Heads Bent, Hearts Apart
The Social Cost of Our Device Dependence
Imagine visiting the grocery store that’s a fifteen-minute drive from your home. Shortly after entering the store, you see a woman in a worn shirt, shorts, and flip-flops maneuvering a grocery cart past shelves filled with Doritos, Swiss Rolls, and Zebra Cakes. Two children slouch in the cart, in thrall to the green and hot pink tablets held inches from their faces, children’s music and video game sounds streaming from the tablets’ overtaxed speakers. The harried woman seems oblivious to the noise trailing behind them, yet also appears relieved that her little monsters are occupied for this brief moment in public.
Or maybe you go to a restaurant for supper and see a man and a wife with two teenagers seated at a table. Both children spend all their time with their heads bowed toward their devices, except to send an occasional glare of venom toward parents who dare to attempt to involve them in conversation. The parents finally capitulate to peer pressure and begin aimlessly flicking through their own social media feeds and news. The food arrives a few minutes later, but you can perceive no real change in their behavior. Now they all balance their phones on their left pinkies while shoveling food in with their one free hand. The meals are finished, the bill is paid, and the family makes its way out the door. The teenagers continue to be engrossed in their screens, nearly colliding with a busboy carrying a tower of dirty plates. The parents say few words to their children during the entire time at the restaurant, making you wonder what the point of this all was. Couldn’t they have just stayed at home, saved $100, and ignored each other there?
Driving home from church on a beautiful March morning, you see a young father and his daughter sitting on a swing beside the river. The girl's short hair blows in the breeze, and she swings her legs with abandon, giving herself over to the spring sunshine and daffodils. Her father’s legs are planted solidly on the ground, and he is leaning forward until his elbows rest against his lower thighs near his knees. Both hands are cradling a phone, which appears to hold more interest for him than the precocious child less than a foot to his right. What is he looking at? Perhaps it’s a Facebook or TikTok feed. Maybe it’s the latest political news or a scientific article about an Earth-sized exoplanet found orbiting a star only 50 light years away. Or, perhaps he is reading Dickens or Dostoyevsky, but you doubt it.
On the way to work one day, you pass a young boy and girl—probably in their early teens—at a school bus stop. They are facing in opposite directions with AirPods screwed into their ears, their heads bent toward their phones at unhealthy angles. They are likely interacting with ten or twenty online friends within only a few minutes. A possible friend is merely feet away, yet that relationship would require more risk and effort than the distant ones on their phones. They are neighbors standing right beside to each other, but who couldn’t be bothered to put forth the effort needed to engage with someone in real life.
These examples are not exaggerations for the sake of hyperbole, they are realistic portrayals of the influence of devices on our relationships, some were even pulled from my experiences.
When I was growing up in the early 90s, teen pregnancies were at an all-time high, reaching their peak in 1991. Over the next thirty years they plummeted, from 61.8 births per 1,000 females in 1991 to 14.4 births per 1,000 in 2021. There are many hypotheses about what caused this dramatic decrease, but one that keeps bubbling to the top is the rise of the Internet, social media, and pornography.
There is no doubt that the decrease in teen pregnancies is a good thing. Very few teen pregnancies begin within the bounds of marriage, which means that few of the babies are born into a home with a mother and a father dedicated to each other. However, the decline in teen pregnancies illustrates something, the power of digital devices is strong, so strong that it can take the place of physical intimacy.
Devices are powerful because they can take the place of good things that God has given us. Online likes, replies, and “friends” take the place of in-person interaction. Porn takes the place of marital intimacy. Video games and VR take the place of experiences and overcoming challenges in the real world. The good world and good relationships for which we were created are being supplanted by hollow digital simulacra.
