Digital technology like smartphones has revolutionised the way we navigate daily life and the way our whole society functions. We have supercomputers in our hands that can answer almost any question instantly and perform many tasks that make life easier.
Such technology has its downsides, like the explosion of accessibility to pornography and the prevalence of online bullying. Even so, our stance as Christians is often something like, “Let’s use this technology wisely, but not abuse it”, as if the technology is simply a neutral instrument. But the good things of our world (like technology or money) can become much more than this: they can become master-teachers that dominate and disciple us.
In this first episode of a special three-part series, we explore this issue—interrogate and ask questions about what the smartphone really is and how it does affect our lives. How does this technology disciple us? How does it reorder our attitudes, operating beliefs and behaviours—not just personally, but on a society-wide level? Finally, what have been the costs and disadvantages of all this?
(Please note: Part 2 will be published in a fortnight’s time, while part 3 will be published in a month’s time.)
Correction 10/04/2026: In the audio, Tony mispronounces Felicia Wu Song’s name as Felicia Sue Wong. We have corrected the transcript but are unable to update the audio, and we apologise for the error.
Links referred to:
- Books referred to:
- Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (Johann Hari)
- The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)
- How to Break Up With Your Phone (Catherine Price)
- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Cal Newport)
- The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Jonathan Haidt)
- Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman)
- Technopoly (Neil Postman)
- Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age (Brett McCracken, Ivan Mesa et al)
- The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World (Christine Rosen)
- Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (Brian Brock)
- Find out more and register for “Left right out: The strange position of the political Christian” (Wed 20 May 2026, 7-9pm)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 42:46 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:05] Tony Payne: Hello, I’m Tony Payne. Welcome to the Centre for Christian Living podcast and to Part 1 of a special three-part series of podcasts that we’re calling “The smartphone disciple”. This is another of our little deep dive miniseries at the CCL podcast, where we dig into a particular issue in more depth.
[00:00:24] And the issue we’re thinking about in this series is the extraordinary piece of technology that we carry around with us that we call the smartphone, and how as disciples of Christ we should think about and act towards and make best use of this very powerful little supercomputer that lives in our pockets or in our hands, and seems to have a kind of power of its own to really affect our lives—to change the way we interact with the world and with each other.
[00:00:53] And during the series, you’ll hear a range of voices apart from me: you’ll hear some people that we interviewed in preparation for the series about their use of the smartphone and how they react to it, and what it means to them and how it changes their lives in different ways. We’ll also hear some audio from the biblical ethics workshop that we conducted on this subject in October 2025, where we presented some of this material and worked it through for the first time. And you’ll also hear a range of quotes from significant authors who have thought about and written about this subject, as well as quotes from the Bible, of course. And they’ll be read by one of our CCL team members, Steph Larkin.
Series outline
[00:01:30] Tony Payne: Now what’s our plan for these three episodes? It’s really to follow the trajectory of all ethical and, especially, biblical ethical thought, and that is to start by seeking to recognise what it is we’re dealing with—to understand this issue, to interrogate and ask questions about what the smartphone really is and how it does affect our lives. The first step is just to seek to understand, and that’s this episode.
[00:01:53] Then secondly, in Part 2, we’ll look at the Bible itself. We’ll reflect biblically and theologically about the questions that are raised in Part 1. And then finally, in Part 3, we’ll return to the issue itself and look at it with fresh eyes—eyes that have been shaped by the renewing, transforming power of the Scriptures and of God—and think about how to respond to the various issues that the smartphone raises for us.
[00:02:17] We’ve got plenty to get through. So let’s dive into Part 1 of our CCL podcast series on “The smartphone disciple”.
[Music]
The Swiss Army knife
[00:02:39] Tony Payne: Most men of my father’s generation carried with them what today we would call a Swiss Army knife, but which they called a pocket knife. Extraordinarily useful little things, pocket knives. With your thumbnail, you could prise out two different blades to use in different circumstances, a very short screwdriver, sometimes an ice pick, sometimes a bottle opener, and all of it in a handy, pocketable, flattened little cylinder of bone or ebony that was worn smooth by long use and by the fabric of my father’s pocket, I guess.
