McCracken / Mesa Scrolling Ourselves to Death

Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-4335-9946-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Christian Wisdom for Our Tech-Saturated Age  The rapid advance of digital technology is reshaping our world and warping our minds. The onslaught of social media and smartphones has brought an appetite for distraction, an epidemic of loneliness, and increased rates of mental unhealth. For Christians, the digital revolution has profound implications for spiritual formation and mission. How should believers respond to the theological and discipleship challenges of scrolling life?   On the 40th anniversary of Neil Postman's prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Scrolling Ourselves to Death gathers today's most incisive writers to think critically about the shaping power of contemporary technology. This book explores Postman's insights, connects them to the challenges facing Christians today, and turns difficult challenges into life-giving opportunities for the church. Stepping back from their screens, readers will be equipped to live faithfully, and grow spiritually, in a 'scrolling ourselves to death' world.  - Practical: Includes action steps readers can use to reclaim a healthy life in a tech-saturated world - Wise: Helps readers become more discerning in the way they think about and utilize technology - Perfect for Small Groups: Includes discussion questions at the end of every chapter - Useful for Church Leaders or Ministry Staff: Perfect for those who want to help those they lead think more carefully about technology - Expert Contributors: Features insights from a wide variety of leading Christian thinkers on technology, faith, and culture

Brett McCracken is a senior editor for the Gospel Coalition and the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World and Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. He lives with his family in Southern California.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mccracken, Brett

Mesa, Ivan

Leseproben

1

From Amusement to Addiction

Introducing Dopamine Media

Patrick Miller

In 2011, Julijonas Urbonas unveiled a miniature model of his “Euthanasia Coaster.” If built, the full-size roller coaster would be four-and-a-half miles long, beginning with a massive drop, followed by seven consecutive tightening loops accelerating to a lethal 10 Gs of force.

“It’s a euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster,” Urbonas explained, “engineered to humanely, with euphoria and pleasure, kill a human being.”1 The acceleration causes the rider to suddenly suffocate, inducing a brief, painless, euphoric state generated when the brain focuses only on vital activities.

Euthanasia is unethical, so we can be thankful no such amusement exists. Nonetheless, you can find countless articles, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and social media posts in which ordinary people share how much they like the idea. Why not amuse yourself to death? After all, it’s strangely poetic for humans addicted to amusement to die by it. From entertainment you were made, and to entertainment you shall return.

No one likes to think of himself as an entertainment addict, wasting away his life on impulsively foolish, self-indulgent, self-destructive endeavors. But if an objective observer from a pre-digital era followed you around for a day and watched you compulsively check your phone, refresh your email, ogle at social media, binge videos, and tune out your children with AirPods, what conclusions would he draw?

Would he see an addict? Someone on a decades-long Euthanasia Coaster, slowly amusing himself to death in the way Postman predicted?

Postman’s insights four decades ago can help us in our own time as we consider technology’s trade-offs and how we’re being shaped by our internet-era media environment, for good and ill. The internet, social media, mobile computing, and artificial intelligence have brought benefits we don’t want to give away, but they’ve also come with costs. Is the trade-off worth it?

Postman understood that all “new technology for thinking involves a trade-off”: “It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure. Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around. We must be careful in praising or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us.”2

So let’s embrace carefulness, and ask, What are the trade-offs of internet-era digital technologies?

How Media Changes How We Think

Postman didn’t live to see our current iteration of digital technology, but he modeled how to think through trade-offs—particularly how media changes the way we think.

In Technopoly, Postman reflected on a myth from Plato’s Phaedrus, in which an Egyptian king named Thamus converses with the divine progenitor of reading and writing, Theuth. The god explains all the benefits which will accrue to humans who adopt his new media format. But King Thamus demurs. The trade-off isn’t worth it: “Those who acquire [writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. . . . They will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources.”3

Postman agreed with King Thamus that there were mental trade-offs with the widespread adoption of reading and writing. Memory was one. However, the written word also generated new mental worlds: theology, the natural sciences, ecology, economics, mathematics, philosophy, sociology, medicine, and much more besides.

The trade-off was real but worth it.

