Do we as Christians, and in particular, Christian men, have a responsibility to think deeply and respond wisely to the proliferation of technological gadgets in our lives? I believe we do. God calls us to be wise in all of the areas of our lives, and, considering the fact that technology plays a major part in our lives these days, we need to be sure that we are using it wisely. There is a sense in which things seem to be getting out of hand. Now before anyone jumps to conclusions, let it be known that I am a technology junky. I like to look at all the new gadgets. Forty years ago, I was the first to bring a computer into the school where I taught. Since then I have followed with great interest the development of not only the PC, but also cell phones, Phones, and tablet computers. So I am not just an old man complaining about all of the new fangled stuff. I like the new-fangled stuff! In this booklet, I hope to help us think through some of the implications of the technology we use, and the impact it may have on our Christian life and on our relationships with others.
Distraction
The first area I would like us to consider is the area of distraction vs. attention. I have a real concern about how our devices are limiting our ability to focus and pay attention to one thing at a time. You probably know the feeling. You’re involved in a face to face conversation with someone, and your cell phone vibrates in your pocket, or you hear the tones from your computer that let you know that an email has arrived. You are now faced with a choice. Do you slide the phone out of your pocket to see what email has arrived? Do you excuse yourself from the conversation to go check the computer to see what the email is about? Many people would do the first. Not so many people would actually get up and leave the room to check on their email message. But, even if you don’t follow through in either case, your train of thought has been interrupted, and there is one part of your brain that wonders who’s trying to communicate with you. You’ve been distracted.
A similar scenario can take place while you’re reading your Bible or praying. The interruption has the effect of breaking your concentration and introduces a question in your mind as to what the message might be. Even if that lasts for only a second, it takes effort to get back into the train of thought that was interrupted. If this happens often enough in life, your brain actually changes its wiring, so that it becomes harder and harder to focus for stretches of time. (See The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr)
Tim Challies asserts, “Our brains actually change in response to new technologies. The brain of a person raised in the age of print, a person who learned from books and who read books in time of leisure or study, has a brain that is markedly different from a person who has learned primarily from images or who has watched videos in times of leisure or study.” (The Next Story, page 44)
One of the interesting things about all of these interruptions is that very few of them are important. Your deep contemplation of the love of God might have been broken by the tone that ultimately lets you know that someone “Liked” the description of breakfast you posted on Facebook.
I don’t want to make this too complex, but our system for responding to external input consists of three basic areas – the alerting, the orienting, and the executive networks. The alerting lets us know what inputs are around us. The orienting helps us select what we pay attention to out of the millions of available inputs at any moment. The executive network is in charge of attention and helps resolve all of the areas of the brain that are responding to the inputs from your world. (Distracted, page 23) When our executive network gets overloaded trying to handle all of the inputs, we feel overwhelmed, fearful, and frustrated. In Distracted, Maggie Jackson states that “People who focus well report feeling less fear, frustration, and sadness day to day, partly because they can literally deploy their attention away from negatives in life.” In other words, their executive network is able to manage all it is given to control, and so the frustration is lower.
In another place Maggie Jackson writes, “Executive attention (which directs judgment, planning, and self-control) is a precious commodity. Relying on multitasking as a way of life, we chop up our opportunities and abilities to make big-picture sense of the world and pursue our long-term goals. In the name of efficiency, we are diluting some of the essential qualities that make us human.” (Distracted, page 80)
Tim Challies writes:
“Harvard Medical School, is recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. After years of studying and treating ADHD, Hallowell began to note a similar disorder…. He termed this condition attention deficit trait. ADT is a product of the digital world, a result of our obsession with information—our desire to surround ourselves with it, with more of it, all the time. In an interview with CNET News, Hallowell observed, ‘It’s a condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless, and, over the long term, underachieving.’ People will know they’ve succumbed to it ‘when they start answering questions in ways that are more superficial, more hurried, than they usually would; when their reservoir of new ideas starts to run dry; when they find themselves working ever-longer hours and sleeping less, exercising less, spending free time with friends less, and in general putting in more hours but getting less production overall.’” In other words, they will know they’ve got it when they find that they no longer have time or ability to give to building relationships or to fulfilling their God-given mandate that they work, create, innovate. Arising as a direct result of overloading the brain’s internal circuitry with too much input, ADT carries significant consequences. Hallowell states, ‘Aside from underachievement, you don’t ever get the fulfillment of seeing yourself coming up with the ideas you ought to come up with.’” (The Next Story, pages 138-139)
My motivation for bringing in these technical descriptions is to make us aware of the dangers that exist by too much multitasking enhanced by our personal technologies. God wants us to be able to get the big picture. He wants us to be able to think deeply about truth and focus on His word and its implications in our lives. Nicholas Carr writes, “The more you multitask, the less deliberate you become and the less able to think and reason out a problem.” (The Shallows, page 140)
Carr goes on, “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. The more we use the web, the more we train our brain to be distracted.” (Shallows, page 194).
