Issue 29 - Finding a Happy Medium with Digital Media
I am neither a Luddite nor do I intend to stir up fear, but I do try to draw attention to things that can affect our spiritual and mental health - and particularly that of our children. In this issue I present several links related to new warnings about technology.
Social psychologist and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, who wrote “The Anxious Generation” and co-wrote “The Coddling of the American Mind,” recently published an essay on the damage that TikTok is incurring on children - and how the leaders of the company knowingly avoided addressing these harms, because it would jeopardize profits.
Christian pediatrician Dr. Meg Meeker has indicated that she would rather her teens smoke than use social media: because if you stop smoking at 19, your lungs will regenerate to their prior healthy state, whereas excessive use of social media during such a developmentally key stage causes changes to your brain wiring that are difficult to reverse.
In addition to evidence that mental health has deteriorated in the last 15 years, there’s now evidence that adult literacy and numeracy and ability to process information have been falling in the West over the same time period. In describing trends in intelligence and information processing, journalist John Burn-Murdoch notes a simultaneous rise in difficulty concentrating and learning new things among young adults. He suggests that it may be partly because of a decline in reading (though a decline in reading may simply measure a substitution to time wasted on screens). He suggests that the problem isn’t technology per se, but in the fact that we’ve replaced active engagement with algorithm-curated content; shifted from longer material to short, self-contained content; and “an explosion in the volume and frequency of notifications, each one at risk of pulling you away from what you were previously doing (or taking up some headspace even if you ignore it).”
In his new book, “Living in Wonder,” Christian writer Rod Dreher talks about the need for Western Christians to rediscover “enchantment,” which writer Joseph Homes defines as “believ[ing] and liv[ing] as if the spiritual world is real and active in our material, visible world; that the world is objectively meaningful…see[ing] the world as sacred and sacramental.” Dreher notes that the key to retrieving an enchanted mindset is the ability to focus one’s attention, particularly making time and mental space for prayer. As he put it: “attention - what we pay attention to and how we attend - is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment. And prayer is the most important part of the most important part.” Later, he recounts the experience of Catholic Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan (who famously coined the phrase “the medium is the message”): “[Marshall] once wrote that every person he knows who lost the faith began their journey to deconversion by ceasing to pray. The implication is not that they set out to deconvert, but that having lost that living daily connection to God, the living waters and source of life, eventually their capacity to believe dried up too.”
We often think that as long as we aren’t using our screens to watch porn, or to covet our neighbors’ life on social media, then we’re in the clear. But I think we should heed Dreher’s warning, that devoting too much attention, particularly passive attention, to things online not only risks our mental health and intellect as suggested in the links above, but also risks our spiritual well-being. I’m not here to point out digital splinters with a log in my own eye, I just want to encourage us to be intentional about finding ways to silence our technology, and to reclaim more of that time to spend praying and reading God’s word. We should also be careful to set healthy boundaries on technology for our children, and model for them an appropriate balance of necessary screen time with “real life.” Doing so is likely to improve the mental and spiritual health of everyone in the family, which seems like something worth unplugging for!