12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

It is easier to tweet than pray!”

f we merely exorcise one digital distraction from our lives without replacing it with a newer and healthier habit, seven more digital distractions will take its place.

So should we turn back the clock and return to the simplicity of the “distraction-free” predigital age? No—there may have been a predigital age, but there has never existed a life without distractions. Whether you have a smartphone, a dumb phone, or no phone, you cannot escape a life that divides your attention.

Unhealthy digital addictions flourish because we fail to see the consequences, so let’s begin our study by uncovering three reasons why we succumb to distractions so easily.

First, we use digital distractions to keep work away. Facebook is a way of escape from our vocational pressures. We procrastinate around hard things: work deadlines, tough conversations, laundry piles, and school projects and papers. The average American college student wastes 20 percent of class time tinkering on a digital device, doing things unrelated to class (a statistic that seems low to me!).5 When life becomes most demanding, we crave something else—anything else.

Second, we use digital distractions to keep people away. God has called us to love our neighbors, yet we turn to our phones to withdraw from our neighbors and to let everyone know we’d rather be somewhere else. In a meeting or a classroom, if my phone is put away, I am more likely to be perceived as engaged. If my phone is not in use, but is faceup on the table, I present myself as engaged for the moment, but possibly disengaged if someone more important outside the room needs me. And if my phone is in my hand, and I am responding to texts and scrolling social media, I project open dismissiveness, because “dividing attention is a typical expression of disdain.”6

In the digital age, we are especially slow to “associate with the lowly” around us.7 Instead, we retreat into our phones—projecting our scorn for complex situations or for boring people. In both cases, when we grab our phones, we air our sense of superiority to others—often without knowing it.

Third, we use digital distractions to keep thoughts of eternity away. Perhaps most subtly, we find it easy to fall into the trap of digital distractions because, in the most alluring new apps, we find a welcome escape from our truest, rawest, and most honest self-perceptions. This was the insight of seventeenth-century Christian, mathematician, and proverb-making sage Blaise Pascal. When observing distracted souls of his own day (not unlike those of our time), he noticed that if you “take away their diversion, you will see them dried up with weariness,” because it is to be ushered into unhappiness “as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self, and have no diversion.”8 Pascal’s point is a perennial fact: the human appetite for distraction is high in every age, because distractions give us easy escape from the silence and solitude whereby we become acquainted with our finitude, our inescapable mortality, and the distance of God from all our desires, hopes, and pleasures.

Eternity, not psychology, is my deepest concern.

Facebook now travels with us, and this mobility is quickly making Facebook addicts of us all. Few of us can stop ourselves. Ofir Turel, a psychologist at California State University-Fullerton, warns that Facebook addicts, unlike compulsive drug abusers, “have the ability to control their behavior, but they don’t have the motivation to control this behavior because they don’t see the consequences to be that severe.”4

But the consequences are real. As digital distractions intrude into our lives at an unprecedented rate, behavioral scientists and psychologists offer statistical proof in study after study: the more addicted you become to your phone, the more prone you are to depression and anxiety, and the less able you are to concentrate at work and sleep at night. Digital distractions are no game. Because we are all so interconnected, hundreds of people (friends, family members, and strangers) can interrupt us at any moment.

So God scattered the builders across the globe by a variety of languages (and drew all those languages back together at Pentecost when the gospel was ready for worldwide distribution10). God was not absent at Babel. He was the cosmic foreman on site, overruling human technology to serve his ultimate gospel purpose.

The mockery of this treasonous act is also partially comic—man builds his temple up as high as possible, and then the living God of the universe stoops down to his knees and puts his cheek on the ground in order to evaluate the progress.9 This is always what happens when technology is misused in unbelief. God is the genesis of all knowledge and technological advance, and he is the author and finisher of a glorified city to come. Why would a mud skyscraper impress him?

Technology is not inherently evil, but it tends to become the platform of choice to express the fantasy of human autonomy.

Technology is used to subdue creation for human good, but also to increase efficiency.

Technology modifies creation