[00:03:09] Now, what would my dad have made, I wonder, of the Swiss Army knife that I now carry in my pocket? It’s made of glass and aluminium and about 25 rare earth minerals. It goes with me everywhere. It has no blades, no bottle opener. It can’t slice an orange or open a bottle. But with the device in my pocket, I can do seemingly endless things. And new capabilities that it can achieve emerge constantly. It’s a TV, it’s a camera, it’s a video camera. It’s a watch—an alarm clock. It’s a spirit level when I need one, a wallet, a bank, a photo album, a takeaway restaurant. It’s a taxi stand and a train timetable. It’s a diary. It’s a postbox. It’s a torch, a map, a street directory. It’s a department store. It’s a gaming console, an encyclopaedia, a calculator, a book, a library of books, a compact stereo system. It’s a speed dating night. It’s a movie, it’s a newspaper, a magazine. It’s even a dirty magazine. And should I also say, among all these other functions that are too numerous to mention, it’s a phone.
[00:04:20] Now that this extraordinary device the smartphone has taken over the world is anything but surprising. More than 90 per cent of adults over the age of 14 in the Western world have one of these tiny supercomputers as their constant companion. In fact, if you’re under the age of say 35, it’s unlikely that you can imagine a world without the smartphone, the first iteration of the smartphone being released by Apple as the iPhone in 2007. It seems that we really rather like our smartphones and we use them in all kinds of ways.
We like our phones
[00:04:56] Elsie: Say if you’re working in a particular industry or just giving some inside goss on the Australian corporate world, and it’s nice to hear and find other people who may have similar experiences to you, or maybe you’re having a particular experience and you don’t know how to process it or what to do, usually someone on Reddit has had an experience.
[00:05:15] Abby: It’s so easy to chuck in my wireless earphones, connect them to my smartphone and just call my parents or my siblings as I do the dishes or fold clothes or just do chores. I can video chat with them. That’s great, ‘cause they live far away. It connects me to them in ways that would be really difficult if I didn’t have a smartphone.
[00:05:37] Jose: Yeah, I mean, it’s a double-edged sword. I personally think in some ways, I would love to not have a smartphone. But I just don’t think you can function as an adult in today’s society without it—without just being a big inconvenience to others and being a big inconvenience to yourself.
[00:05:55] In the current climate that we live in, public transport—being able to just, you know, I’m new to Australia; I don’t know where to go; I don’t know where things are—pulling up a map and just clicking one button and just follow an arrow—that’s just incredible. And to be able to communicate with a good amount of people that otherwise, it would just be really inconvenient to keep tabs with some relationships, especially overseas or across the country without the smarts of a smartphone, it would just be really hard to do that.
[00:06:25] I think there’s just—I love the fact that I don’t really have to carry many things with me. If I want to listen to music, I can do it on my phone. If I want to very quickly write something down and I don’t have a physical notebook with me, I just type a few notes on my phone. If I engage with any conversation and I need to pull up my Bible, I have it.
[00:06:42] Tim: Yeah, I remember there’s a side-by-side meme that came out, and this is many years ago now, but showed a classic 1990s office workers’ desk and all the different things cluttering their desk and all the different devices that they had to have around. And then picture two is the laptop or just the smartphone, even. And I think that’s what I most appreciate: it is my calendar, my clock, my calculator, my documents, my emails, my podcasts. I can listen to music. I can read books. It’s almost magical how much of our lives, for those of us who are old enough to remember, you know, the 1990s/the early 2000s office life, how many different things—it’s just amazing to think that all of that is in one device.
[00:07:24] Tony Payne: That was Elsie, Abby, Jose and Tim—some of the people we talked to about their smartphone usage and their attitudes towards their phones. It’s not difficult to see why we like our smartphone so much. They’re extraordinarily useful. In fact, judging by how much of our day we spend using them, perhaps we like them a little too much.
[00:07:46] Surveys from across Western countries suggest that smartphone users spend somewhere between three and seven hours each day using their device, and they pick it up or open it between 50 and a hundred times. Now, these numbers feel shockingly high, although it is less shocking, perhaps, that the younger you are, the more likely you are to inhabit the upper ranges of those numbers.
