Sermon quotes on Smart Phones
Alain de Botton
True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
qtd. in Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation (Penguin, 2016).
Cory Doctorow
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, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention.
“Writing in the Age of Distraction”, Locus Magazine, January 2009.
Tony Reinke
Like a smartphone screen made blank by the rays of direct sunshine, one day we shall see Christ’s face. On that day, all the vain spectacles in this world of illusions and all the pixelated idols of our age will finally and forever dissolve away in the radiance of his splendor.
Taken from Competing Spectacles by Tony Reinke, © 2019, p.154. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Todd Gitlin
People are submitting themselves to time-devouring technology. We’re a nerve-racked society where people have difficulty sitting back and thinking of the purpose of what they do.
qtd. in Richard A. Swenson, A Minute of Margin (The Navigators, 2014).
Jay Y. Kim
According to professor and author Adam Alter, the average phone usage among adults rose from eighteen minutes per day in 2008 to two hours and forty-eight minutes per day in 2015.
This isn’t because we’re talking to each other more. On the contrary, we’re talking to each other less. The dramatic increase is due to emails, internet use, and, in large part, social media. Recent estimates are that there are over three hundred million active users on Snapchat, three hundred thirty-five million on Twitter, one billion on Instagram, and more than two billion on Facebook. (Almost) everyone everywhere is on social media—especially millennials and Generation Z.
Taken from Analog Church by Jay Y. Kim Copyright (c) 2020 by Jay Y. Kim. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Nokia Phone Survey
The average person uses their cell phone every six minutes and checks their phone 150 times a day.
2013
Sherry Turkle
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 elsewhere. At class or at church or business meetings, we pay attention to what interests us and then when it doesn’t, we look to our devices to find something that does. There is now a word in the dictionary called “phubbing.” It means maintaining eye contact while texting.
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, (Penguin Publishing Group, 2015).
Michael Winnick
The average iPhone user touches his or her phone 2,617 times a day.
Walter J. Ong
Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.
Henry David Thoreau
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Sherry Turkle
The tethered child does not have the experience of being alone with only him- or herself to count on. For example, there used to be a point for an urban child, an important moment, when there was a first time to navigate the city alone. It was a rite of passage that communicated to children that they were on their own and responsible. If they were frightened, they had to experience those feelings. The cell phone buffers this moment.
Cal Newport
The source of our unease . . . becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopted them. Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable. What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.
Sherry Turkle
Digital connections . . . may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.
Jay Y. Kim
This is the ultimate paradox of the digital age: at the moment in human history when technology allows us to be more connected than ever, we are so very far apart, to the point that our very understanding of “community” has devolved into a sort of collection of isolated individuals.
Taken from Analog Church by Jay Y. Kim Copyright (c) 2020 by Jay Y. Kim. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
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