The Wired Soul

by Tricia McCary Rhodes

  When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.

  SIMON INGS, Headlong

  YESTERDAY MORNING I sat in the sauna at my gym along with seven other people. Four of them had their smartphones with them. While a few of us chatted, those four never looked up and never even noticed the rest of us, as far as I could tell, so intently were they engaged with the content on the devices in their hands. Watching them, I couldn’t help but think of a book by Christian philosopher and theologian James K. A. Smith, in which he takes normal cultural experiences and tries to help us see what they might suggest about our spiritual values and priorities.

  Smith asks us to imagine that some Martian anthropologists, in an attempt to gather information about our religious habits and rituals, have visited a shopping mall. They have determined that malls are central to life in North America. Smith begins with the parking lot, suggesting that the Martians might first note the popularity of the place, given the sea of cars and number of people on “pilgrimage” (shoppers). He goes on to describe things such as the “winding labyrinth for contemplation” (the walkways between stores) or the “welcoming acolyte who offers to shepherd us through the experience” (store clerks) and the “newly minted relics” (purchases) that we leave with after we’ve consummated our transactions with the “priest” behind the altar (cash register).

  This is not just a tongue-in-cheek metaphor, as Smith explains:

  I’m not out to be merely playful or irreverent; rather, my goal is to try to make strange what is so familiar to us precisely in order to help us see what is at stake in formative practices that are part of the mall experience. This description is meant to be apocalyptic, in a sense, unveiling the real character of what presents itself as benign.[1]

  If Martian anthropologists had seen my friends in a hot sauna glued to their smartphones while surrounded by other people, what might they have assumed regarding the importance of that activity? If they were to observe your engagement with technology for a day or a week, what conclusions might they draw regarding your personal priorities or spiritual values?

  Because digital interaction is ubiquitous and indispensable to our daily existence, it is difficult to step away and examine our relationship to it with a critical eye—to “make the familiar strange,” as Smith would put it. But its pervasive presence is precisely why we must find a way, lest we risk shutting God out of large swaths of our lives.

  Oratio speaks of prayer, of loving conversations with God in which we consecrate parts of ourselves that we have not previously believed he wants. In the actual practice of lectio divina, this step involves asking the question, What do you want to say to me, Lord? God surely wants to speak into our digital decisions and habits and daily rituals—things as seemingly benign as checking emails or posting on social media or texting friends or buying products online—for he alone can destroy their power to shape our identities and form our souls. This, then, is where we begin.

  What Our Practices Reveal

  When I was a young girl, my mom tried in vain to teach me the proper way to make a bed, persisting for days on end. I was not a ready learner, largely because I couldn’t see the point: I was only going to crawl back into bed later. Then Madeleine moved in across the street. Madeleine was young, beautiful, and newly married to a handsome businessman. She worked nights as a nurse at a local hospital. I was smitten from the start and wanted to be just like this glamorous brunette, who seemed happy to have me hang out on her days off. One morning as she was making her bed, she stopped to demonstrate the mysterious craft of folding sheets into what she called “hospital corners.” As she told me how important they were for the patients she cared for, I was mesmerized by Madeleine’s manicured red nails, pulling and tucking those sheet edges into pristine white curves. I wanted nothing more than to be able to do the same. We spent the better part of an hour practicing until I got it down.

  I still remember my perplexed mom shaking her head when I ran into the house bragging about my newfound skill. For weeks she didn’t have to tell me to make my bed because every morning I wanted to practice those lovely hospital corners—not only on my bed but on all the beds in the house.

  Of course, this raises the following question: Why didn’t I learn the craft of bed-making after weeks of mom’s persistence, only to master it in one morning with Madeleine? Simply put, to make a bed with Madeleine was to enter into her story, one that to my young mind held the promise of beauty and romance and adventure, a story that touched some intangible longing in a little girl’s heart.

  This is the thing about practices: If we look at them carefully enough, we can learn something about what it is we really long for, what we believe will meet our deepest needs, what story we are choosing to live our lives by. The practices we keep, in one sense, are a window to our souls, and understanding this can help us more prayerfully consider our relationship with technology.

  The story that God invites you and me into—the gospel story—transcends time and space, and it is the only one in which our deepest longings can truly be met. Yet from the time we enter this world, our culture calls us to find our joy in other narratives. From athletic excellence to academic prowess, from ageless beauty to instant popularity, from wealth to fame to power—we play our roles, energized by a way of being that Paul says is “corrupted by deceitful desires” (Ephesians 4:22, HCSB). Often oblivious, we go through our days entrenched in these sagas, embracing their habits and respecting their rituals for what we hope to gain in return.

