Over against the potential harms of digital exposure, there is strong evidence for the benefits of non-technologically-mediated, unstructured play among children. When a child exercises imagination, creativity, decision-making, and problem-solving, he is helped in developing early math concepts, such as shape, size, and sorting, and, at the same time, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.42
But the negative impact of digital media is not limited to children. Because of the perception of the lack of authority, the anonymity, and the sense of distance or physical remove, cyberspace facilitates diminished inhibitions among users. What researcher John Suler first called “online disinhibition effect” (ODE) is now an accepted origin of certain behaviors online.43 ODE contributes not only to impulsive behaviors among some individuals, but also a growing problem with Internet addiction. Based on literature review and her own research, Aiken maintains that digital technologies can stimulate the release of dopamine to the pleasure centers of the brain. That explains, in part, why searching online, purchasing goods and services online, and using social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter can be addictive.
Hard to resist. That’s how many of us find the Internet. It’s always delivering a wild surprise, pulsing with breaking news, statistics, personal messages, and entertainment. The overwhelming evidence point to this: A combination of the fast delivery, exploring opportunities, unexpected information, and intermittent rewards creates a medium that is enticing, exciting, and for some individuals totally irresistible. Now let’s add in the design aspects of the apps, ads, games, and social-networking sites—the alerts, push notifications, lights, and other visual triggers that signal us like primitive mating calls.44
This kind of digitally-induced hyperactivity has also contributed to our inability to find solitude tolerable, much less beneficial. In fact, for increasing numbers of people solitude equals loneliness. Sociologist Sherry Turkle contrasts solitude with loneliness. Solitude is “the capacity to be contentedly and constructively alone,” whereas loneliness is a word we invented to describe “the pain of being alone.”45
Developmental psychology has long made the case for the importance of solitude. And now so does neuroscience. It is only when we are alone with our thoughts—not reacting to external stimuli—that we engage that part of the brain’s basic infrastructure devoted to building up a sense of our stable autobiographical past. This is the “default mode network.” So, without solitude, we can’t construct a stable sense of self.46
But now that connectivity is continuous, fewer and fewer people know how to cope with time alone. They find it difficult to concentrate, they complain of being bored, they get fidgety. In short, they experience anxiety that leads them back to their digital devices, especially their smartphones. Mari Swingle suggests that “A loose yet rather accurate measure of when usage of digital media becomes problematic is (1) when one can’t do without, (2) when one can’t stop, (3) when one chooses an Internet or I-tech activity consistently over all others, and finally, (4) when there is some form of dismissed, or ignored, repercussion or consequence, interpersonally, scholastically, or professionally. In other words, quite simply, when usage starts to have the properties of addiction.”47
A 2015 study found that Americans check their phones a total of 8 billion times a day, with the average adult checking his or her phone two hundred times a day, or about every five minutes.48 With more than three quarters of teens having access to smartphones, it’s no wonder that digital addiction is rising.49
Excarnation
Following the lead of Templeton award-winning philosopher Charles Taylor, Australian missiologist Michael Frost has appropriated a vivid term to describe our contemporary technoculture: “excarnation.” Frost argues that “the core idea of the Christian faith is the incarnation: God took on flesh and dwelled among us.”50 Jesus of Nazareth is both fully man and fully God. His claim to be God got him crucified on a Roman torture device. His humanity meant that he really died. His divinity meant that he could conquer death and rise from the grave. As the apostle John puts it, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as from the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-2, 14).
Excarnation is the opposite of incarnation. Historically, excarnation refers to the ancient practice of removing the flesh and organs from a dead body to prepare it for burial. Also known as de-fleshing, the practice was used in the late British Neolithic period in England and Scotland, as well as on the Hawaiian islands as late as the 18th century. After rehearsing the history, Frost remarks,
I mention all this not merely to highlight an archaic custom but to suggest that while the defleshing of corpses is no longer in vogue, we currently find ourselves in a time in history where another kind of excarnation occurs, an existential kind in which we are being convinced to embrace an increasingly disembodied presence in our world.51
The evidence for excarnation is manifold and damning:
. . .the rise of the influence of the Internet has contributed radically to the increasingly excarnate experience of life today. . . . We debate or mock those with whom we disagree on blogs and in social media without ever engaging them face to face. We refer to people who have connected with us on Facebook as our “friends” without necessarily having ever met them. In fact, nothing is more subversively excarnate than the pressure to objectify a stranger as a “friend.”
Many teens recognize that they and their friends and family are increasingly tethered to their electronic gadgets, and a substantial number express a desire to disconnect sometimes. A recent study found that 41 percent of teens describe themselves as “addicted” to their phones. Forty-three percent of teens wish that they could “unplug,” and more than a third wish they could go back to a time when there was no Facebook. Some teens get frustrated by how attached their friends and parents are to their own devices. For example, 28 percent of those whose parents have a mobile device say they consider their parents addicted to their gadgets, and 21 percent of all teens say they wish their parents spent less time with their cell phones and other devices. Nearly half (45%) of teens say they sometimes get frustrated with their friends for texting, surfing the Internet or checking their social networking sites while they’re hanging out.
. . . [Excarnation] has also seeped into our everyday thinking in the church as well. We drive our SUVs across town to churches in neighborhoods we don’t live in (and don’t want to). We send SMSs and check Twitter during the sermon, and then we download our favorite celebrity preacher’s sermon as a podcast to listen to during the week. We engage in online discussions by posting smug and condescending remarks about those unseen, unknown folks with whom we disagree. We sign petitions and change our Facebook profile picture to show our support for various causes without any thought of getting involved personally. We are outraged by those who manipulate child soldiers in Africa or who traffic sex workers from Central Europe, but we don’t open our homes to our own neighbors, let alone those with no home at all. And this isn’t even to mention the prevalence of online porn usage by churchgoing men, including male clergy.
This says even some church leaders themselves are intentionally excarnate, appearing only onscreen via satellite links, beamed in from the mother church, multiplied and digitized for a consumer audience. It’s as though the pastor becomes the new icon in the Protestant worship service, and if that’s true, it’s hard to see how the video-based multisite church can’t tend toward idolatry, pride and self-promotion—even where the ambition of spreading the gospel is genuine. 52