Technology and Relationships

            I think all of us have seen the bizarre sight of a man and woman across from each other in a restaurant each texting or talking to someone else. I saw something similar to this on a beautiful evening while walking down the sidewalk. Toward me came a man and woman walking side by side. Both of them had a phone up to their ear talking to someone elsewhere. It seemed to me that in so doing they were missing both the potential communication with the other person as well as all of the interesting sights and sounds of their actual location.

            Why do we do this to ourselves? What is it about remote contacts that is more appealing than those we are with?  There is a danger here that I don’t think many people think about. If the person you are with is someone near and dear to you such as a wife or a child, and if you repeatedly move yourself from attending to them to attending to someone else (or something else), the relationship changes and is ultimately harmed in some way. It may not be damaged over night, but in time the relationship will not be as strong as it should be.

            We are already familiar with the jokes about the husband who is distracted by a newspaper or a ball game when his wife is trying to talk to him. Think about how much greater the barrier is when there is an actual person on the other end of a conversation who is getting precedence over one’s own spouse. This kind of thing will certainly happen from time to time, but let’s just imagine the scenario that every evening one spouse is texting some invisible person to the neglect of the person right there in front of him. Doesn’t that have the potential to break down the communication and put distance between the two of them? What if they both are doing it? They are each receiving some sort of fulfilling input from a source other than their spouse. Over time, this has to have a damaging effect on the relationship.

            Read what one anonymous reader posted on my blog in response to a technology article:

I read through what you wrote……my comment combines a few, as I am having jealousy issues with my husband’s cell, FB usage, iPad etc. Mostly it is the cell phone usage with access to FB. We have only been married a short time *less than a year* and this is a big issue for me- as it takes away from our time together whether at home, at restaurants, the mall, even at times, at church. Lately I have been praying for patience and understanding…. understanding as to why he chooses it over me. We also, btw, have 4 kids with us at any given time. I am going to read through some of the other postings for enlightenment. But, my stance is: these pieces (cell, iPad, FB) can hurt a person or a relationship just by sucking up the TIME it takes away from a loved one.

            Let’s consider another scenario. A family of five is home for the evening for a change. Dad and mom decide to watch a movie. The children don’t want to watch that particular movie, so the first child goes to his room to watch something he’s interested in on his computer. The next child props his feet up in the family room and listens to his favorite playlist on his phone. And the last child texts back and forth with one of her friends from school. In some homes this is normal. It happens every day.  Do you see a problem here? The family is together, but not communicating.

            Next consider the fact that self-centeredness is fed by this scenario. No one has to learn to appreciate the other person’s taste in music or movies. No one has to learn to share. Everyone can have what suits himself. Sister is not required to talk to brother if she doesn’t want to. While this might seem like a reasonable thing in today’s world, for the Christian it is not the direction we want to go.

            I’ve discovered that living the Christian life is an extremely difficult thing especially when it comes to our relationships with others, especially when those others are members of our family. If we are to become the kind of people God wants us to be, don’t we have to learn the skills that He values?

Let’s look at some relevant scripture passages:

Ephesians 5:25 Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it. (Emphasis mine.)

Philippians 2:3 In lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.

Romans 12:10 In honor giving preference to one another

Galatians 5:13 Through love serve one another.

Deuteronomy 6:7 You shall teach them (God’s words) diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie  down, and when you rise up.

Romans 15:1-2 Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, leading to edification.

            After reading passages such as these, I learn that my role as husband and father is one that is supposed to be other focused. I am to be attentive to the needs of my wife, not only giving preference to her, but making sure that she is built up spiritually and emotionally. I am to esteem her as better than myself when it comes to preferences in the use of time, money and activities. I am not to be focused on pleasing myself but on her good so she can be built up in her faith and character.

            In addition, I am to spend time at all times of the day instilling in my children the words and commandments of God. My focus personally and for my family is one that is to have a God-ward direction. I’m to make sure that I am teaching my children to be focused on the needs and interests of others rather than the natural tendency to focus on self.

