12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You by Tony Reinke

"Owning a smart phone is similar to dating a high

 maintenance attention starved partner."

Every few years I read a book on how technology affects the brain so I can remember why to limit screen time. This year it was Tony Reinke's 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You. Frankly, I was surprised at how pro-technology the book is. 

Reinke contends that technology is morally neutral and that it began in the garden of Eden. Technology is the reordering of raw materials for human purposes.... Musicians re-order notes and sounds into music. Novelists re-order the raw material of human experience into stories. Technology pushes back the results of the Fall (less pain in childbirth, easier ways to plant and harvest, etc.) He admits that technology unhitched from fear and obedience to God quickly becomes a pawn in human power plays and uses the tower of Babel as an example, but, says Reinke, it is the human heart and not technology that is at fault. (If you've read anything by Paul Kingsnorth or Jacques Ellul, you will not agree that our constant upgrading in mechanization is "neutral" or, even, indeed, a sign of human progress. But I digress.)

In each chapter Reinke highlights one way in which our phones are changing our habits. In Chapter 1, he shows how we have become addicted to distraction; in Chapter 2, he writes about how our super-connectedness has robbed us of real relationships. Chapter 8 deals with easy access to porn. You get the idea. 

Although I didn't agree with everything he wrote, I always appreciate someone who makes me think through my habits with more clarity (and less self-delusion!)  

In the chapter on how our phones are making us illiterate, Reinke writes, If you want to internalize a piece of knowledge, you've got to linger over it. But we have been trained not to linger over digital texts. Our lack of self control with digital "marshmallows" malnourishes our sustained linear concentration. Deep reading is harder than ever. What we have today is not illiteracy, but aliteracy: a digital skimming that is simply an attempt to keep up with the deluge of information coming through our phones rather than slowing down and soaking in what is most important. He contends that this way of imbibing the written word leaks over into our Bible reading. The more time I spend reading 10-second tweets, the more it affects my attention span, weakening the muscles I need to read Scripture for long distances.

My favorite emphasis of the book was on how online distractions rob us of our ability to experience deeper pleasures: [As] we feed on digital junk food, our palates are re-programmed and our affections atrophy.... The more we take refuge in distraction, the more habituated we become to mere stimulation and the more desensitized to delight. We lose our capacity to stop and ponder something deeply, to admire something beautiful for its own sake. By seeking trivial pleasures in our phones, we train ourselves to want more of those trivial pleasures. These become the only pleasures we know. Our capacity for deep enjoyment is thus destroyed.

One of the biggest ways my phone has changed me (even though I limit my time on it quite a bit) is that I now have the attention span of a gerbil. The irony is not lost on me that I listened to this book on my phone at 1.25 speed so that I could get through it quickly and move on to other things.

I'd be interested to hear any thoughts you have on this book or on your own digital habits.

Blessings,