Technology and Spiritual Disciplines

Personal Introduction

So before we dive into today’s lesson I figured I’d introduce myself a bit. My name is Austin, I’m 28 years old, and I’m married to my wonderful wife Melissa who is here with me today. I won’t go super deep into how we met and got together, I’ll just say to women here today that boys are stupid and if you’re trying to let them know you like them and they don’t seem to get the hint, you might need to sit down and spell it out for them because they’re dumb.

I wear three different hats primarily: I’m a full time seminary student at Reformed Theological Seminary, I am a part-time Ghostbuster (a much cooler way of saying I’m a pest control technician) and I am a part time social media manager/content creator for Redeemer Christian Church. Obviously, if I’m talking about this today, you can probably imagine that I’m a bit of a nerd, and yeah, you’d be right. I grew up playing video games and still play them in my spare time, have learned to read/write Japanese on two separate occasions (which I have since forgotten), and I even spent a very brief period as the captain of a wildly unsuccessful competitive Halo 5 team, having played in the 2016 and 2017 Halo World Championships. Have any of y’all know who Ninja is? The popular Fortnite streamer with crazy hair? He was a pro Halo 5 player before he got real big, and my team played against his team - Luminosity eSports - in a tournament and we got destroyed on his stream.

So being the nerd that I am, naturally I have a huge interest in technology and (by my estimation) seem to be decently proficient in it. I have my associates in Radio/TV Production from Amarillo College, I have about a decade of audio engineering experience, and I have either been in charge or or edited for several different media entities over the years. My most recent project is one called Breaking the Digital Spell, a podcast focused on how technology and media influence our theology. Brendon and I got connected because I heard that he also was interested in this subject and we partnered together to launch the writing/blogging component of the podcast. I have been immensely thankful for Brendon and his knowledge and insight into this subject, and even more so that he is passionate enough to spend several weeks teaching on this subject. Y’all have a great man here and I hope the next time you all see him you let him know how much you love and appreciate him.

Lesson Topic

Today I am going to be talking about Technology and Spiritual Disciplines, and I know when you hear the word “spiritual disciplines” you’re probably thinking “oh great, he’s gonna beat me over the head that I need to spend less time on TikTok and more time reading the Bible.” And don’t get me wrong - spending less time on TikTok is a great idea for anyone - but I’m actually not going to be spending too much time on discussing spiritual disciplines today. Instead, I want to get under the hood of what it takes to even do spiritual disciplines at all, and I want to show that we live in a culture that is being shaped by technological forces that are actually sabotaging our ability to do spiritual disciplines well.

This is the main idea I want y’all to be able to take away from my lesson today - if you don’t remember anything else that I talked about today, I hope you will remember this:

“We live in a world where powerful companies use everyday technology to compete for as much of our attention as possible, and as a result our spiritual disciplines suffer as we give God the leftovers of our focus.”

Now, hearing this you probably think that I’m about to spout some crazy conspiracy theory talk about how there’s some secret global organization out to destroy God in the most subtle way possible and how all technology is secretly a tool of Satan. I promise I’m not about to do that, because I don’t believe that myself. I believe that there are plenty of serious downsides to technology, but I also believe that God, in his sovereignty, is able to use any mean or method that he wants to accomplish his purpose, and that certainly includes technology. But there’s a lot to this statement, and so I want to spend some time unpacking it.

Let’s start with some definitions. What do I mean when I mean “spiritual disciplines”? Basically, it’s often used to describe things like reading the Bible, memorizing Scripture, attending and participating in church, private prayer, worship, evangelism - things that Christians do to grow in godliness. We could spend plenty of time talking about how technology impacts each of those things individually, and we will cover a couple of them near the end of today’s lesson, but for most of the time today when I say “Spiritual disciplines” I mean all of these things collectively.

Next: what in the world do I mean when I say “powerful companies use everyday technology to compete for as much of our attention as possible?” There’s actually a term for that, and it’s something called “the attention economy.” Now the phrase "attention economy" seems vague and mysterious, but it is based off a simple concept:

your attention is valuable, and companies want as much of it as they can get, and they’ll use everyday technology to get it.

And before we dive into how the attention economy impacts our spiritual disciplines, we need to spend some time fleshing out what the attention economy is and how it effects us.