  Of course, this is nothing new. The god of this world has distorted human beings’ desire for God from the start, convincing Eve that there was something more fulfilling than walking with her Maker. Yet the technological revolution has upped the ante in spades, so to speak. Not only are our waking moments now saturated with these counterfeit tales of abundant life, but the Internet also is a medium with a message and practices all its own, a medium all the more potentially destructive to our souls for its seemingly benign nature.

  This is why, when we invite God to speak into our relationship with the World Wide Web, we must first wrestle with the startling degree of access that we give it to our minds and hearts. Then we need to dig deeper and uncover the stories that may be fueling our digital routines and regimens, so that we understand what is really at stake in our all-too-often mindless engagement with technology.

  Confronting the Issue of Access

  We are keenly aware that digital life has its downsides. We experience the feelings of angst that come from the pressure to always be “on,” to answer our cell phones no matter where we are or what we are doing, or to jump when a text comes in, as if it might carry some urgent news we can’t afford to miss for one minute. We suspect, perhaps, that television’s tentacles are creeping too far into our downtime and that our minds are not exactly enriched by the content we take in. We experience disturbing pangs of withdrawal when we try to set aside our digital devices. Recent research suggests that the average person checks his or her smartphone more than one hundred times per day.[2] We don’t like the word addicted, but we know we can’t live without our digital devices.

  Our personal habits with our digital devices are relatively obvious to us, but they’re not the whole story. Something to which we may give little thought is the potential risk in allowing external forces unfettered access to our personal lives.

  While television invited corporate entities into our homes to hawk their products and promote their worldviews, the Internet ushers them into our very minds and hearts. They trawl our online activity, collecting data that they can then use not only to identify our desires but also to shape them in turn. The truth is that almost everything we do online—whether via our smartphones, tablets, cameras, computers, cars, or HDTVs—is recorded for posterity. From the restaurant we “check into” when we are having lunch to the websites we visit, fro
m the pictures we take to the friends we choose, from what we read to what we share and whom we share it with—not just a single day but our entire history is constantly being sold to the highest bidders, who then feed the data into algorithms that create models for advertisers, which they use to target us in very specific ways. The financial stakes are high, as the entire system is set up to figure out what will grab our attention and compel us to click on an ad or a link that mysteriously appears in the top right corner of our computer screens or flashes from our smartphones or tablets when we open an app.

  While these things might not seem hazardous in and of themselves—surely we can all resist an ad or link here and there—we must not underestimate the determination of the companies who buy our personal data. Their intention is to engage us, to hold our interest and keep us coming back so that we will eventually buy the commodities that keep them afloat—whether those things are something as banal as beauty things or as meaningful as political viewpoints. They don’t have to get it right every time, but as computer scientist and world-renowned virtual reality scholar Jaron Lanier notes, the statistics ensure that over time their influence will intrude upon each of us. The result, Lanier laments, is a loss of freedom:

  When you carry around a smartphone with a GPS and camera and constantly pipe data to a computer owned by a corporation paid by advertisers to manipulate you, you are less free. Not only are you benefiting the corporation and the advertisers, you are also accepting an assault on your free will, bit by bit.[3]

  Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who used to work in the marketing department of a large telecommunications company. She shared with me about developing an advertising campaign to draw kids to their mobile television app. In their meetings, they referred to the app as a “digital pacifier.” This is the kind of dependency all of us—children and adults alike—are in danger of developing through unbridled Internet usage and the access to our hearts that it provides. Click by click, frame by frame, we lose our freedom to rely on the Spirit to shape our choices, yielding instead to unseen entities with profit motives. Though we may pray or even set aside time for personal devotions, we do not live moment by moment with a Godward dependency, the kind that causes us to pause often and ask the central question of oratio: Lord, what do you want to say to me?

  So what are we to do? We can begin by establishing a spiritual discipline of prayerful awareness whenever we are engaged with technology. When a link or an ad pops up or a friend posts some alluring video on social media, we should have a habit of pausing before we click, prayerfully asking questions such as Is this something I need to do right now? What might the hidden agenda behind the source of this ad or link be? Will clicking on this enhance or hinder my walk with God or even the work I want to accomplish?

  Beyond that, we can set goals to curtail our online hours or curb interaction with our smartphones. We can even address this using technology itself—setting reminders on our phones or computers, or downloading one of the many apps that track our usage and let us know how we’re doing or that block us out of social-media sites for extended periods.

  Steps like these will help, but they may not produce the kind of lasting and permanent transformation we need. For that, we must dig deeper into our online practices and patterns, exploring what they may be revealing about our hearts and the story by which we, often unconsciously, may be living our lives.

  Internet Idolatry and the Liturgies We Live

  My husband and I recently saw the movie Everest, a tragically true spellbinder about two expeditions that encountered massive storms while attempting to scale the mountain. We left the theater asking ourselves why anyone in their right mind would devote his or her entire life to something so inherently life threatening, but a conversation between two of the men after a particularly grueling practice climb may provide some insight.