Giving it up
[00:08:12] Tony Payne: But not every younger person is one of those statistics. In fact, a small, but growing band of dissidents are looking askance at their smartphones and in fact, abandoning the smartphone altogether for its alter ego, the dumb phone. Why would you choose to reject possibly the single most usefully versatile device ever created for something that is, well, just a phone? We asked Stephen and Michael why they made this switch.
[00:08:41] Stephen: I gave up my smartphone nine years ago, because I was noticing that as I spent time on my smartphone or on a screen in general, it eroded my focus and it fuelled anxiety. So I gave it up.
[00:08:55] Michael: I was just noticing some mornings, it would take me, like, an hour. Especially Uni days when there’s no rush, I could be lying in bed for an hour, just watching random content—which was sort of fun, but also just, I just found it frustrating how it slowed me down and made me a bit more lazy.
[00:09:10] So I had a YouTube feed eradicator. I started tracking my phone usage. I switched to black and white mode about three or four years ago, ‘cause I thought that would be a way to cut how much time I spend on my smartphone.
[00:09:22] The kind of final straw before switching to dumb phone was I turned off notifications. And behind it, at the start, I think it was mostly about being the distractions and wanting to make the most of the time I had. But I think as well, maybe, about three years ago, I read a first book on the topic of social media and smartphones—I think it was Lost Focus or something like that—and realised that using the smartphone the way I was, and the way we use it, just impacted the way my brain worked, and as Steve was saying, kind of led me to be more anxiety-prone. And also impacting just my emotions and just the relationship I had with entertainment in general.
Dependent
[00:10:02] Tony Payne: The book Michael was referring to was Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which we’ll come back to later in this episode.
[00:10:08] There’s no question what an amazingly useful little gadget the smartphone is. But its negative effects seem to be in proportion to its usefulness. It can do almost anything, but then we find ourselves becoming dependent upon it and affected by it in ways that disturb us.
[00:10:28] Abby: How dependent do I think I am on my smartphone? I’d say reasonably dependent. Like, on the one hand, I always leave my phone lying around and have to use my watch to buzz my phone so I can find it again. If I leave it behind when I go out, I’m not panicking like I can’t function without it. I know that I can do stuff without my smartphone. I could live without it if I had to.
[00:10:57] But then on the other hand, so many of my daily routines revolve around my smartphone. And so, not to have it at all, that would create some pretty decent shock waves in my life. So yeah, reasonably dependent.
[00:11:14] I mean, I think I feel in control of my smartphone. I know cognitively that I can determine whether or not I use something on my smartphone. So I feel in control of it.
[00:11:28] But then when I step back and think about all the ways it’s shaping me—the ways that I’m dependent on it—I’m not so sure. I think a decent chunk of the time, it probably controls me more than I control it.
[00:11:46] Jose: Like, 2018, I probably realised that I used my phone way too much. Wake up first thing in the morning and then try to go to sleep at night. Wake up early to work. But I’ll just be scrolling or watching something until real late at night on my phone in bed. And that’s probably when I realised, “Oh, this is no good, ‘cause I can’t quite stop.” I’m checking it for different reasons.
[00:12:11] And I remember back in the day when—don’t know if you remember this, but smartphones used to have an LED light on them and they’ll tell you, depending on the colour, whether you had a notification or not. And I remember looking at that light like a hawk and seeing which colour it was, ‘cause if it was green, it was a text message and if it was blue, it was Facebook. And yeah, that’s definitely not a helpful thing to start doing.
[00:12:36] Claudia: What I dislike the most about our smartphones is that it takes us away from being present around the people that we’re with. And sometimes I find in conversations, you don’t have people’s full presence, because they’re distracted or a notification pops up. And I feel like it’s reduced the quality of our human interactions. In many ways.
Broader concerns
[00:12:55] Tony Payne: These kind of concerns about the possible negative effects of smartphones in our lives are being expressed by relatively young people: all the people in those clips were under 35.
[00:13:05] But smartphone scepticism is not only a growing phenomenon among the young and self-aware; parents are increasingly panicky about the effect of smartphone screen time on their children’s emotional development and about the harmful side effects of some of the aspects of smartphone usage, like social media.