The phrase "attention economy" seems vague and mysterious, but it is based off a simple concept: your attention is valuable, and companies want as much of it as they can get.

The Attention Economy

Let's start with the word "attention". As two academics define it:

Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act. -Thomas Davenport and J.C. Beck

Of course, we all know that our ability to give "focused mental engagement on a particular item of information" depends on the time of the day, the activities we are doing, our stress and anxiety, and a whole host of other factors. As Matthew Crawford, author of The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, elegantly puts it:

Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it. Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

Who wants our attention? Or rather - who doesn't want our attention? Businesses, advertisers, politicians, news outlets, friends, family, homework assignments, pets, bosses, coworkers, Twitch streamers, YouTube channels - everything and everyone wants our attention, and in the attention economy, companies compete fiercely for this increasingly-contested resource. Why do companies care so much? Simple: attention is data, and data is the most valuable commodity in the world.

Although it is disputed by some, there is a growing consensus that data has surpassed oil as being the most lucrative resource that can be extracted in the world. As the New York Times puts it,

Personal data is the oil of the 21st century, a resource worth billions to those who can most effectively extract and refine it. American companies alone are expected to spend close to $20 billion by the end of 2018 to acquire and process consumer data, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia, and Nicholas Confessore, "As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants.

The source of all this data is in your attention. Whether it comes through your eyeballs or through your ears, companies want you attention because your attention translates to data. Your attention to your Facebook newsfeed, your Amazon shopping cart, your iPhone, and your Google search history, your YouTube play history, and basically anywhere else you go on the Internet gives these companies information about you, and these companies want to know as much about you as possible. The more attention a company can capture, the greater the amount of data they can extract from you.

As individuals, our personal data isn't worth all that much. For Facebook, our personal data roughly translates to $6-$7 in annual income for the company. Data doesn't become valuable until you have data on a significant number of people. The greater the data set size, the greater your ability to take that data and use it to accomplish your goals as a company.

So why do companies what this data so much? Companies want this data because they want to keep you coming back to their platform or service as much as possible. Your attention is data, and your data translates to dollar signs.

To illustrate this, we only need to look to Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress in April 2018. The whole ordeal was an embarrassing mess, but one of the worst moments came when Senator Hatch (R-UT) asked Zuckerberg how the company makes a profit when the service is free.

Zuckerberg's response was simple: "Senator, we run ads."

Like any business, these big tech companies exist to make a profit for their investors and shareholders. For companies like Amazon or Apple, those profits come directly through selling products and generating brand loyalty through quality and customer service. For services like Facebook, those profits come through advertising, which is how the free-to-use service netted a $7 billion dollar profit on top of $16 billion in revenue in a single quarter.

In both cases, whether selling a product or offering a service, your attention drives their growth. Each time your see an ad on Facebook or YouTube, those companies make money. Each email or notification from Amazon about a product recommendation is another chance for Amazon to plant a new desire in your heart for something. These ads and product recommendations are tailored to your desires, interests, and behavior- all of which comes from your data - and the data of hundreds of thousands of people who share the same hobbies, beliefs, and passions you share.

If the attention economy is driven by your attention, and these companies want as much of your attention as possible, then these companies will do whatever it takes to keep you engaged. Often times, these engagement tactics are psychological in nature, aimed at "hacking" our minds and leading us towards the direction of addiction.

Aza Raskin, one of the founders of The Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization that works with technologists and designs in the hopes of seeing a shift towards "humane" technology, understands how companies do this. Aza created the "infinite scroll" feature we see on every social media feed and countless other websites, but when he began to recognize the addictive features of his creation, he began speaking out against it. Speaking on the BBC documentary Panorama, Aza remarks:

"It's as if [big tech companies are] taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface. And that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back. . . . Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting." Aza Raskin, Panorama, as cited from "Silicon Valley insiders say Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter are using 'behavioral cocaine' to turn people into addicts."

Aza is not the only technologist to change his mind about his work. Leah Pearlman, who co-invented the Facebook "like" button, found herself becoming addicted to her own creation and the validation it gave her. Sean Parker, the founding president, would claim of Facebook that:

"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them,. . . . was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?" And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or post or whatever." Sean Parker, as quoted in Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

It's not just that these companies want our attention - there is nothing wrong with that by itself. It is that these companies, armed with powerful insights and tools, are trying to capture our attention through our psychological vulnerabilities. This sounds alarmists, but if the men and women who created these features and services are sounding the alarm about the dangers of their own creation, then we ought to listen.

