Sermon Tone Analysis

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.