[00:13:24] But they’re also waking up to the fact that among all the functions that smartphones make easy and convenient are all the pathologies and dysfunctions of teenage life, like bullying, social ostracisation, name-calling, crippling self-doubt, overly intense relationships, anxiety, and, of course, pornography. The smartphone has made all of these as simple and as accessible as sending a text. It’s a Swiss Army knife for teens to behave badly.
[00:13:53] And this sense of alarm about the effects of widespread smartphone use has spread to educators and psychologists, and even politicians. As I record this podcast, Australia has just instituted the world’s first social media ban for those under the age of 16—although the chances of those under the age of 16 sliding out from under that ban somehow through ingenuity or simple defiance do seem rather high.
[00:14:19] But all the same, voices have been raised in concern about the effects of smartphone and screen-based technology for decades. Back in 1996, American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said this:
[00:14:33] Steph: At a certain point, we’re going to have to build up some machinery inside our guts to help us deal with this, because the technology is just going to get better and better, and better and better, and it’s going to get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us, but want our money.
[00:14:56] Tony Payne: That, by the way, of course, was not the voice of David Foster Wallace, but of Steph Larkin, one of our CCL student team members here at Moore College, who will be our reader of quotes and Bible passages during this series. And in that quote, Wallace was echoing a strain of technology criticism that goes way back through Neil Postman to Marshall McLuhan and many others. He was opening up a seam of cultural criticism that has only become wider and deeper in the decades since, because people are deeply worried about what the internet and the digital world, supercharged as all of these things are by the smartphone, are doing to our brains, to our attention, to our social life and productivity, to our relationships, to our physical and mental health.
[00:15:42] To mention just a few of the many books that have been published in this space, there was Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, published back in 2010; Catherine Price’s very sharply titled book, How to Break Up With Your Phone, 2018; Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World—that was published in 2019; and the book we’ve already referred to by Johann Hari called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, published in 2022.
[00:16:14] It was Hari’s book that started Michael thinking about his phone usage, and it got me thinking as well when I read it a year or two ago. Hari’s book has a, by now, familiar shape to it: it’s kind of the “Amazing Grace” trajectory, where I once was lost in a smartphone hell, where I was distracted and anxious, but now I’m found by locking my phone in a kitchen safe and detoxing digitally away on an island somewhere where I can rediscover my ability to read War and Peace.
Drawn in
[00:16:44] Tony Payne: Now, I don’t mean to demean Hari’s book. It’s very well written and tells a very good story. In fact, one of its distinguishing and impressive aspects is Hari’s recognition that kicking our addiction to the always on, always texting anxiety-laden reality of the smartphone is almost impossible for the courageous individual. And this is for the simple reason that the smartphone is not just a standalone device, but it’s a node of connection. It connects us to a vast system that is far more powerful than any one individual’s capacity to resist it. It’s almost impossible to be connected to this network—to this system—without being drawn into it—that is, of finding ourselves increasingly at the mercy of the system that this little device connects us to so constantly. Most of us have experienced this in one way or another.
[00:17:37] Simon: The thing I hate most is Shorts. You see them on everything: LinkedIn, Facebook—that dopamine hit. Once you start, you can’t stop.
[00:17:45] Sophie: It gets very easy to spend more and more time, and you don’t actually realise how much time you’re wasting on your phone. You’ll check a notification, something else would pop up, and then—you were just checking the weather, and then you just spent 20 minutes replying to notifications that you should not have looked at.
[00:18:00] Helen: I think distraction inertia—as in, you’re distracted in the moment when you’re checking your phone or looking at it, but there’s also the inertia that carries over where the very inconsequential notification or whatever you saw, it carries on to, like, where you are in that moment and you can’t really be present.
[00:18:17] Tony Payne: Hari goes on to argue quite persuasively and with impressive evidence that distraction or capturing our attention is precisely what the smartphone is designed to do. That’s what the system is for. And it’s been designed and refined with enormous sophistication and behavioural psychology in order to do this very successfully. Your attention is the product that, in various ways, makes money for tech corporations and app makers. And with our average smartphone usage at three to seven hours per day, they seem to be very good at what they’re doing.