Giving God Your Attention Leftovers

Christians ought to care that these large tech companies are desperately competing for our attention, and are willing to tinker with human psychology to do it. We ought to share the concerns of these designers and technologists who are pushing back against the addictive designs and practices of the attention economy. But as Christians, we have an ever greater reason to care about the attention economy. If our attention is a finite resource, and powerful companies are competing to get as much of it as they can, then it means we run the risk of giving too much of our attention to technology and have too little attention left to give to God.

Think about it:

But as Christians, we have an ever greater reason to care about the attention economy. If our attention is a finite resource, and powerful companies are competing to get as much of it as they can, then it means we run the risk of giving too much

Let’s go back to talking about spiritual disciplines. What do you need to have in order to pray, read the Bible, memorize Scripture, share your faith, and worship (other than a copy of the Bible)? In order to be able to do these things, you have to be able to give your attention to them. You don’t just read the Bible by accident, or pray without thinking about it, or worship without trying. These are conscious actions that you do, and in order to do these actions, you have to be able to give some amount of attention to them. You have to give attention to the words on the page of the Bible. You have to concentrate when praying and worshipping. You have to focus on the conversation you’re having when you’re sharing the Gospel. When you’re tired or distracted, it makes it harder to do these things. It’s also hard to do these things when your attention and your focus have been spent, like after a long day at school or a stressful day of work. But we ought to ask ourselves: are we making things worse for ourselves by our technology and media use? How much of our attention is spent refreshing social media or binging YouTube? How much time do we spend on our phones or computers? And what kind of toll is that taking on our ability to love God with everything we have?

I want to be the first to admit that I struggle with this far more than I ought to. Everything that we are about to talk about, I am just as guilty of myself. As my wife can attest to, I have often woken up many mornings to spend time reading the Word and to pray and find myself glued to my phone as I refresh Twitter over and over again. Even in writing this lesson, whenever I would hit a writer’s block, I would pick up my phone and scroll through Facebook or read an article - and by the time I came back to what I was working on, not only was the block still there, but it was much harder to concentrate. I don’t want to pretend like I’ve mastered this, because I definitely haven’t.

At the heart of all spiritual disciplines is that, like anything else in life, you don’t get good at something without practice. You don’t get good at football or basketball without showing up to practice. You don’t get good an instrument without playing stuff over and over and over again until you’re sick of it. You don’t get good at your job until you’ve been trained at it and are given chances to put that training into practice. The apostle Paul tells us in that we are to train ourselves for godliness, because godliness “holds promise for the present life and also for the one to come.” Godliness is not an accident; it requires training, and like training in every other area of your life, you reap what you sow.

Moreover, godliness is directly tied to fulfilling the Great Commandment. Jesus tells us in (ESV) that we are to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Spiritual disciplines train us in godliness, and godliness is nothing less than loving the Lord with your whole being and loving your neighbor as yourself. At the core of Christian spirituality is giving your attention to God and the things that He is passionate about, and you cannot give your attention to God if you’re constantly whipping out your phone to check a notification every time it buzzes, or spending so much time on social media that it eats up the time you’d set aside for the Word. We must be wise in understanding how technology affects us, and we must be wise about what to do about it.

27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Technology and Spiritual Disciplines

To illustrate everything we’ve been talking about so far, we are going to look at two of the most common spiritual disciplines - reading the Bible and memorizing Scripture -and we are going to see how technology influences our ability to do these things. Is it possible for technology to possibly even help us do these things well?

Let’s start with Scripture reading. Every spiritual discipline is important, but few things are as essential to living the Christian life as reading and knowing the Word of God. We live in a period of time where we are able to have more copies of the Bible than some people will ever lay their eyes on in their lifetimes. My wife and I personally must have a dozen different Bibles in our house, even though we only use two or three of them at most. We have an abundance of the Word, and yet sadly that abundance of availability doesn’t always translate to an abundance of time soaking up its life giving richness.

