Discover more from Think Christianly, Live Faithfully
I purchased my first smart phone in April 2008. It was a Blackberry Curve. A few years later, I bought a Motorola Razr. It was beautiful . . . until I dropped it in the toilet. In 2011, I converted to Apple and bought an iPhone 4. Within a year, I purchased my first iPad. Three years later, in 2014, I acquired my first MacBook. Since 2017, my wrist has been adorned successively with a FitBit, then a Garman watch, and now an Apple Watch. I’ve also owned two Amazon Kindles.
I’m surrounded by screens. Their lights and their sounds and their vibrations are always tempting me to break eye contact with the person I’m talking to, or put the book down too soon, or attempt to multitask by jumping around Wikipedia while I’m watching the show or the movie or the big game. I’m far more distractible than I would like to be. I’ve been conditioned to remember less than I used to because I can always search for the information I need. My teenagers’ phone numbers? I have no idea. But their contact information is saved.
Here's the thing: all of this is true of me and I neither had an email address nor logged on to the internet until I was an 18-year-old freshman in college. After that, the only screens in my life were the television and computer until I was almost 30. I’ve only had a smart phone for slightly more than 1/3 of my life.
“Hello, my name is Nathan Finn, and I’m a screenaholic.”
Kids These Days
I really do struggle with screen addiction, but I’m more self-aware than I’ve been letting on. I actually take all kinds of steps to unplug and detox from screens. I try new strategies all the time. My wife and I talk frequently about how our family can be less reliant on screens (including this week). I’m intentional, even if I sometimes fall back into bad habits.
But here’s the thing: what caused me to be intentional more than anything else was witnessing how my students are dominated by screens. Unlike me, with every passing year most of my students have been surrounded by multiple screens for the vast majority of their lives. This fall, the average college freshman will have been born in 2006—the same year the iPhone came out. They are addicted from the cradle. Mom and dad are their dealers. And their first “hit” comes the first time a parent hands them a screen so they’ll stop crying.
Interestingly, most of my students know they are addicts. They know there is, at bare minimum, a strong correlation between their screen time and their level of anxiety. They know their brains have been hacked and the algorithms own them. They know that their screens lure them into pornography, and cyberbullying, and hyper-curated social media, and reinforced confirmation bias, and Russian and Chinese bots, and sexual predators, and transgender influencers, and white supremacists, and . . . you get the point. They really do know. But they also really are addicted. So, they take another hit, hoping it might be better tomorrow.
Almost every expert agrees that screens are unhelpful in most classroom contexts. (Obviously, this doesn’t apply to classes where the learning outcome is technological proficiency.) Almost every developmental psychologist agrees that the longer a child avoids personal screens, the better it is for that child cognitively and emotionally. It’s not even really debated. There is an honest to goodness general consensus on this. In America. In 2024.
And yet, almost every public school system wants to get tablets into the hands of every student from day one. And yet, textbook publishers promote electronic books and online supplemental resources over physical books—assuming they still publish physical books. And yet, textbook services that contract with colleges and universities default to electronic copies. It’s almost like it’s really all about the money and not what is best for students.
Not Today, Silicon Valley!
In 2017, I went virtually screen-free in my undergraduate courses. No laptops. No tablets. No smartphones. Occasionally, there are particular learning activities that are conducive to screens. When that is the case, students are told they can use their electronic devices. But 90% of the time, they are handwriting their notes. With a pencil or pen. On paper. Even when I lecture.
I also don’t administer electronic tests. Or electronic quizzes. It takes a little bit more work on my part to print out those assessments and grade them by hand. But my students are worth it. I do allow students to type their written assignments and submit those to me electronically. I’m not unreasonable. I promise.
I’ll admit that I’ve had a few students complain to me over the years about my screen-free approach to teaching. But I have had far more students—I mean, far more students—tell me that they enjoyed disconnecting and focusing on the class itself. I’ve even had many students tell me the single thing they most enjoyed about the class is not using electronic devices. I’m dead serious. Remember, most of them know they are addicts. And they know I’m trying to help, even if only for 75 minutes two times a week.
Some Recommendations
I’ve read a fair amount on this topic in recent years, so I want to share some recommendations. Jonathan Haidt’s newest book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness is just as good (and sobering) as you’ve heard. Every parent, teacher, coach, and student minister should read it. An older work in the same vein that I’ve found to be very insightful is Jean Twenge’s iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us. More generally, one of the most important books about the social internet and its effect on all of us is Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
There are many helpful books written by thoughtful Christians that can help us cultivate a healthier relationship with screens. Some of my favorites include Samuel James’s Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age, Andy Crouch’s books The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World and The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place, Chris Martin’s Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media, Felicia Wu Song’s Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age, and Jason Thacker’s Following Jesus in a Digital Age.
I have also written a little bit on this topic. I discussed some of the same themes as this newsletter in a 2023 column for WORLD Opinions titled “A Disastrous Distraction.” I also contributed a chapter to a forthcoming collection of essays from Crossway and The Gospel Coalition that is tentatively titled Scrolling Ourselves to Death and is edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa. That book engages with Neil Postman’s classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death and applies his insights to the internet age. My chapter is titled “Unfit to Remember: The Theological Crisis of Digital-Age Memory Loss.” Look for Scrolling Ourselves to Death in 2025.