[00:18:54] It’s also now very well known, including by the tech corporations themselves, that this level of attention and engagement with a phone is not good for the mental and emotional health of people or of the “users”, as we describe them. And “users” seems to me an appropriate kind of term—an addiction-adjacent term—for the helpless, lifeless immersion that cheery smartphone users routinely experience.
[00:19:23] Perhaps the most influential voice raised in alarm over the damage that extensive smartphone usage is doing is American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose message is summed up in his widely read 2024 book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Now there’s a book title that describes the message of the book!
[00:19:47] Haidt suggests that no one should have a smartphone until they are 14 and no access to social media till 16. But one can’t help feeling that if what Hari and numerous other authors say is true, which is that heavy smartphone usage—in other words, average smartphone usage—has a corrosive effect on people’s lives, then you have to wonder whether adults should be trusted with these things as well.
A Christian perspective
[00:20:15] Tony Payne: Now, in all of this, some Christian voices have also been raised to ask what we should make of the smartphone as a powerful device that shapes our lives as Christians—as disciples of Jesus. We spoke to Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa about their new book, Scrolling Ourselves to Death.
[00:20:33] Ivan Mesa: You know, in a lot of the conversations that Brett and I have had, we think through this topic in the context of attention. So much of Christian discipleship, I think, could be summed up with the idea of what are we attending to. Obviously as Christians, we want there to be a vertical dynamic there, attending to the things of God—God’s word. But there’s also a horizontal dynamic there of people around us—our neighbours; obviously in the church that we’ve covenanted with, other believers—caring for those around us in that local church setting, not just staring down at our devices, ignoring the world, ignoring the Lord.
[00:21:08] Brett McCracken: For my part, I think my interest in this topic goes way back, probably, to when I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s, right as the internet was kind of getting going. I had a professor who introduced me to Neil Postman, and I started reading his books, like Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly and so on and so forth. And I really started to kind of model my thinking after Postman’s in the sense of, like, thinking critically about the technologies that were around me.
[00:21:39] And so I’ve always had kind of a critical posture towards social media. I’ve been a late adopter to join most of the platforms. But really in the last, I would say, 10 years, I’ve really felt the power of this technology, both personally in my own life. I mean, I think if Postman was pinpointing the television, you know, when he wrote him Amusing Ourselves to Death, it was television that he was, like, sounding the alarm about. But back then, most people had, like, one, maybe two television sets in a specific room in their home. So there were limitations around exactly how much we could be formed by this technology. Now in the smartphone age, we all have a television in our pocket. We bring it with us everywhere we go. We fill every gap moment in our lives. Five minutes waiting for coffee; 10 minutes in the airport lounge; 30 seconds at a stoplight. We fill all those moments with television—are becoming television. TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube, even podcasts are now mostly on video as well. So everything is converging onto television. And so, if Postman was concerned about TV back when it was limited geographically and temporally, he would be so alarmed with the fact that all of us are just constantly bringing a television in the form of a smartphone with us everywhere we go, and not being able to resist pulling it out and turning something on at every opportunity.
[00:23:06] Ivan Mesa: It is a very god-like extension of ourselves. You can just accomplish so many things at any point anywhere you are. And so, I think, because of all the technological changes and advancements there, I think we need Christians to be thinking more critically about that.
[00:23:21] And I think, by and large, and I always put myself in this category, we evangelical Christians basically have a more passive engagement with technology. We think it’s neutral. We are usually following the culture and just thinking, “Hey, this is a new technology. Might as well just take advantage of it.” And even sometimes with noble intention, just thinking through how to use and deploy this for godly purposes—broadcast sermons, broadcast truth. And those are all good and worthy conversations.
[00:23:49] But I think the church, by and large, has not had a lot of those lonely, prophetic voices from the outside like Postman saying, “Well, what about this? What about that?” I think we just need more voices like that—not just to be curmudgeonly, for curmudgeonly’s sake, but to just think more discerningly, more critically, more faithfully about how to think through this.