We also live in a period of time where don’t have to lug around a physical Bible with us everywhere we go - we can just read the Bible on our phones. And let me make this perfectly clear - this is awesome! The ability to take the Bible with you wherever you go and keep it in your pocket is an amazing ability - it’s something that would’ve seemed unlikely even just 20 years ago! If any of you have ever heard of Logos Bible Software, I personally have my entire library stored on my phone - we are talking *thousands* of books and resources. But even though reading the Bible on our phone is easy and convenient, does that automatically mean it’s the best way to read the Bible?

Now you might be thinking “This is stupid, a Bible on your phone is going to say exactly the same thing as a physical Bible in your hand, so it doesn’t matter which one you use”. And you’re right! But what if there’s more to reading a Bible than just the *content* of the Bible? What if the *form* of the Bible shapes the way you engage with the content as well?

Let’s suppose I’m going to spend 15 minutes of my morning reading the Word. I’ve got my cup of coffee by me and I’m going to start my day by spending some time reading through , one of my favorite chapters in the Bible. I could read this on my phone, or I could read it on my physical Bible - a goatskin ESV Heirloom Single Column Legacy Edition Bible gifted to me at the end of my internship at Redeemer. My wife loves my Bible just because it feels super nice in your hands when you hold it. So let’s say I read in said Bible, and I put my phone on silent and put it on the table and begin reading. 15 minutes go by and I feel encouraged, convicted, and strengthened from being able to just focus on the text - all I have to do is maybe turn a page. Now let’s say I read on my phone - same exact text, same exact passage, but my phone case is old and worn and scratched up, so it’s not as clear and easy to read. I also have to constantly keep scrolling to keep the text on the screen - it’s never stationary or still. Also, in the 15 minutes I’ve spent reading, I’ve been interrupted three different times - a reminder from my calendar, a Discord notification, and Amazon trying to get me to buy something. They’re just notifications, but they’re broken my train of thought and I have to re-focus on the text with each interruption. By the time the 15 minutes are over, I’m still encouraged, convicted, and strengthened, but as the 15 minutes went on I kept thinking about the stuff I needed to respond to as soon as I was finished. Which of these two reading experiences do you think was the better one?

It’s important for us to understand that the form of the content matters just as much as the content itself. We know that watching movies on a giant IMAX screen with a top notch sound system is a more immersive and engaging experience than watching that same movie on your phone with headbuds. We know that going to a concert is a much more fulfilling experience than watching cheap cell phone footage on YouTube. The same is true with reading the Bible, and contrary to popular belief, reading the Bible as a physical book and reading the Bible on a screen is not the same experience! As Stephen Carr writes in his book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains:

“A page of online text viewed through a computer screen may see similar to a page of printed text. But scrolling or clicking though a Web document involves physical actions and sensory stimuli very different from those involved in holding and turning the pages of a book or a magazine. Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It’s tactile as well as visual. ‘All reading’, writes Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, is ‘multi-sensory.’ There’s a ‘crucial link’ between ‘the sensory-motor experience of the materiality’ of a written work and ‘the cognitive processing of the text content.’ The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.”

Listen to that last sentence again: the shift from paper to screen “influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.” My physical Bible has one job: to be a physical Bible. I don’t judge it by how fast it turns on, or it’s battery life, or its camera quality - it’s literally one thing, and it does that one thing or it doesn’t. When I’m reading out of the physical Bible, I don’t have to worry about a notification showing up at the top of the screen. I can’t tap the top right corner of the page and expect it to do anything. The text of the book gets everything out of the way so that I can focus on the text as much as possible. I can give my full attention to it and get as immersed in it as I want to. On my phone, that’s not the case. You get interrupted. You get distracted. You remembered something you needed to check and open another app before multitasking back to the Bible - and all of this is part of the design of your phone. It’s designed to help you juggle as many different things as possible, which is the opposite of spending deep quality time with just one thing. The content might be the same, but the experience is different, and your experience with the content shapes your understanding of the content itself. I am not trying to say that it’s wrong to read the Bible on your phone or that you shouldn’t - I’m just saying that reading your Bible on your phone isn't the same thing as reading a physical Bible and that there are some drawbacks to reading the Bible on your phone that you don’t get when you read out of a physical Bible.

(Also, as an aside, this is why my lesson today is on printed paper on not on my iPad. I was preaching one Wednesday night for Redeemer youth and the app I was using for my manuscript just completely crashed and I lost my entire train of thought and had to re-navigate to that spot. Talk about annoying!)

