Genesis 16:13, Exodus 33:14, Isaiah 49:15–16, Matthew 18:3–4, Luke 15:20–24, Psalm 139:1–3
We’re little children wandering the aisles of the internet because we’ve lost the presence of our loving parent. We are desperate for the attention of a good Father who sees us. We have no idea how to...
But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re waiting in the grocery store aisle for two minutes. We listen to podcasts on our commute. We lea...
We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.
65 percent of parents, ages 25-34, believe they check their phone too much. (56% of kids agree.) 31 percent of parents say they don’t set a good example with mobile device usage. (22% of kids agree.)...
The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...
Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...
The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer's ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response...
Genesis 2:9, Colossians 3:2, Matthew 13:1-17, Matthew 13:16-17
Years ago, my family and I visited Sequoia National Park in California. The highlight of this trip was seeing the Giant Sequoia redwoods, after which the park is named. These trees are awe-inspiring, ...
Genesis 2:7, Exodus 20:8–10, 1 Kings 19:5–7, John 1:14, Matthew 11:28–29, Psalm 34:8
In this short excerpt, author Ashley Hales describes the disembodying reality of being glued to screens, and a few ways to become back in touch with our embodied selves: Perhaps we look to a scree...
Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...
Luke 10:41-42, Ecclesiastes 5:1, Mark 6:31, Isaiah 30:15, Psalm 46:10
Smartphones make it possible for the attention economy to target our little attention gaps as we transition between tasks and duties. Our attention may be slightly elastic enough to fill up every empt...
James 1:25, Mark 4:19, Hebrews 2:1, Isaiah 55:2-3, Ecclesiastes 5:1
We say we turn to our phones when we’re “bored.” And we often find ourselves bored because we have become accustomed to a constant feed of connection, information, and entertainment. We are forever el...
Cue a terrifying trend: our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was twelve seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But ...
Companies in this era of apps and personal tracking devices have grown much smarter about surfacing milestones that were previously invisible. The app Pocket, which stores articles from the Internet o...
Max Lucado shares a funny story about a phone app that was supposed to be able to guess your age. It worked by taking a picture of a person’s face and then spitting out a supposedly accurate result. L...
Because of the modern rhythms of work that are mediated through personal computers and phones, people, in the words of one cultural commentator, “leave the office, but they do not leave their work. Th...
What use could this company make of an electrical toy? *President of the Western Union Telegraph Company, in 1876, rejecting an opportunity to purchase Alexander Graham Bell’s patent on the telephone
Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...
In today’s culture, it’s a race to the top of the ladder. According to Pew Research, millennials are the most educated generation. No one does comparison quite like millennials. We have apps for every...
One of the many technological transformations of the twentieth century took place right on our dinner plates. Because of its cheapness and convenience, most Americans quickly accepted new ways of eati...
Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were ...
A reporter interviewed Albert Einstein for an article he was writing. At the end of the interview, the reporter asked if he could have Einstein’s phone number to call if he had further questions. “Cer...
I recently attended an event sponsored by Compassion International, the International Child Sponsorship Organization. The event was called “Stepping into My Shoes”. The purpose being to show children ...
Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...
Psalm 19:14, Matthew 12:36, Proverbs 15:28, Proverbs 12:18, Colossians 4:6
E-mail is the great scourge of modem communication. It facilitates the passing on of simple information, yet it forces complex matters to be presented In a fashion that makes what is difficult appear ...
Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing thes...
My son Michael and his wife, Amy, also have been on the dance floor with their Fear Dance. And their reactions have not always been pretty. One day Michael came home with a new cell phone and plan—abo...
Proverbs 4:5-7, Ecclesiastes 12:11-13, Isaiah 28:9-10, Matthew 7:24-27, James 1:22-25, Psalm 119:11
Gathering information without processing and applying it is counter to how the mind works and how the brain is structured and has a deleterious effect on our mental and physical well-being, creating a...