Redeeminng the Time, Part 7

Problems in Digital Paradise

Consider our daffy digital world:

• We are irritated if our text isn’t answered within a few minutes—“Where are you?!”
• We feel naked without our phones.
• We check our devices first thing in the morning and last thing at night. 
• We try to keep up with the happenings of our 1000 “close” friends on Facebook. (Do I really want to see every photo you snap?)
• One survey found that the average American checks his e-mail just under 200 times per day!

What has happened? An invention that started out as a marvelous tool to communicate with family and friends, has become something that many of us are addicted to: “Cell phones and heaping e-mail leave us even more frenetic, harried, and feeling out of control than our ancestors. We seem not so much to have “saved” time as to have sped it up.”

Like most of us, Nicholas Carr found the digital experience exhilarating. He was captivated by the speed of the Internet, the search engines, the sound, the videos, everything. But then, he recalls, “the serpent of doubt slithered into my info-paradise.” Maybe the net wasn’t so great. He discovered that his habits were changing, morphing to accommodate a digital way of life. His ability to pay attention was declining. “At first I had figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the net did it – and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.”

The recent death of comedian George Carlin caused me to search YouTube for some of his routines. Soon I had spent over an hour listening to the good, the bad, and the vulgar humor of Mr. Carlin. If that type of activity became a regular pattern, it could squeeze out time with God, time with family and friends. I don’t want to become a “compulsive nimbler of info-snacks” which fill me up and take the place of the meat I need to grow up in the faith.

So what can we addicts do? When Alan Fadling’s family decided to turn off their devices while they spent an evening playing Catchphrase, he felt resistance rising in himself: “I really have important things I should be doing.” Then he came to his senses: “What was more important than unhurried time spent enjoying my bride and my three teenage sons?”

What do we really need a phone for? When Jeff Haanen answered that question he made changes that changed his life. As I began deleting apps and setting new boundaries, I found myself catching an appealing vision of a better—and slower—life. And my phone once again became just a tool, to be used like all good things given by God. (James 1:17)

Consider other boundaries with? Can you go an hour without checking your inbox? Can you delay a response to a text because you are engaged in another activity? Can you read your Bible in the morning before you check overnight messages? Can you trash someone’s appeal to watch a video? We all receive e-mails that claim: “I don’t normally forward messages, but you have to watch this.” I now seldom open those messages. The most effective way to beat an addiction is to starve it.