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In my last blog, I sketched out what my Riddell Memorial Lectures were about. “Curb Your Technological Enthusiasm: When should we be tech-prudent?” was my title. My basic point was that we need to draw upon relevant scientific study of cultural evolution in order to better anticipate which new technologies (broadly construed) are likely to spread so widely and get rooted so deeply that they are hard to uproot if they prove to be more harmful than helpful.
In particular, I argued that certain technologies play upon basic human psychology — the way we think, the motivations we have, and so on — such that they are very seductive. Technologies that need a special dose of scrutiny are those that are relatively easy to use, are rewarding to use, and can be used in many different contexts, particularly those contexts that mimic basic human needs, drives, and relationships.
A practical takeaway from this observation is that digital social media are particularly fraught technologies that should be used very judiciously, and not by children. I discuss some of this in my podcast with Ana Ávila concerning “The Screen Time Crisis.” Ana has done considerable research on this topic and she framed our conversation around social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent book The Anxious Generation. Haidt argues that much of the rise in anxiety and depression in young people is a result of using digital social media too early and often in life. My argument is that this connection was entirely predictable.
Many of our contemporary personal computer operating systems, and especially touch-screen interfaces that run our smart phones and tablets, are brilliantly engineered for ease of use. Even young children can learn to use them very quickly. (Indeed, this is one reason why there really isn’t any point in kids having computer literacy classes in schools. They can figure out how to use them in a few hours of unguided exploration aided by the devices’ own tutorials.) But more than being easy to use, their use of iconography, graphics, and sounds can bypass hard-earned literacy and reflective reasoning, to get us to do what content developers want us to do with our attention and, ultimately, our money.
More worrisome still is how social media purports to help us maintain or even develop meaningful social connections. We know from biblical wisdom and evolutionary anthropology that we are deeply social creatures, a point I developed at length in my book Thriving with Stone Age Minds. To love each other well is a God-given priority. So what happens when we get little drips of chemical rewards from likes, hearts, and in-group-affirming video feeds and memes — rewards that would have subserved the development of face-to-face relationships, trust, and cooperation in ancestral conditions? Today we can get our fix without the messiness or richness of genuine, deep relationships. As is commonly the case when we attempt to substitute a human-made substance for the real thing, something is missing from digitally-facilitated ‘social’ interactions. And even more, our motivation for the real thing gets sapped. Again, I share much more about this in my Riddell lectures, especially the second one: “From AI to Social Media.”
Even if you are not a policy-maker, a school administrator, or a tech developer, I encourage you to carefully consider how you and your family use digital social media and whether it promotes the kind of full, abundant life Jesus calls us to. You are not powerless.
If you are more interested in what I shared in Newcastle, the lectures can be found on YouTube. I am also hoping to begin creating additional short videos that explore this topical space. You will be able to find these on my YouTube channel. So if you are interested, consider subscribing so that you can easily find these videos when they are released.
