Smartphones & Social Media

This originally started as compiling a list of quotes I appreciated from the 12 Ways your Phone is Changing you book, but I figured I'd put some reflections in here as well.

I've been dissatisfied off and on about my phone/social media usage for probably about 2 years now. Being fairly self-aware I could tell something wasn't right, but couldn't place my finger on it. Being connected to friends and family afar is wonderful, but I started experiencing some of the darker sides of always being connected. I used to have a great ability to focus, but began feeling distracted and scattered. Felt like I hadn't had time to think as deep I once did. I had a good memory, but my remembering muscle hadn't been exercised much lately. What happened to seeing people in person? I used to do that more regularly. And the list of small things shifted could go on.

I started finding language, explanations, and practical tools in the book How to Break Up with your Phone at the end of last year. Social media and apps aren't "free," they turned my attention into a commodity they can sell. So naturally developers work diligently to make it all the more and more addictive to keep my eyeballs glued and my fingers scrolling. I remember when my newsfeeds had a logical ending point, I could "catch up" with my friends each day in chronological order and then move on. Now the newsfeeds are designed to never end. I wanted off the bandwagon.

One of the first "break up" tools the book recommended was using a usage tracker--my phone conveniently has a screen time function--to see exactly how much you use your phone and on what apps/websites. Like most people, I use my phone in small bursts here and there throughout the day, not in one sitting, so I definitely underestimated the actual cumulative total. Week 1 I learned I spend an average 3.5 hours-a-day on my phone. What!?! That totals to be about 24 hours a week or 52 days a year staring at my phone screen. Approximately half of that time was spend on social media. Naturally those numbers made me reevaluate how I was spending my time.

I implemented a few other of the tools the book mentioned, like deleting a good chunk of my apps, putting all apps in folders, getting a real alarm clock, using the 'do-not-disturb' function, and charging the phone outside of the bedroom. These tools helped decrease my phone use by about an hour per day. Progress! But behavioral modification can only go so far, which is where the 12 Ways your Phone is Changing you book came in. It focused primarily on how phones and social media affect our spiritual and intellectual lives.

As the title plainly states, it focused on the twelve ways our phones/social media are undermining our spiritual health and then shared twelve disciplines to help us preserve it. The author asked lots of great questions that require some wrestling and often left the answers open-ended for each to determine their own convictions. One question that stood out to me was the following:

"Am I entitled to feed on the fragmented trivialities online? In other words, am I entitled to spend hours every month simply browsing odd curiosities? I get the distinct sense in Scripture that the answer is no...I do not have 'time to kill'--I have time to redeem." (Pg. 179-180)

The author also did a good job of drawing wisdom of Christians gone before. Distraction is nothing new under the sun, humans are just tempted in new ways:

"C. S. Lewis called it the 'Nothing' strategy in his Screwtape Letters. It is the strategy that eventually leaves a man at the end of his life looking back in lament: 'I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.'

This 'Nothing' strategy is 'very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years, not in sweet sins, but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them ... or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.'

Routines of nothingness. Habits unnecessary to our calling. A hamster wheel of what will never satisfy our souls. Lewis's warning about the 'dreary flickering' in front of our eyes is a loud prophetic alarm to the digital age. We are always busy, but always distracted diabolically lured away from what is truly essential and truly gratifying. Led by our unchecked digital appetites, we manage to transgress both commands that promise to bring focus to our lives. We fail to enjoy God. We fail to love our neighbor." (pg. 191)

One of the root issues of my discontent with social media in the last few years was finally put into words by the author. In Ecclesiastics we learn that the human soul will experience a wide range of emotions and that should expect to move back and forth or hold some of them simultaneously. But time online left me feeling more numb and distant rather than connected because:

"...all these seasons now stack tightly together in linear tabulation in one vertical feed with no end. Compressed to fit into our phones, all these tweets hit us in one scrolling chronology. At one moment, we are called to weep with those who weep, and in another to rejoice with those who rejoice. Life online is a whiplash between deep sorrow, unexpected joy, cheap laughs, profound thoughts, and dumb memes...those seasons come at us too quickly, and because they hit and leave so soon, we seldom feel the weight of our emotions. Behind the safety of our phone screens, we can more easily shield ourselves 'from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others, and the complexity of their personal experiences.' This doesn't make us suppress emotion; it makes us express 'contrived emotion.' We grow emotionally distant with our expressions. We become content to 'LOL' with our thumbs or to cry emoticon tears to express our sorrow because we cannot (and will not) take the time to genuinely invest ourselves in real tears of sorrow." (pg. 178-179)

So where am I now? While I love learning from people who have ditched their smartphones entirely, I don't plan to become a digital monk. The functionality of to-do lists, calendar, banking, etc. make efficient use of my time rather than waste it. My phone usage has dropped to an average of 2 hours-a-day in the last month and I'd like to decrease it to closer to 1 hour-a-day eventually. I decided to keep Facebook messenger as a tool to connect inter-personally--one-on-one or in small groups rather than to document my life on Facebook for a hundred of acquaintances. In the coming weeks, I'd like to start parking my phone in one location when at home rather than having it in my pocket at all times.

Two degree changes in course now can make for a very different life in the future. I want to have a more limited and disciplined use of technology. Not opposed to technology, but very critically review how it will affect myself, community, and lifestyle before deciding upon adoption or rejection.