How Facebook and Twitter Change Us
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | How is Facebook and Twitter and our online habits changing us?
00:00:09.000 | This continues to be an unresolved question that presses for clarity,
00:00:13.000 | and it's a question I've been meaning to ask Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh.
00:00:17.000 | Bruce is a historian and the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology
00:00:22.000 | at Regent College in Vancouver.
00:00:24.000 | In my research on the life and theology of John Newton,
00:00:27.000 | I depended on his groundbreaking research, which was published in his landmark book,
00:00:32.000 | John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition.
00:00:35.000 | Bruce joins us now over the phone.
00:00:37.000 | Bruce, you're a historian focused on the spiritual life,
00:00:40.000 | and you are willing to address how technology influences the Christian life today.
00:00:45.000 | For the next three days, I want to focus on this and bring your very unique perspective to it all.
00:00:50.000 | So we, of course, live in this age of technological advance
00:00:55.000 | with all of its glory and all of its conveniences and all of its consequences.
00:01:01.000 | Digital communications technology like email and texting and social media,
00:01:06.000 | Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all of it is relentless, it seems.
00:01:11.000 | So how do you think this culture of digital technology harms or hinders
00:01:16.000 | the spiritual life of the Christian today?
00:01:19.000 | Yeah, that's a really, really important question.
00:01:21.000 | In many ways, it's an important question of our time,
00:01:25.000 | and I wish there was more writing being done and more thinking being done about this.
00:01:30.000 | My colleague Craig Gay is working on a book on this subject,
00:01:33.000 | and I'm really looking forward to what he's going to say about it.
00:01:36.000 | But I think one of the things we have to do, first of all,
00:01:39.000 | is pay attention to form as well as content.
00:01:43.000 | And there's a lot of good, intelligent books about this kind of thing,
00:01:46.000 | about how the medium is part of the message,
00:01:49.000 | and that the medium is not neutral.
00:01:51.000 | It's not just an envelope, and you can just throw the same content
00:01:54.000 | in any old envelope, and it's the same thing.
00:01:57.000 | So I think part of that is reframing and how we're thinking
00:02:00.000 | so we can think well about discipleship.
00:02:03.000 | And the benefits are obvious, and you mentioned some of them,
00:02:07.000 | the conveniences, the accessibility, the flexibility,
00:02:10.000 | the unbelievable resourcefulness, the instant nature of the communication
00:02:15.000 | and the resources that are available.
00:02:18.000 | I think I want to, because those are so obvious,
00:02:21.000 | I would rather sound the note of some of the dangers
00:02:24.000 | to the spiritual life of screen communication,
00:02:28.000 | and communicating through screens and through the digital envelope.
00:02:32.000 | And people will be all too familiar with these,
00:02:36.000 | and some of these are widely known.
00:02:39.000 | But the first one is distraction.
00:02:42.000 | We are all already, just our spiritual condition
00:02:45.000 | is one of having spiritual ADD, and we are all easily distracted
00:02:49.000 | from the important issues of our lives moment by moment.
00:02:54.000 | But the nature of digital communication is that we are endlessly distracted.
00:02:59.000 | And if that was true already sort of prior to the advent of social media,
00:03:06.000 | there was enough in the digital world to be distracting.
00:03:10.000 | It's all the more true in terms of notices and updates.
00:03:13.000 | Apple Watch has just been released, so that on your very wrist
00:03:16.000 | you can have all your notifications and so on.
00:03:18.000 | So one risk to think about is distraction, having a dispersed consciousness.
00:03:24.000 | I remember one of my teachers saying there are some things in the spiritual life
00:03:28.000 | you need to be reminded of every six minutes.
00:03:31.000 | And to be recollected is the old word for this,
00:03:34.000 | to be recollected that we are in the presence of God,
00:03:38.000 | and we are living intentionally, living out of a calm center spiritually.
00:03:43.000 | I think that's hard.
00:03:45.000 | Another one is trivialization of communication.
00:03:47.000 | And I think that there is a lot of communication
00:03:52.000 | that is atomized and is trivial.
00:03:57.000 | And it's not that there aren't very serious things done.
00:04:01.000 | But if we think, it's hard to imagine the Oxford book of emails,
00:04:04.000 | the Oxford book of text messages.
00:04:06.000 | There's just something about the media that does allow a trivialization.
00:04:11.000 | And I think we need to be aware of that.
00:04:13.000 | And it's not that profound things can't be written in the digital age.
00:04:17.000 | I think there's an atomization, I alluded to this, of knowledge
00:04:21.000 | where in the digital world things are literally like at the level of a code,
00:04:26.000 | they're broken up into atoms.
00:04:29.000 | And it means it's harder and harder to see how things are connected to holes,
00:04:33.000 | to see how things are integrated, how this is a part of,
00:04:38.000 | this particular insight is a part of God's world,
00:04:41.000 | is connected to a whole way of seeing the world.
00:04:44.000 | It just is fragments.
00:04:45.000 | And we experience the world as fragments,
00:04:47.000 | and we don't understand how this has to do with everything else.
00:04:51.000 | There's a lot of hierarchies of knowledge.
00:04:54.000 | And in many ways today that hierarchy seems like a bad word.
