One of the best books that I have read this year is Felicia Wu Song’s Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age. It is a diagnosis of much that is unhealthy with the culture of permanent connectivity that has been proliferated by digital technology. Her assessment never romanticises the past to dismiss the benefits of digital technology, but she outlines clearly and persuasively many of the costs we are (often) uncritically paying as individuals and as society as a result of our digital addiction. There are many parts of what she writes that I would like to explore more. In this article, I’ll focus on her reflections on being human and having limits.
One of Song’s starting points is to dismiss the idea that digital technologies are merely tools – neutral instruments that can be used for good or bad. Instead, she argues that their design privileges certain options. Social media, for example, is designed to captivate our attention and mine us of our data. It does so very successfully because it is designed to be addictive by delivering the emotions we crave rather than the complexity we need to interact healthily with the world. Far from a benign tool, digital technology tells a powerful story about what it is to be human and how we should live together; a story narrated by corporations whose concern is for their profits not our best interests.
The story that digital technology immerses us in bends our assumptions about what it means to be human. It teaches us to view the very limits that make us human – the limits of our bodies, of time, and of place – as inconvenient restraints to transcend. I will try to briefly summarise each of those.
The digital impacts our relationship with our bodies in many ways – not least in its leaning towards disembodiment. The physical limitations of our bodies are regarded as a nuisance. Living rooted in community with actual in-the-flesh human beings – in particular those ‘others’ who are not like us – is regarded as unnecessary when online connection allows us to self-define who we are in the abstract.
The digital encourages us to transcend the limits of time by at once monopolising our attention (distracting us from the things that really matter) and bombarding us far more opportunities than we could ever have time for. This keeps us in a state of FOMO (fear of missing out) and anxious busyness where virtually all stillness is removed from our lives by a constant urge to check our phones to ensure that we are not missing out. Time becomes a competitor we race against and try (always unsuccessfully) to master.
The digital immerses us in a story that is placeless and displacing, that interacts with the physical world only as potential fodder for our social media profiles, that places no value on rootedness or fidelity to a particular place. Some might say it fosters a nomadic lifestyle, but that is to misunderstand the strong community dynamics in nomadic tribes. Instead, what digital technology fosters is a form of hyper-individualism that masquerades as ‘freedom’ but which in reality is an isolating force severing us from any connection to place or people.
Recently, I re-read The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks. It is the beautifully written story of a Lake District Shepherd. The book ends with the haunting line ‘this is my life, I want no other.’ I say haunting because I am struck by how few people I know who could honestly say that of their lives. The digital technology that we are immersed in feeds off and encourages the exact opposite – shaping us into people who long for lives other than the one we are living. That is at the heart of the attempts to transcend the limits of bodies, time and place – it is essentially saying ‘this is my life, and I desperately want another.’ And the tragedy of this drive towards transcendence is that it diminishes the exact things that make for human flourishing. Instead, we are being shaped into disembodied, lonely, angry, narcissistic, frantic, displaced and uprooted people. And this isn’t accidental. The power-brokers of digital capitalism know that disembodied, lonely, angry, narcissistic, frantic, displaced and uprooted people will consume more social media. And so, they hook our attention and sell it to advertisers, at huge profit for them and huge cost to the wellbeing and flourishing of human beings, of local communities, of our politics and our societies.
We need a better story. That is what Song proposes in the second half of the book. If our digital routines are ‘secular liturgies’ which form our habits, values and imagination, then we must practice ‘counter-liturgies,’ which ground us in a better story. The main practices she outlines are designed to reorient us around the limits of bodies, time and place – and receiving those limits as gifts, rather than as restrains to transcend.
She talks about embodied, faithful presence and the importance of being with others in real physical community – especially those who are not like us. She talks about sabbath as a practice to root us in the gift of time. And she talks about sacred space as a practice that dares us to show up to our place without digital distraction.
These counter-liturgies excite me. They frame spiritual practices as acts of resistance – habits which, through simple repetition and mundane persistence, might just make plausible that elusive line from James Rebanks. I’m not sure about this, but I wonder if a significant test of our faithfulness at making disciples in the digital age, is the extent to which we cultivate the conditions that make it possible for us to honestly declare ‘this is my life, I want no other.’ To that end, I hugely recommend Song’s book to anyone interested in spiritual formation in this cultural moment.
Notes From the Potting Shed 