So now let’s look at another spiritual discipline, Scripture memory. It’s not just enough to know what the Bible says, its also to know it so well and so deeply that we can recall it at a moments notice when we are tempted to sin, when we need to speak truth to a friend, or when we need to be reminded of God’s love for us. David tells us in that that “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you”, and that ought to be something we can say ourselves. How does technology interfere with our ability to memorize Scripture?

11 I have stored up your word in my heart,

Let’s go back to Bible apps again - could it possibly be that because we have access to the Bible with us at all times that we don’t really need to memorize it? Can’t we just pull out our phones at any given moment and look up whatever we need? Yes, we can certainly do that, but what happens when your phone doesn’t work, or you don’t have it on you? Do you think you’ll be able to recall the verse you’re looking for? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s probably not going to happen.

that I might not sin against you.

We are so accustomed to the technology in our lives that it changes the way our brains work, whether thats a telephone, a smartphone, or the Internet. We live in something called “the Information Age”, and we call it this because we have more information at our fingertips than we can ever possibly want, and because of this, our need to store information in our brain - to memorize - has been outsourced to machines. We no longer need to memorize information - we only need to memorize where to find information. As Nicholas Carr, author of the book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, writes:

“[One writer] refers to the Net as an ‘outboard brain’ that is taking over the role previously played by inner memory. ‘I’ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything’, he says, ‘because I can instantly retrieve the information online.’…[A popular NYT columnist] makes a similar point. ‘I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more,’ he writes, ‘but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.’ . . . [Another writer] argues that, with our more or less permanent connections to the Internet, ‘its no longer terrible efficient to use our brains to store information.’ Memory, he says, should now function like a simple index pointing us to places on the Web where we can locate the information we need at the moment we need it: “Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored.” . . . [Another writer] puts it more bluntly. Now that we can look up anything ‘with a click on Google’, he says, ‘memorizing long passages or historical facts’ is obsolete. Memorization is ‘a waste of time.’”

So not only are we living in a world where companies use technology to compete for our fragmented attention spans, we are so accustomed to being able to just get the information we want on demand that our brains have shifted in the way we store information. It’s not so much about hiding the Word in your heart - it’s about hiding *where to get the Word* in your heart.

But is there a way in which technology could possibly help us practice memorizing Scripture? At this point you’d probably assume my answer would be “no”, but you’d be mistaken! Of course, you can always memorize Scripture by writing them down on flashcards and drilling through them, but I want to recommend a Scripture memory app called RememberMe. It’s an app my wife uses and she has memorized hundreds of verses using it. The app is solely designed to help you drill and practice memorizing Scripture and has a couple of different memory exercises to help you remember your verses, and it also keep cycling through all the verses you memorize so you don’t forget older verses as time goes on. Of course, you’re still going to get interrupted because it’s an app, but it’s a tool that’s specifically designed to help you learn a skill. It’s not something you’re going to go to just because you want to go to it - you’re using this app to help you learn how to do something.

A Challenge

So to wrap this lesson all up, and to send you out, I want to talk about one more spiritual discipline and I want to issue you a challenge, and it’s this: in service today, I want you to turn your phone completely off. Not just silent, not just stick it in your purse or under the pew - I mean off. If you need a Bible, grab one from the pew or share one with the person next to you. I want you to do this and I want you to see for yourself whether or not your phone interferes with your ability to worship God and listen to the sermon. Maybe for some of you that won’t be a problem, but I imagine for most of us we might get a little tense as the sermon goes on. What if we got an important text? What if something is going on that you need to know about? What if, what if, what if?

Here’s another what if: what if nothing more important than the worship of the Creator of the Universe? What if God is so important that worshipping him demands nothing less than your undivided attention and focus? Of course, prone to distraction and prone to wonder, but what if we can take active steps to minimize the likelihood of that happening? What if you took an hour out of your week to say “no” to everything you say “yes” to the rest of the week so that you can worship the God who has given his only son for your eternal salvation? What if all the notifications and updates are weighing us down to where we can’t grasp the marvelous beauty of the eternal Gospel?

First, try to carve out time in the morning to read the Word and to pray. I know for some of y’all that can be challenging, but