No wonder the rates of depression and self harm are rising in young people. They search for connection and meaning, and yet, many feel as if those things slip further away each day. They are awash in a social media sea with each person searching for approval, status, and community. I’m sure that many young people want things to be different. They feel an aching emptiness that they want filled, but perhaps they either aren’t sure what to do, or they don’t have the courage to step out and be different during a time when the pressure to conform and belong to a group is much stronger than it is for those of us who are older. If someone would just see them and recognize their value, then they would at least have a solid plank to cling to keep their heads above the churning waves.
And now they can turn to AI chatbots for love and validation. The New York Times reported on a married woman in her late 20’s who fell in love with a chatbot.1 She spends hours training ChatGPT to become a boyfriend who is always responsive and willing to meet her every emotional need. She knows that the relationship is not real, but it feels real to her, and so that’s enough for her to continue pursuing it.
Some experts feel that there is nothing wrong with using AI in this way, while others warn that relying on a virtual relationship for support and validation will likely cause real-life relationships to become more difficult. Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology, stated: “If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real friendships, and that’s contributing to loneliness—the very thing we’re trying to solve—that’s the real potential problem.”2
I feel sorrow for these young people. I didn’t get a smartphone and daily access to the Internet until I was in my mid-20s, well past the time when my mind was more easily molded and shaped. Even so, it took time for me to realize how I was being affected and to drag myself away from the sucking maw of social media. Perhaps others can moderate their usage and not allow it to turn productive hours into wasted minutes, but I’m not sure whether I can, and so I put away the thing that called with a voice that I couldn’t resist.
We’ve spent the last twenty years carrying out a society-wide social experiment. It started with optimism: universal access to the Internet would spread knowledge, education, and Western values such as democracy and secularism. It has delivered on some of its promises, but along with those it has brought epistemic overload3, indoctrination, isolation, and pessimism. What was promised to bring us together, has instead moved us apart. It’s easier to connect, but harder to find real connection.
As relational and embodied beings made of flesh, blood, and bone, we need other people beside us in families and communities who gather in real space, not cyberspace. It can be useful to be able to communicate virtually via text, voice, or video, but something is always lost when we separate ourselves from others. Yes, we can get the same content from a sermon into our heads if we listen in over the phone or watch a livestream, but can attending church virtually work on us and form us like needing to talk to the brother or sister beside us on the pew? Those people likely don’t think just like you, and that is a good thing. Relationships are hard, but the difficulty built into relationships is precisely what helps us build skills of empathy, sacrifice, and submission.
When the automobile became affordable in the middle of the 20th century, small communities were hollowed out as families moved to cities for work and extended families were sundered as young people followed opportunities in different states. The effect was no less strong on our churches. Now, you might go to church with a family who lives forty minutes or an hour away and who drives past several other churches from the same church group. We often don’t think about the effect of the automobile on our churches, but could it be that cheap cars were the gateway drug that gave us permission to see church as a place to go, not as a body of Christ that lives, works, and worships together on more than just Sundays? Now the Internet and digital devices allow us to become even more distant from the brothers in the pew while connecting to friends from Maranantha, Heritage, and Timbuktu. The smartphone accelerated our social fragmentation, it didn’t start it.
What do the next twenty years bring in our lives? There are glimmerings of hope, but there is still much more work to be done. Both as a society and as a church, we have realized the social cost of our devices, and many parents are putting guidelines in place to protect both themselves and their children from the socially debilitating effects of devices. But turning away from smartphones and social media will not be enough. We need to turn toward and engage with those in the local body of Christ. Show interest in their lives, invite them over for a hotdog roast, start a small group or Bible study, be willing to ask for help with a project at your place, and then offer your services when a brother needs help.
Pick up your phone, call or text your friends, and then meet with them in real life. Share food, conversation, and your lives with each other. Use your phone as a tool of communication instead of allowing it to move you away from your brothers and sister. Technology is good and can be used for good, but the Deceiver subverts good things and uses them for his purposes. Don’t let him win.
Ibid.
epistemic overload—the feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information and the difficulty of making sense of it, leading to a sense of confusion and inability to form reliable knowledge