Ada Herald Pastor's Pen July 24, 2014

A Necessary Conversation
     
   Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing with readers our family’s technology agreement.  Our approach isn’t foolproof by any means, and one of the things that I have learned the hard way is that it’s best to go slow with handing out digital devices and technological privileges.  It’s harder to take away a digital freedom once granted than it is to be cautious in handing out the privilege in the first place.

   Caution is the order of the day.  Our new technologies are changing our lives in unprecedented ways and it is the better part of wisdom that we approach them with a measure of care.  The technology agreement we adopted provides guardrails in terms of our time by providing opportunities to check out (especially in the evening and on Sundays) and in terms of the content we create or allow on our devices.

    When it comes to content, the overwhelming problem today is pornography.  According to the Huffington Post more porn sites are accessed per month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined.   Blogger and youth speaker Anne Marie Miller has travelled the country speaking to “church kids” at camps and has found that more young kids are exposed—and addicted—to pornography than ever before.  She points out that Google is the new sex education classroom for today’s children, who are typing in unfamiliar phrases and getting more than they bargained for in the search results.

   Ms. Miller counsels parents not to make the mistake of thinking that your kids are the exception.  As you hand out a new iPhone or iPod touch to your children, it would be wise to discuss your expectations regarding what types of sites are appropriate to visit.  We recently took the step of installing a wireless router in our home that routinely filters questionable content on any device connected to it.  Even if you trust your kids, don’t underestimate the seductiveness—and destructiveness—of this type of content.

   Content isn’t just something our kids are viewing, but it’s also something they’re creating.  A healthy technology discussion with your kids would include reminders that anything they post online is there for the world to see—forever.  Nothing can really be taken back.  We counsel our kids to not hide behind their devices.  We should all have the courage to post only something that we would be willing to say to someone’s face.  If you’d like to see the whole tech agreement we crafted, it will be on our church’s website this week at www.adafirstpres.org.

Ada Herald "Pastor's Pen" for July 17, 2014

Look at Me

   My five year old son has taken to a new phrase:  “Look at me!”  He recently wanted to show me a new pair of skates and how well he was gliding around the driveway with his hockey stick.  And until I looked up from my phone, he was relentless in his demand.  It would have done no good, as we parents are prone to do, to insist that I did glance up when he wasn’t looking.  Kids see right through that.  They crave our undivided attention.

   To help us be present for one another, our family has adopted a technology agreement with various sections:  foundations, time, and content.  As I pointed out last week, our smartphones and devices especially challenge our ability to stay focused on the people who are physically near us.  We try to address this challenge with the following guidance:  “To be a good friend, and fully present to others, I will put my device away when having a conversation.  I will silence it in public, especially at churches, restaurants, and movies.” 

   Jesus taught us, and most people I know agree, that we should love our neighbors as ourselves.  How do we love ourselves?  We love to be noticed, to have someone listen to us and understand us.  We don’t like to be put on hold or told to “wait a minute” while someone takes a call or checks a status update.  We love by giving ourselves, fully and in the here and now, to another person.

   We used to know these things more intuitively.  In the past if we had gone out to dinner with a group of friends, we never would have thought to take out a book and begin to read.  We would’ve been thought anti-social or worse.  But as Christine Rosen observed in an article for The New Atlantis, the opposite is true today:  “the group is never expected to impinge upon the individual’s right to withdraw from social space by whatever means he or she chooses.”  The friends need to “get over it” if one of their members is thumbing through Facebook while the dinner conversation proceeds.

   An attorney friend of mine recently invited me to dinner at a private club.  During dinner, as he reached for the smartphone in his pocket, he told me he received over 100 emails a day.  Bringing the phone out on the table, he quickly retreated and put it back when he remembered the club had a rule that patrons were to keep phones away during dinner.  We will know that the human race has made progress when we don’t need rules and guidelines to tell us what we know intuitively:  we are creatures who flourish when others look at us and don’t immediately look the other way.