            However, when I make arrangements for each of my children to have his/her own electronic entertainment, I am teaching them that they don’t have to learn to cater to the desires and preferences of others. I am teaching them that each of us can have what we want. Some may argue that such arrangements are not taking away from the preferences of others because they too get to listen to or watch what they want. But the issue is in learning to communicate and to submit to one another. It’s difficult to let another person have the choice of the music that I have to listen to or the movie we’re going to watch. Why should I have to watch a movie my sister picked out?! My selfish self rebels against this. If we all have to watch the same movie or listen to the same music and share the same space, we learn to put others first and to share. This doesn’t come naturally, but it is what God wants from us. And as parents we need to make our daily instruction an integral part of our dialogue throughout the day’s activities. Our decisions about how we use technology impact that daily instruction. If everyone including parents is distracted with their own movie, playlist, Facebook page, and text messages, where are the opportunities going to come from for sharing the Christian life with one another?

            It takes time to build and nurture relationships. It takes time for me to nurture the relationship with my wife and children, and it takes a lot of practice for children to learn to relate with each other in the way I’m describing. The fact that our technology has become ubiquitous and personal has worked against us in the area of personal relationships. In fact, just this week as I was working on this, (January 2012), CNN had an article on how multitasking hinders young people’s social skills. http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/25/tech/social-media/multitasking-kids/index.html)

            We need to take steps to reverse the trend and nurture the personal relationships in our lives the way God intended. As parents we need to make sure we are fulfilling God’s desire for us to train up our children in the way they should go. As spouses, we need to fulfill God’s design for marriage by being all there for our spouse throughout the moments of every day.

            As I was thinking through the thoughts I shared last time, I was thinking through the difference between the way we interact with technology and the way we used to interact with newspapers or books. We’ve all seen the older sitcoms where a woman would be trying to speak to her husband, but he would be hiding behind a newspaper. He was shutting her out of his world during the time he was reading the paper.

            My dad was a pastor. He loved to read, and so he almost always had a book with him. When we’d go on vacation, as soon as he had a chance, he would sit down somewhere in the shade and read his book. This would sometimes perturb my mother because she often had other ideas of what she would rather have him do with his time, especially time she considered to be family time.

            In both of these scenarios, it’s important for a husband to learn to be attentive to the needs and desires of his wife and family. It was still possible to be withdrawn and separated from those around us even when the technology consisted of paper and ink.

            But I’ve been asking myself the question as to whether our issue today is just another version of the same thing, or is it fundamentally different? On the surface there are some of the same issues. I can be reading the daily news on my phone when my wife wants to get my attention about something. A phone isn’t as big as a newspaper, and so she can easily see my face.  Or, I can be on vacation, and when I think I have a good opportunity, I can go off somewhere and read a book on a Kindle. Is this different or the same as what happened in previous generations?

            On another level, the two media pose completely different circumstances that I think we as Christians need to look at very carefully. With print media, one is normally locked into one task. When I’m reading a book, everyone around me knows I’m reading a book. If I decide I’d like to check on the yesterday’s sports scores, I will put down the book and go pick up the newspaper. If my son is reading the sports page, I have to wait until he’s finished. I don’t know how other people are, but very seldom, if I had five minutes of free time between getting dressed and leaving for work, would I go find my book, pick it up, and read a page. Because I wasn’t used to so much distraction and multi-tasking, my brain didn’t think it needed to find some little thing to do during every quiet space in the day.

            How do things differ now with technology? Let me use myself as an example. I have a phone that I use for just about everything except typing. I mean I can study my Bible, check the weather, read the news, read any number of different books, play games, text people, send out tweets, check on Facebook, etc. Because I am older, I tend to use this tool more like I would the device it replaces. In other words, when I read, I tend to read it the way I would a book. Younger people tend to be much more distracted and multi-tasking than I am. But having said that, I have noticed some tendencies that automatically come with this type of technology.

            I may be reading my Bible and meditating on it, but then wonder what today’s weather is going to be. So almost in mid-sentence I may switch over and check the weather. Then I’ll wonder what the 10-day outlook is and so might check that out. Needless to say, this breaks my train of thought. I may be reading another book, when I wonder if anyone has posted a response to a grandchild’s picture I posted on Facebook, and so might switch over there to see what’s been happening. Someone there may have referenced a cute YouTube video, and so I might check that out and chuckle as I see the inane antics of some 2-year-old. Meanwhile, the thoughts evoked by the book I was reading are long gone.