That’s not the case with later technologies, Postman believed. He thought TV changed how we think for the worse. To be clear, Postman said he was not claiming “that changes in media bring about changes in the structures of people’s minds.”4 But much of his work gives that impression. He argued that people in the televisual era learned and thought about truth differently than those in the prior (typographical) era.5 Their televisual minds lacked the attention necessary to engage in the long-form discourse common in the typographic era.6 Worse, the televisual mind lacked typographical fluency in abstract reasoning, preferring the concrete and emotive. Postman thought TV cultivated a highly subjective, highly expressive, highly therapeutic, and highly individualized way of perceiving the world and self, and of evaluating truth.

Those weren’t merely changes to the structure of discourse. They were changes in the mind.

The same is true today. Yes, digital media changes the structure of discourse. But that’s not all it changes. If Postman were alive, I suspect he might be nostalgic for the TV era. Because what followed TV is quite literally rewiring our brains.7

We’re amusing ourselves into addiction. Entertainment culture metastasized into something not even Postman could have predicted: dopamine media. In some ways, the dystopia that inspired his work, Huxley’s Brave New World, did see it coming. In that universe, a drug called Soma is used to anesthetize the people and keep them happy. Our addictive (more on this later) drug of choice isn’t ingested or injected. It’s consumed ocularly.

The trade-off we all make in the digital era is not merely between substantive and trivial discourse. It’s between sobriety and addiction. While TV addicts have existed since television’s inception, the technology wasn’t addictive enough or constantly accessible enough to become dependence-forming. It’s easy to think smartphones are just an extension of TV technology, but even though the phone in your pocket looks like a tiny TV, it’s actually something far more nefarious.

Your phone is a digital syringe.

It’s a gateway to lifelong, brain-altering, relationship-destroying addiction.

Digital Dopamine Nation

In Dopamine Nation, Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Anna Lembke argues pervasive, cheap, and easy-to-access products and experiences that release dopamine in the brain are creating a mental health crisis unlike any other in human history. This is for the simple reason that most people in history lived with scarcity—limited access to the foods, substances, and experiences that release dopamine in the brain—but now we live in a world of abundance. Our brains were not designed to live in such a world.

The consequence of dopamine abundance is addiction. To understand how this works, Lembke says it’s helpful to imagine your brain like a seesaw. On one side is pleasure; on the other side is pain.8 Your brain wants to retain equilibrium, to keep the seesaw flat.

The longer you spend with your mental seesaw tipped to pleasure, the harder the pain comedown. While your reflexive self-regulation mechanisms press the pain side down, you may experience heightened levels of stress, depression, and irritability, and a whole array of psychological symptoms that make your brain want more dopamine to relieve your psychological distress.

Throughout most of history, it was hard to find substances and experiences that could press the pleasure side, so equilibrium was more commonly attained. But when you live in a society awash with dopamine factories—social media, pornography, gaming, high-calorie foods, alcohol, online gambling—you face a constant, pathological temptation to press the seesaw on the pleasure side.

The problem is that the more you repeat a dopamine-releasing behavior, the greater your tolerance becomes. This applies to social media—a proven dopamine-releasing substance—which was designed to be addictive.9 Thus, if it took only two TikToks to spike your dopamine the first time, it will take four the tenth time, and dozens the hundredth. Whatever your drug of choice, you need more and more of it to get the original high and more and more of it to reduce the psychological pain you experience when you come down from your high.

It’s a vicious cycle. Anyone who experiences ghost vibrations in his pocket—beckoning him to clutch his phone—knows this cycle. Anyone who’s opened YouTube or Instagram to watch a video for five minutes only to inexplicably lose an hour knows this cycle. Anyone who cannot resist the impulse to watch digital pornography or gamble online knows this cycle. If the faintest shadow of boredom makes you compulsively check your phone, then you know this cycle. If you are easily distracted during a conversation with your spouse by the strange and desperate urge to check your phone, then you know this cycle. If a brief moment of anxiety makes you swipe madly through your phone looking for any unread notification, then you know this cycle.

Your brain is seeking dopamine. It’s whispering, “Get out the digital syringe. Take another hit. Then the boredom, stress, irritability, and blues will go away.”

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