[00:24:09] Tony Payne: What Mesa and McCracken are quite rightly pointing out is that it’s very difficult—in fact, naive, I think—to view the smartphone as just a neutral kind of tool that we can either use well or use poorly. It’s far more powerful than that, especially in the way that it ends up changing the way we see and think about and experience the world. The smartphone is more than a simple tool, like a hammer or an electric toothbrush. It’s hundreds of tools and instruments and capacities in one device, and it has an autonomous mode of existence and operation that’s not just operated by us, but operates upon us.
[00:24:49] And perhaps this is the difference between a tool and a technology, although this distinction is kind of difficult to nail down. But like all influential technologies, the smartphone has a kind of life force of its own. It interrupts us. It directs us. It supports us and helps us. And it is not only this multifunctional, powerful personal assistant, it’s also a connection point like that jack in the back of people’s heads in The Matrix that plugs them into a worldwide virtual network of voices and images and news and entertainment and conversations.
[00:25:26] The smartphone mediates and connects us to a virtual world of somewhere else, and this is one of its powerful features. It enables us to focus our attention somewhere else other than where we currently are in space and time. Whether that’s in a synchronous conversation with someone in some other place, or in directing our attention to memes and videos and stories and music and games, none of which exist physically where I am now, this ability to transcend and escape my current circumstances is one of the extraordinary things that the smartphone makes possible, among many other capacities and uses. Like all powerful forms of technology, the smartphone certainly makes new things possible—things that not all that long ago, would have felt like science fiction. And it also saves us time and effort and energy in countless ways.
[00:26:18] But the bargain that technology offers us is rarely straightforward, and doing a simple cost-benefit analysis between all these benefits of the new technology and the costs that are starting to accumulate is rarely possible to do.
[Music]
Costs and disadvantages
[00:26:44] Tony Payne: Andy Crouch points out in his essay “The alchemist’s dream” that a new technology offers us one or both of the following tempting propositions: it says, “Now you’ll be able to …”, and “Now you won’t have to …”. In this case, now, you’ll be able to video phone your cousin in Spain while watching your dog. And now you won’t have to balance the street directory on the steering wheel while arguing with your wife about the best route to take; you’ll have a bland, cheerful lady to tell you which step to take at every turn.
[00:27:18] However, as Crouch goes on to say, these two offers always come with two other consequences that can be expressed as, “But now you won’t be able to …” and “Now you’ll have to …”. Now you won’t be able to have a sense of innate direction anymore and know where you are, because you’re so dependent on the phone. And now you won’t be able to find a payphone anywhere when your phone dies. And now you’ll have to keep up with people regularly—with your cousins all around the world, because they’ll be offended if you don’t.
[00:27:50] Now, these are quite trivial examples. But the underlying truth is very important. Technology always brings costs and disadvantages. It offers new capabilities and promises to make life easier in various ways. But there are always knock-on consequences. And the nature of these consequences are often longer term and very hard to predict. They’re very frequently externalised and distanced and downplayed, especially by the advocates of new technology.
[00:28:21] In the case of the smartphone, there are, of course, massive human and environmental costs involved in its manufacture and in the maintenance of the network and system that it connects us to. And these are beyond calculation and really are never considered. But even if we could calculate them somehow, would they really make us pause before we shared a photo of our lunch on Instagram? We mentally cope with the external costs of our smartphone usage by distancing them from ourselves. These costs are either generally shared by many other people, and so are inconsequential to us, or else they’re so distant from us that we don’t consider them.
[00:29:00] But some of those costs are now becoming visible to us—the things you won’t be able to do and the things you’ll now have to do. These are beginning to multiply and become noticeable. After a decade and a half or so of widespread smartphone usage, we are not only discovering that the rates of anxiety have skyrocketed, but that what previously were normal aspects of human experience are now becoming more difficult or inhibited.
Less than fully alive
[00:29:30] Tony Payne: This is the argument of Christine Rosen in her insightful book, The Extinction of Experience. She argues that what is being lost or extinguished is the everyday bodily experience of being a human being—of existing in a particular time and place and relating to other embodied human beings in rich, enduring relationships.