Ada Herald "Pastor's Pen" for July 10, 2014

Coming Unplugged

  Last week, I began to share with you my family’s technology expectations, which are guidelines we have developed and discussed with our children to help our family navigate the various iPods, laptops, and smartphones in our lives.  Our guidelines come in three parts:  foundation, time, and content.  We deliberately placed “content” last, because technology’s biggest danger isn’t so much the negative content it might deliver to our inboxes, but its power to shape our humanity in entirely new ways.

   Nicholas Carr argues in his well-received book The Shallows that the internet revolution has not only brought unprecedented information, but also greater superficiality in our interactions with that information.  We are distracted, constantly interrupted by texts or notifications on our screens.  We can’t think deeply anymore.  We try to multitask, which hinders our ability to concentrate on a single task with greater success.  And perhaps most devastating, we mistake information for wisdom.

   In our family’s technology agreement, we try to tackle this problem by encouraging our teens to examine their “all in” approach to technology.  Under the heading “time,” we state, “I will not text or email while doing school work, because my intellect best develops when focused.”  We further encourage our children to realize that life is bigger than technology with the following guideline, adapted from Janell Burley Hofmann: “I will leave my device at home from time to time and feel safe and secure in that decision.  I am bigger than technology.”

   Probably the most important guideline we have as a family is our “device Sabbath” on Sundays:  “I will observe a digital Sabbath from Saturday night through Sunday after supper.”  We ask our teens to check their devices in with us on Saturday night, and then we return them after dinner on Sunday evening.  That gives us worship and the afternoon free to be more in touch with God and each other than everything else in the world, which seems to run along just fine even when we’re not checking status updates.

   I later discovered that author William Powers also takes an internet Sabbath for the entire weekend in his helpful book Hamlet’s Blackberry.  It’s not just Christian families who are trying to get a handle on technology’s intrusion into every corner of our lives.  We all recognize that these devices aren’t merely tools that give us content; they are changing our mental and physical habits and impacting how present we are to our neighbors and families.  Deliberately unplugging at key times during the week will help us reclaim an important part of what it means to live.

Ada Herald "Pastor's Pen" for July 3, 2014

Questioning Tech's Triumph

   A few years ago, my mother proposed getting us altogether at a lodge that could house my family (no small task) along with my siblings and their families.  We enjoyed being in each other’s physical presence, but I couldn’t help noticing that something else had stolen into the center of our family—devices that took us away from each other:  cell phones, iPods, and laptops.  It seemed that we were checking out as much as we were checking in.

   Some years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman observed that “technology does not invite a close examination of its own consequences.”  And therein lies its greatest danger—we have so quickly fallen into this world of constant connectivity, that we haven’t taken the time to ask questions, set boundaries, or think about whether the changes are themselves changing who we are in some profound way.

   Thankfully some folks are starting to ask questions.  One question I heard came in a proactively titled article by Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which ran in the Atlantic a few years ago.  Another question came when my wife showed me a book called iRules by Janell Burley Hofmann, who seeks to answer the question, how do I wisely put an iPhone in the hands of my young teen? 

   Her book got me thinking about how I wanted my own children to use and interact with their various devices, and so my wife and I developed a guide that I have shared with my own children as part of our technology expectations as a family. The foundational part, in particular, is written from our family’s Christian identity:  “Since I am an ambassador for Jesus Christ and desire to glorify God, I desire to let my Christian faith inform my use of technology.”

   It may surprise you to know that technology actually plays an important role in the Bible.  Adam and Eve were put in a garden to work it and care for it for the glory of God.   Christian discipleship, in part, seeks to honor what it means to live and work in this world under God’s lead.  We certainly have an interest then in technology, the tools that manage and make the world God has created.  We should be asking questions about technology and its impact on our lives in God’s created order.  In the next week weeks, I’ll share with you more specifics from our family’s technology agreement to continue that conversation.