Your Phone Is Changing You

Most of us can’t remember life without our “smarter-than-I-Phone.” It is always within hand’s reach. It wakes us up in the morning. It plays our music. It keeps our calendars. It captures life’s moments in pics and video, and it’s there as an ever-present portal to Instagram, “X”, and Facebook.

The smartphone is so prevalent in daily life that we rarely think self-reflectively about it. So, I wish to invite you to take the time to consider the consequences of your smartphone. What is it doing to our minds when we are living with this endless stimulation? We are living in a parallel universe, a virtual universe that can devour the time we have. So, what happens to us when we are in constant motion, when we are hooked on constant visual stimulus? What is life like because of the smartphone?

We are only thirty-four years into the “Information Age.” One day we will step back and look with more perspective at what our smartphones are doing to us, but we don’t have the leisure to postpone self-reflection for later. We must ask ourselves now.

May I suggest we think about six changes?

Change 1: We are becoming like what we behold.

This is one of the simplest (and profound) realities in Scripture: We become what we behold. To worship an idol is to become like the idol; to worship Christ is to become like Christ. See: Psalm 115:4-8; Romans 12:1-2; Colossians 3:10; 2 Corinthians 3:18.

What we behold is what we worship. What we spend our time beholding shapes our hearts and molds us into the people we are. This truth is both frightening and useful, but it raises the questions: What happens to our soul when we spend so much time beholding the glowing screens of our phones? How are we changed? How are we conformed?

One way we become like what we behold shows up relationally. Our digital interactions, which are often necessarily brief and superficial, begin to imprint on all our relationships. All of our personal interactions take the same shape. The way we interact online becomes the norm for how we interact offline. 

Change 2: We are ignoring our finiteness.

We are finite creatures, limited in what we can know and what we can read and what we can engage with and — perhaps most importantly —limited in what we can really care about. Yet our phones offer us everything — new news, new outrages, new videos, new music, new pictures, and new status updates from all our Facebook friends.

One reason we own smartphones is to avoid being left behind. We don’t want to miss anything gone “viral.” And little by little we ignore our finiteness, we lose a sense of our limitations, and we begin chasing after the forbidden fruit of limitless knowledge in a subconscious desire to become infinite like God.

These technologies want to stretch us out over the entire world-wide-web with updates, notifications, and pics. Instead, we need to embrace our “finitude.” And if we really own up to the fact that a life well lived is a life lived carefully (Ephesians 5:15, Colossians 4:5), we simply have to say ‘NO!' to some of these things.

Change 3: We are multitasking what should be uni-tasked.

Adapted to shallow friendships, distracted to limited focus, and ignorant of personal limitations, we embrace the multitasking myth. We multitask everything, trying to think in multiple directions at the same time, trying to be in two places at the same time, trying to live in physical space and virtual space simultaneously.

We are a very distracted culture. We are trying to multitask things that can’t be multitasked. Scripture calls us to a life of single-minded self-reflection that often gets interrupted by the buzz of multitasking. If it’s important, it’s worth being uni-tasked.

Change 4: We are forgetting the joy of embodiment.

The apostle John closes one of his handwritten letters with a line of enduring relevance for those of us who now write with our thumbs: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink [modern technology for John]. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12).

Communication technologies, like email and messaging, are ghost-to-ghost more than person-to-person. There is something of us in them, but there’s more to our personhood that doesn’t get sent. In a message, we send our ghost. The same is true of this article.

Social media and email can be a useful extension of our embodied relationships, but not their replacement. Are the conveniences of disembodied communication undermining the joy of embodied communication? Do I truly value my face-to-face relationships over the disembodied relationships I maintain online? Are my face-to-face relationships suffering because I neglect the priority and joy of embodiment?

Change 5: We are losing interest in the gathered church.

Inevitably, this lost joy of embodiment manifests itself as empty seats at the church house.

Christianity is rooted in Christ’s incarnation, and this profound face-to-face reality shapes our fellowship (2 John 12; 3 John 14), our ultimate hopes (1 John 3:2), and our lives. The cellphone offers few advantages here.

We have the whole dynamic of collective worship, which is very significant biblically because God inhabits the praises of his people (Psalm 22:3). When people come and really worship, there is the presence of the Holy Spirit that can’t be replicated through a Zoom call. The body of Christ, by nature, is designed to get together. We are to be with each other, and we are to worship together and confess our sins and share communion and show our love for people and weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh.

Do we truly value the embodied reality of the local church? And even if we show up on Sunday, are we scrolling on our phones, looking for something more promising, more entertaining, than what God offers in embodied fellowship?

Change 6: We are growing careless with our words.

Why are we so quick to judge the motives of people online, and why are we so bold to criticize? Why do we say things online we would never say in person?

When we interact with people online, we are quick to forget these are souls, quick to forget we are interacting with eternal beings. Distracted minds trying to multitask make our language especially flippant and hyper-critical.

We must have integrity when we are online. We should do it prayerfully. We need to resist impulses. And, admittedly, I’m not always successful. I have deleted not a few online posts. Please remember that we are doing this before the presence of God, and we are interacting with eternal image-bearers. We are impacting people’s destinies. I think if we take that kind of approach, we are less likely to become frivolous. Shallowness is a terrible vice in our age. We’re cautioned by Scripture to be careful with our words; to be careful how we speak and let our words be few (Proverbs 10:19-21; 17:27). These technologies allow us to talk endlessly.

I think we need to do more self-editing and realize that mediated communication has its benefits, but detriments as well.