  Struggling to catch his breath in the high altitude, one lamented, “This is suffering, man.”

  The other responded, “Few more days. [Then] for the rest of your life you’ll be the guy that got to the top of Everest.”

  Not only were these men and women driven by a vision of mastering that mountain at the top of the world; as they pressed into the arduous training rituals and exercises, their identity became formed by that vision. They would be the ones who made it.

  The reality is that we all hold certain visions of what we believe will fulfill our longings. While most aren’t as grandiose as scaling Mount Everest, these visions spur us to develop habits of life—and these habits, which James K. A. Smith calls liturgies, shape and deepen our desires until the vision becomes our identity. Liturgies, in the traditional religious sense, are practices we engage in to direct our longings toward life in God’s kingdom, fueled by a vision of God and his love for us. Thus, liturgies of praise or Eucharist or gratitude or confession or forgiveness or the Word are ways of practicing our part in the gospel story, forming our souls and shaping our identities: We are worshipers who find our joy in God.

  Secular liturgies, on the other hand, flow from a vision rooted in some other story, one with its own set of practices and rituals. What then might be the fables behind an unrestrained engagement with digital resources? How might our online habits be directing our hearts toward desires corrupted by deceit, in the apostle Paul’s words, and in turn shaping our souls or forming our identities as those who find their joy in something other than God? Here are a few possibilities:

  Incessant engagement with video games or games over social media might be a liturgy that directs our hearts and love toward achievement and competition, shaping our identities as those whose longings are met in success.

  A continual pursuit of the latest, greatest computer, smartphone, tablet, or other technological wonder might be a liturgy that directs our hearts and love toward greed, shaping our identities as those whose longings are met in material possessions.

  Posting our every move on social media or live-streaming our activity might be a liturgy that directs our hearts and love toward being noticed or admired, shaping our identities as those whose longings are met in social status.

  A voyeuristic interest in the lives of others, especially celebrities, might be a liturgy that directs our hearts and love toward a fantasy world, shaping our identities as those whose longings are met in wealth or fame.

  An obsession with technical interactions (e-mail, texts, live chats, virtual hangouts, and so on) might be liturgies that direct our hearts and love toward other people, shaping our identity as those whose longings are met in popularity, acceptance, and approval.

  These are only a few, but the point here is that our Internet activity has the power to “malform” us. When our online practices direct our hearts and love toward rival gods, we are committing idolatry, a sin that not only grieves God’s Spirit but also damages our souls. As Scripture shows us, when this happens, instead of becoming more like Christ, we become like the gods upon whom we have set our affections. By examining these practices, then, we may gain insight into where our desires have gone awry.

  Becoming Like Our Idols

  Marshall McLuhan was a twentieth-century Canadian scholar, respected today as the original media theorist, who predicted the World Wide Web long before it came into being. McLuhan said that people who embrace the tools that technology offers, without acknowledging how they and indeed the culture at large are impacted by them, are sleepwalking through technological change. Famous for the phrase “the medium is the message,” McLuhan argued that regardless of what content it might deliver, a medium itself is transformative. So, for example, because television captures our attention but doesn’t require us to act in any way, it produces in us a kind of mindlessness, something brain scans have affirmed. Because the Internet sends us from link to link and willingly secures information for us, we become shallower in our thinking and plagued by attention deficit. Because social media manifests itself in sound bites with little accountability, we lose the capacity for empathy a
nd lack sensitivity to people’s real needs.

  Philosopher Douglas Groothuis points out that McLuhan drew his inspiration partially from Psalm 115:4-8:

  Their idols are silver and gold,

  the work of human hands.

  They have mouths, but do not speak;

  eyes, but do not see.

  They have ears, but do not hear;

  noses, but do not smell.

  They have hands, but do not feel;

  feet, but do not walk;

  and they do not make a sound in their throat.

  Those who make them become like them;

  so do all who trust in them.[4]

  Groothuis expanded on this in an interview on how our smartphones are changing us, noting that one of the simplest yet most profound truths of Scripture is that we become like what we behold. In understanding the brain’s plasticity, this makes sense. The more we gaze at something, concentrate on it, and give it our attention, the deeper the neural pathways are laid, which alters the structures of our brains. Thus, as we fix our eyes on Jesus—as we give him our attention and make him the object of our heart’s affections, guided and empowered by his Spirit within us—we will develop neural pathways that match his character, and thus we will become like him.

  Paul understood this many centuries ago, writing that as we behold Christ, we are “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Groothuis unpacks this principle from a spiritual perspective:

  What we love to behold is what we worship. What we spend our time beholding shapes our hearts and molds us into the people we are. This spiritual truth is frightening and useful, but it raises the questions: What happens to our soul when we spend so much time beholding the glowing screens of our phones? How are we changed? How are we conformed?[5]