[00:29:52] She notes that with the rise of the smartphone, people are increasingly less able to relate normally to other people face-to-face. We’re also increasingly less able to tolerate downtime or fallow time in our day—time for mind wandering, for taking a walk, for thinking about nothing in particular. We require stimulation or communication or entertainment at all times, and can no longer derive the real benefits from non-stimulated downtime. We are now increasingly unable to resist the destructive allure of constantly accessible pornography and are suffering the many consequences of that addiction. We are finding it increasingly hard to maintain a healthy, realistic self-image—an image not only of the kind of body that a human being has or should have, but of the kind of person a human being is. We’re discovering, in other words, that with the rise of the smartphone, we are losing certain capabilities and possibilities. There are things that, increasingly, we’re not able to do.
[00:31:00] And the enforced behaviour of the smartphone age is also now becoming more apparent—not just the trivial ones, of having ways to carry a smartphone with you so that you can scan that QR code to get access to something or to verify your identity, but the more insidious ones—that I have to be available and communicative at all times, or I’m not a viable human being or a viable friend. I have to provide texts quickly back to my friends, or they’ll dump me or ignore me. I have to carry this device on my person at all times, because I might miss something or I might feel completely lost or isolated without it.
[00:31:40] Most people under 30 testify to feeling naked without their smartphones. If they are not connected to the system at all times—to the network of connections and conversations and entertainment that is all happening somewhere other than where they are—they feel somehow lost, disconnected, anxious, even afraid. Being constantly connected to somewhere else has become so much part of their daily experience that not to be connected is experienced as loss—as being less than fully alive.
[Music]
Consequentialism
[00:32:23] Tony Payne: Now I’ve taken some time to explore the broader, longer term costs of smartphone technology for a couple of reasons—firstly, because we just don’t consider them very often, and in our adoption of new technology, we tend to downplay in distance its costs and disadvantages.
[00:32:41] But secondly and perhaps more importantly, I’ve explored these various longer term, downstream, broader costs and disadvantages in order to point out that cost versus benefit—pro versus con—is not really an adequate way to judge the worthwhileness or goodness of any device or thing or action.
[00:33:03] In ethical talk, we call this “consequentialism”, a mode of judging things that weighs up the costs and benefits that will occur in the future in order to decide on the goodness or worthwhileness of things now. And consequentialism, while important and valid in certain modes and in certain circumstances, is ultimately inadequate to make judgements about the goodness of actions. And in particular with something like the smartphone, the long-term, broad, deep and hard to calculate costs of its usage highlight to us that consequentialism is just not an adequate way to frame our lives and our actions. A cost-benefit analysis—that kind of approach to technology and to smartphones in particular—isn’t nearly enough—not only because of the inherent inadequacies of that kind of approach to ethical decision-making, but also because it’s naive about the nature of technology itself.
[00:34:03] As Brian Brock points out in his excellent book, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, our stance towards technology in all its forms must be conditioned by an awareness that the devices we make and use carry with them certain ideas, assumptions and purposes. Technology in all its forms embodies and propagates a way of seeing and understanding the world and a mode of living within it—for good or ill, or for both.
[00:34:34] Now, we do not have the space to explore here the story as Brock tells it of how our society came not just to love technology, but to develop a culture in which the technological or engineering gaze—that particular way of thinking and seeing and understanding the world—became dominant and default. As a result of the developments of the modern world since the time of the Enlightenment, we’ve come now as a default way of thinking to regard the world as a vast system of parts—of parts that can be mathematically understood and broken down and reconfigured in what we would regard as the optimal configuration. The technological society is one in which all aspects of our lives, including ourselves as human beings, are composed of fixable, fungible, improvable, malleable parts that we can improve and always reconfigure in some way in the name of what we call progress. In a technological society, we come to see and think about the world in a particular way, and the smartphone is one of the agents of that seeing and thinking.
[00:35:45] Speaking particularly about digital technology, Felicia Wu Song puts it like this:
[00:35:50] Steph: Together, the designs and norms of digital life ultimately immerse us in a story about the human condition that bends our assumptions to regard embodiment as a nuisance, attention as the measure of our worth, the other as an object, and time in terms of scarcity. The current digital ecology not only affirms the capacity to live into these claims, it also structurally compels and enhances our ability to do so. When we look at our digital ecology, we can arguably see evidence of our contemporary attempts to escape from the human condition. Our infinite digital options promise to liberate us from the uncertainties, inconveniences and constraints that come with the finitude of our bodies, the givenness of our locations and the narrow scope of the people in our lives.