00:04:57.000 | But it used to be, like if I wanted to publish something,
00:04:59.000 | just the expense of publishing means that my proposal goes through a peer review process.
00:05:05.000 | It goes through rigorous scrutiny, and there's many people who are examining
00:05:09.000 | what I have to say prior to it being released.
00:05:13.000 | And there's all sorts of good things about being able to directly get one's message out.
00:05:19.000 | But the loss of hierarchies is potentially a loss of filtering.
00:05:23.000 | It's a loss of wisdom.
00:05:25.000 | It means that knowledge is not a part of a system of apprenticeship,
00:05:29.000 | where there's an apprenticeship, there's a learning from those who have experience
00:05:35.000 | and wisdom, who've been entrusted and authorized.
00:05:38.000 | And so there's a way that we've lost that ability to see things in terms of how they relate
00:05:45.000 | to authorities and trusted authorities.
00:05:49.000 | There's a danger of posturing and image posturing in the digital world.
00:05:56.000 | Everybody is happy on Facebook.
00:05:59.000 | Everybody seems to have a better life than I do.
00:06:02.000 | And a long, long time ago at the beginning of the modern period,
00:06:06.000 | there was a fellow named Jürgen Habermas who just wrote about even with the beginnings
00:06:10.000 | of periodical press, periodical literature, and the expansion of print media,
00:06:15.000 | there was a new kind of way of understanding oneself.
00:06:18.000 | And that is that we have an audience-oriented sense of self.
00:06:21.000 | We understand ourselves as communicating to an audience.
00:06:25.000 | And anybody who's been on Facebook understands all of a sudden you're just constantly
00:06:31.000 | thinking about communicating to an audience.
00:06:34.000 | And there's something about that that can be very damaging to realism.
00:06:38.000 | And thin rather than thick communication is like you're communicating through a pipeline.
00:06:44.000 | The first kind of committee meetings I've been a part of are the ones that are by conference call.
00:06:48.000 | You have thin communication.
00:06:50.000 | You don't get three-dimensional feedback and all the richness of communication
00:06:55.000 | of being face-to-face, all the nuances and so on.
00:06:59.000 | And most important, and you can forget all the rest of those as if that isn't the long enough list,
00:07:05.000 | but is the disembodied relationships, the disembodiment.
00:07:10.000 | And I think that's the most significant thing.
00:07:12.000 | And I think that's the only world we're in.
00:07:14.000 | For all of the friends we have on Facebook, this is a lonely world.
00:07:18.000 | I can't raise my children by Skype.
00:07:21.000 | Bodies, being present bodily to each other is so important.
00:07:25.000 | Bodies are not what define the limits of my autonomy.
00:07:28.000 | My body defines the extent of my availability.
00:07:33.000 | It's my body that allows me to be present to give and receive love.
00:07:38.000 | My body is what makes me available to others and makes them available to me.
00:07:43.000 | And this digital world of not now, not you, and not here is disembodied.
00:07:49.000 | So I think one of the most radical things we can do as Christians right now in this world
00:07:54.000 | is face-to-face communication, and preferably around a dinner table, around a meal.
00:08:01.000 | And the richness of that.
00:08:04.000 | I think that's a bit of a coax, and I think that Christ left us with a meal in the upper room.
00:08:08.000 | But being face-to-face around a meal is actually a radical context for discipleship, I think.
00:08:15.000 | I think those are formal dangers, and I think the dangers in terms of content
00:08:21.000 | is most of the dangers I'm most concerned about are formal.
00:08:27.000 | The dangers in terms of content, I think the principal danger, there's many,
00:08:31.000 | is pornography. It is unprecedented pornographic world,
00:08:37.000 | and the combination of pornography and privacy and no cost is, I think,
00:08:43.000 | we have yet to see the impact of that on a whole generation worldwide.
00:08:47.000 | And I think that's...
00:08:49.000 | So I think there's a certain kind of ebullience for many evangelicals,
00:08:55.000 | a certain kind of optimism and gung-ho.
00:08:57.000 | We always want to use the latest tools to communicate the gospel, and that's fantastic.
00:09:01.000 | And that's been true from earliest days.
00:09:03.000 | But I think we have to be very intelligent and thoughtful about discipleship
00:09:10.000 | in this environment, and what it means for people to be formed in this environment.
00:09:15.000 | And I think these are early days. As a historian, I have to say,
00:09:20.000 | these are pretty early days. And I think I'm optimistic that the wisdom of the Church,
00:09:26.000 | the wisdom of Christian people, that we will find ways to live.
00:09:30.000 | This is God's world, and the Internet, nothing about this surprised God.
00:09:36.000 | And God is present in the digital world, and He will redeem this world.
00:09:40.000 | And people will be able to act redemptively in this context.
00:09:44.000 | But I think these are early days for discovering what wisdom looks like.
00:09:48.000 | Yeah, those are wise words of counsel as we navigate these uncharted waters.
00:09:53.000 | Thank you, Dr. Hyde and Marsh. And of course, all of this raises the question
00:09:57.000 | over how we strategically get away from the distractions,
00:10:00.000 | what we could call technology fasting from our iPhones.
00:10:04.000 | Bruce, I want to ask you for your thoughts on this on Monday.
00:10:07.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Have a wonderful weekend.
00:10:10.000 | [END]
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