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.