The smartphone disciple
[00:36:38] Tony Payne: Technology is a way of seeing. It’s a way of understanding and being in the world. And like all powerful and successful forms of technology, the smartphone moulds us and directs our vision and conforms us with the terms of its own inherent logic. It teaches us to see the world a certain way—to inhabit the world a certain way—with a certain set of conventions and expectations.
[00:37:03] Among other things, it habituates us to the idea that quicker and easier and frictionless is always better. That personal convenience and the accumulation of suitable consumer goods and experiences—that this is the very stuff of life. And most especially, that my constant connection to a virtual somewhere else reality of pixels and sounds is an essential aspect of meaningful human life.
[00:37:32] We are clearly very attracted to this virtual somewhere else. It holds out a promise to us of excitement and amusement and relationship and significance that our mundane lives in the flesh just fall far short of. But it’s a two-sided promise. It also functions to harvest our attention and make money from it. And this is a dark truth. We prefer not to confront.
[00:37:57] And there’s another truth we must confront if we’re going to understand and respond to the smartphone as disciples. As Christians, after all, we know what it means to be a disciple: it means to be taught and trained in a way of seeing and understanding the world, and living in the world—to be taught and trained and schooled in a way of living that reflects and expresses the will of our master. What we have to come to terms with is that the smartphone, like many other powerful technologies, is a master that teaches and schools us in its own kind of discipleship. It trains us through constant repetition to see and to live and to act in the world in a certain kind of way. Whether we like it or not, we’re all smartphone disciples.
[Music]
Advertisement: Left right out
[00:39:11] Tony Payne: As Christians, how interested and involved should we be in the political life of our society?
[00:39:17] Now, some of us couldn’t be less interested in politics. We ignore it as much as we possibly can and try to just get on with what we see as the important aspects of living the Christian life and ministering to others.
[00:39:29] Others of us are really much more interested in politics. We dive right into the online debates, we keep ourselves informed, and we think that Christians have a real contribution to make politically.
[00:39:41] Now, which of these two kind of approaches is the more faithful Christian approach, or is it somewhere between the two? And why is it that when we do get involved in politics in some way as Christians and we try to engage in the debate, we often feel that we don’t fit in? We’re not quite Left. We’re not quite Right. We’re kind of both and neither at the same time. Christians often feel marginal in the political life of our society and wonder where we fit.
[00:40:10] I’m Tony Payne, and we’re going to be examining these questions at a Centre for Christian Living Ethics Workshop on Wednesday, 20 May at Moore College, starting at 7:00 pm. The title of the workshop is “Left right out: The strange position of the political Christian”, and I do hope you’ll join us to talk together about these important matters.
[00:40:29] You can get all information, including how to register, at ccl.moore.edu.au. That’s ccl.moore.edu.au. I do hope you can join us on Wednesday, 20 May for this important workshop.
[Music]
Conclusion
[00:40:59] Tony Payne: That was Part 1 of a three-part podcast series from the Centre for Christian Living called “The smartphone disciple”. Many thanks to Karen Beilharz for all her work in editing and producing that episode; to James West for the music; and to the CCL student team for their many contributions to this episode in conducting interviews and research.
[00:41:35] I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Please let us know what you think. We love to get your feedback and your questions. You can email at ccl AT moore edu au.
[00:41:51] And for a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, you can head over to the CCL website, which sounds very similar to our email address. It’s ccl.moore.edu au. You can find every past episode of this podcast there at that website, plus videos from our live events, essays and articles, and much more.
[00:42:10] And while you’re there, if you’d like to, you can also make a donation to support the work we do at the Centre for Christian Living, and we’d love you to do that if you’re able to.
[00:42:18] And finally, like all podcast hosts say, please do subscribe to the CCL podcast so that you get every episode. Leave us a review so that you can point other people to this podcast. And share this podcast with others if you’ve found it useful, and bless them through as well.
[00:42:34] That’s all from this episode of this Centre for Christian Living Podcast. I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
Photo by Creative Christians on Unsplash