            All of the previous events can take place while I’m “reading” a text. But what about all of the other snippets of time that are spread throughout the day?  We have a tendency to check in with the technology in almost every spare minute. There is a pull there that was not present in the newspaper and book. I’m not saying there is anything innately wrong about that, but it has a pull. Can’t you feel it? You have a few minutes while your wife is putting dishes in the dishwasher, and so you check out the sports scores. She comes in the living room to find you looking at your phone. It was just a few seconds, and you found out what you wanted to know, and so you put it down. Later on, there’s a lull in the conversation, if you ever got started in a conversation in the first place, and so you check to see if anyone has updated Facebook. In a few more minutes you remember that you had put a bid on Ebay, and so you check your email for a minute to see if there’s a message there regarding your bid. Again, you set your phone aside, only to hear the familiar tone that tells you someone has texted you. It would be rude to leave it until tomorrow, so you quickly check to see what that was about. Oh, it was only Culver’s restaurant telling you you could get a buy-one-get-one free Sundae on Thursday between 4 and 5 pm. That was important, wasn’t it? Through all of this you are pulled aside from conversing with your wife or distracted from what your children are doing. Rather than talking to or playing with them, you are fiddling with your phone.

            Another difference I’ve discovered about technology media compared to print media is that it tends to hold our attention more. Often that’s because a video is somehow involved, or because the communication is fluid. That is, it’s changing. There are new postings and responses all of the time. It used to be when a person was reading a book, and another person in the room wanted to say something, it wasn’t too difficult to pull the attention away from the book to listen to the other person. When that happened to me, I would usually put a finger down where I had left off and then listen to what was being said and reply back and forth if that was called for. Now, when someone interrupts a person using a computer or phone or other device, it’s hard for the person to break away. There’s a tendency to keep looking back at the device that has grabbed our attention. This leaves the other person feeling like they are not as important as whatever it is that’s showing on the screen.

            One other related issue is that it used to be that when family gathered in the living room after a meal or whatever, they would easily carry on conversations. Even if someone was browsing a magazine or knitting or something like that, the conversation could continue. When there were normal lulls in the conversation, someone would bring up another topic, and the conversation would continue. What’s happening now is that we feel the tug to keep doing something “profitable” during those lulls, and so we pull out the phone or computer so that we can keep tabs on something else, other than what’s going on in the room. The problem is that it is not as easy to return to the conversation again, and people don’t know whether to interrupt or not. Some people even plan ahead so that they have their device ready for those lulls. When they do this, it looks to others like they are prepared for the conversation to be uninteresting and unimportant. It sends exactly the opposite signal from the one we should be sending.

            God is interested in interpersonal relationships. The members of the trinity have loved each other since eternity past and have been carrying on a loving communicating relationship forever. When God created us, he created us in his image. One of the things that means is that he created us as communicating beings. He gave us faces so that we could see one another as we communicated. We could read each other’s facial expressions, point of focus, eye movements, and so on. Proverbs 15:30 says the light of the eyes rejoices the heart.

            In his book The Next Story, Tim Challies explains that before the fall, God and man had direct communication. (page 93) He calls this immediate communication. The prefix im means not, as in immature, meaning not mature.  So immediate communication is communication that is not mediated. In other words, it is face to face with no intervening medium. Challies contends that this is God’s preference and ideal. He writes, “I would argue that it [mediated communication] is, in fact, a lower form of communication, one that is intended to be a mere supplement to our lives. The best relationships we can have are not those that rely on mediation, but rather the ones that allow for unmediated contact and communication.” By unmediated contact he means face to face communication. I agree with this assessment. We thank God for means of communication that allow us to be in contact with family and friends that are far away. Sending a letter or email or text message allows us to communicate with those with whom we cannot have immediate communication.

            When we were first created, God had face-to-face communication with us. After the fall, God basically turned aside in a way, and Adam, for his part, hid so God couldn’t see him. Ultimately God sent Jesus Christ to be the mediator between God and man so that fellowship and communion could exist. God wants immediate communication with us, and he desires that we have immediate communication with one another.

            But what’s happening now is that we turn our backs on the immediate communication we could be having with family or friends who are right with us and communicating in a mediated way with others. We are neglecting what is arguably the ideal method of communication and substituting an inferior type of communication on purpose. Besides switching to an inferior mode of communication, it is often communication with someone who is further removed from us relationally than those right around us.

