media spend increasing amounts of time with their digital devices:

• People now spend an average of 2 hours daily on the mobile web.
• Individuals devote 1.8 hours to social networking, 30% of their daily online time.
• Digital natives spend on average more than 7 hours per day on their smartphones or on multiple digital devices (often at the same time).
• The average “frequent user” is young, male, well educated, and with one child.
• As of the second quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.71 billion active users.
• WhatsApp users grew from 700 million worldwide in 2015 to 1 billion by February 2016.
• WeChat dominates social media in China, with over 697 million users.
• The average user is bombarded by more than 1,700 banner ads per month.

These are stunning numbers that give some people vertigo and others a mild adrenaline rush. What might all of this mean for the future? Where are we going? Are we being led by market forces and insatiable human desire, or are we making carefully informed choices about digital media? And how are Christians to think about these things?

First, I want to outline some of the opportunities digital media offer individuals, society, Christians, and their churches. Then, in the context of what we know about our anthropology—what it means to be human—I want to say something about the challenges these new technologies bring. Then, I will offer some recommendations based on the findings.

For the record, I am neither a technological optimist nor a technological pessimist. I am a critical realist who thinks we should make informed judgments. Furthermore, I am a personalist⁵ who believes that persons take priority over things. In that same spirit of full disclosure, I should reveal that I am not a digital native but a digital immigrant. That is, I grew up before the advent of contemporary digital technology. For some, this fact may disqualify me from the conversation. Rather than disqualify me, however, in her excellent volume i-Minds, clinical neuropsychologist Mari Swingle points out that “one advantage digital immigrants do have is that of perspective: we all have been witnesses to great changes in ourselves and the generation(s) that came after us.”⁶ So, for whatever it may be worth, I will offer my perspective as a digital immigrant.