If we are continuously distracted, we cannot see the big picture and think deeply and therefore we will be less than God wants us to be in our growth in Christ-likeness. In addition, it is much more difficult to store information into our long-term memory and therefore the portions of the Word of God which should be in our brains don’t stick.
It is a difficult thing to work against the trend toward impulsiveness and distractedness. The “rewiring” of our brains to undo the distracted state can be accomplished but it takes work and effort. It requires us to have motivation and self control. Scripture teaches us that these are important qualities.
Proverbs 25:28 reads, “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my life to be like a vulnerable city where there is no protection.
In Titus 2:2 we read, “Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith and steadfastness.” Then they are urged in verse 6 to “urge the younger men to be self-controlled.”
In I Peter 4:7, “The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers.”
Finally, in 2 Peter 1:5 he tells us to “make every effort (i.e., be diligent) to supplement your faith with.…” Using every effort and diligence we have, we are supposed to add certain virtues to our faith. Among the things we are to diligently add is self-control.
Let me challenge all of us as Christians to be diligent in our efforts to master ourselves. Do not kid yourself into thinking that this is an easy process. It takes effort. What better area would there be to put that into practice than in the area of technology? Men love to consider strength and its development as a virtue. Let’s work on building the strength required to master ourselves in the area of our technological devices. Self control is part of the fruit of the Spirit, and as such we have the resource of God and His power to enable us to accomplish this goal.
Challies agrees, “The challenge facing us is clear. We need to relearn how to think, and we need to discipline ourselves to think deeply, conquering the distractions in our lives so that we can live deeply. We must rediscover how to be truly thoughtful Christians, as we seek to live with virtue in the aftermath of the digital explosion.” (The Next Story, page 117)
I’m going to provide some suggestions as to how to retake control and rewire your brain back to a less distracted state. It can be done, but it is difficult. It must be something you really want to do. The following are suggestions, not rules. Depending on your situation, you may find some more helpful than others.
- Discipline yourself to check email at set times in the day—perhaps first thing in the morning, once in the middle of the day, and then again once in the evening. This of course is not referring to email you need to be attending to as part of your job. But even then, when work is over, do not refer to work email at all. This same suggestion applies to your Facebook and Twitter access as well. Schedule times and don’t look at it in between.
- Learn to disregard email or message alerts until the appointed time. If you are reading an online newspaper, and the email icon shows up, don’t interrupt your reading to check the email. Teach yourself to avoid the urge to switch gears. Remember, you are trying to program your brain to focus for longer stretches of time, not shorter ones. This will seem difficult, and you will ask yourself why you should wait. The answer is that it is good for your brain. Even in my work setting, I learned that I did much better if I forced myself to finish one task before breaking to check email.
- When you are working on tasks that don’t involve the computer, don’t just leave your computer up and logged in to email, Facebook or other social media. Your temptation to check it out will be strong every time you walk by your computer.
- Read a good book or serious magazine articles. Force yourself to attend to it for a long stretch of time, 30 minutes or more, without looking at your phone, and without trying to watch TV at the same time. If you can’t read for that long of a time, start with a shorter time and then build up your endurance and concentration.
- Resist the urge to look at your phone every time you sense a message has come in. Don’t resort to your phone every time you think of a question – What temperature is it? Why is the deer population so high? What year was the first Chevy Impala produced? You don’t have to know the answer to every question just because it crossed your mind. Reaching for your phone every five minutes is an addictive behavior. Take control and resist the urge, no matter how much it hurts.
- Make it a matter of specific prayer, asking God to enable you to extend your ability to focus and pay attention. But at the same time take the needed steps to break bad habits.
- Be faithful in having a daily time in prayer and in the Word. Force this to be an undistracted time. Make it a priority ahead of email and Facebook.
- If you are a parent, let me encourage you to help your children adopt better technology practices in order to avoid the issues discussed here. Apply the above list of suggestions to your children. In addition, research shows that teens need 9.5 hours of sleep per night. Many teens keep their cell phones nearby during sleep, and even if they don’t respond to it, the sensation of alerting them to an incoming message disrupts the deep sleep necessary for properly wiring the mind and sorting out learning from the previous day. I would keep all technology out of children and teens bedrooms.
- Reduce the time your children spend with technology. In spite of what they say, they will not die if they can’t be in constant contact with their friends.
- Lengthening a child’s attention span begins long before they begin to use technology. Reduce the number of inputs your small children are subject to. If they have 50 toys to pick from for play time, the choices involved create conflicts in their decision-making. Reduce the choices and encourage them to finish playing with one category of toys before switching to another. Switching gears frequently and having too many choices all the time contributes to a low attention span and trains the brain to be distracted.