            In her book Distracted, Maggie Jackson writes, “Moreover, a boundary-less world means that coming home doesn’t signal the end of the workday anymore than being on vacation is a time of pure relaxation, or being under one roof marks the beginning of unadulterated family time. We rarely are completely present in one moment or for one another….To cope and to keep up with our pulsing personal orbits, we live in worlds of our own making, grazing from separate menus, plugged into our own bedroom-based media centers, adhering to customized schedules. … Seventeen percent of the families in the UCLA study consistently ate dinner together. On weekdays, the parents and at least one child came together in a room just 16 percent of their time at home. True, hours together don’t automatically translate into intimacy. But if we can’t be bothered to keep coming together in the fullest, richest sense of the word, we lose the opportunity to form those deeper bonds. … Are we losing our willingness to wade down into the painful, soulful depths of human relations? ‘When you can have a face-to-face conversation, do you? When you’re right in very close proximity, do you bother?’ asked Ochs. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to wake up and think, “Oh my gosh, we could have been having a conversation.”’”

            My hope is that as Christians, we will not be absorbed into the world’s way of thinking about these things. Relationships are important to God. Satan would do all that he can to disrupt and destroy relationships because good relationships are an image of God and he hates that image to be portrayed with all of the love and self-sacrifice that is an accurate portrayal of God.

            Our technologies, as helpful as they are, have the capacity to disrupt and break down the most crucial and intimate relationships of the home and family. We must not be naive about this. We must be on the alert and take active steps to counter the communication breaking aspects of our technology. It makes no sense to use less than ideal communication media to communicate with people who are further removed from us, when the people we should be caring for are right there, and the means to communicate face-to-face is immediately available.

            So what are some steps we could take to counterbalance the tendencies we’ve discussed? Two choices are not really possible. The first is to throw our hands in the air and say we can’t fight it. It’s too hard, and we can’t make any progress. The other choice is to say that the good old days were better. Let’s get rid of all the technology and return to a previous life. That is not going to happen. So, what can we do?

1. Realize and accept the fact that you do have the power to control the technology and to manage it for the glory of God.
2. On the personal level, make the conscious decision that “wherever you are, be all there.” (Jim Elliott)
3. Based on the previous decision, refuse to take cell calls, look at text messages or emails during times that call for your participation listening and interacting with others. That would mean during mealtimes either at home or in restaurants when you’re with others.
4. Be careful even during group events such as watching a movie or ball game together. I have discussed the implications of multi-tasking on the brain as well as the importance of being involved socially with others, and so if you are involved in a shared experience, participate in that experience without being distracted by your technology.
5. If you’re in the kind of setting where reading a physical magazine, book or newspaper would be appropriate, you should be able to read any of these on an electronic device as well. But beware of the tendency to jump from thing to thing. Control your self. Do not allow yourself to be controlled by the technology. Stay tuned to those around you so that you can be involved. If there are conversations going on around you, pay attention to one of them and join in. You don’t want to hear, “… isn’t that right, Roger,” and not know what they are talking about. It is not only embarrassing; it’s rude.
6. Whether you’re with others or not, control the urge to flit around the internet, hitting links in an almost mindless way. Your brain will become less able to focus. If you find yourself doing this, find something constructive to do either with or without technology, but find something you can focus on for a long stretch.
7. If you are a parent, this and the following suggestions are for you. Restrict cell phone use. Children do not need to be in communication with their friends at all hours. Perhaps they have a cell phone for safety reasons while away from home, but all phones go on the recharging table when they are home.
8. There’s no good reason for children and teens to have smart phones. The Internet is not a safe place. As a young man told me just yesterday, “There is no good reason for a 15-year-old boy to have unlimited and unrestricted access to what’s on the Internet.”
9. Children and teens shouldn’t have TV or computers in their bedrooms. Everything done on a computer should be out in the open in public.
10. If you allow your children to use Facebook or other social media, you must be their friend online and read through what gets posted both to and from them. Be disciplined about this. It is part of your job. When they have new friend requests, ask them, “Who is that?”
11. Teach your children electronic etiquette – No phones during meals; don’t interrupt a conversation with a friend to take a call or check a text message; etc.

References:

Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008.

Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Challies, Tim. The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011.

Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008.

Also you might enjoy listening to http://www.albertmohler.com/2008/07/25/is-technology-distracting-us-to-death/

or this…

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/06/23/tech.popcorn.brain.ep/?hpt=hp_c1