Jeff Van Gundy admits he wasn’t thinking…at least not about what he should have been thinking about.
At the time, Van Gundy was the coach of basketball’s New York Knicks. Driving home after a game, he was preoccupied with thinking about how his team could have stopped Grant Hill. He pulled into his driveway and right into his garage…without ever hitting the button to lift the door!
When Van Gundy tells the story, it’s hilarious. The inattention that led to his misfortune is also more common that we’d like to admit. Who among us hasn’t been so focused on some task at hand that we haven’t messed up by missing something we should have thought about, been paying attention to or notice? Usually, though, it doesn’t result in something as minor as a destroyed garage door.
Adolescents are especially susceptible to missing things for the simple reason that they’re consumed with finding their way on the journey through monumental developmental changes and upheaval, a task that’s made even more confusing and complex by their search for answers to life’s most basic questions.
Their preoccupation is complicated by the fact that it’s mostly unconscious. Most of them aren’t aware of the fact they’re thoughtlessly driving through garage doors on their passage from childhood to adulthood. It’s all part of human nature: We get so focused on trivial things that we never really give the important things the attention they deserve.
One primary place where we see this happening in today’s youth culture is on the digital frontier—that new and never-before-seen technology-induced landscape that’s unfolding in front of us, around us and within us.
Digital Natives or Immigrants?
In some ways, today’s digital frontier resembles the wild, wild West America’s pioneers confronted. As our ancestors, who embarked on the adventurous journey westward, we need to be aware that dangers lurk in this world filled with great opportunity and blessing.
What makes this reality especially challenging is the fact that those of us called to lead and nurture kids into this new world—youth workers, parents, pastors, teachers, etc.—are digital immigrants. We weren’t born here. We’ve arrived, and as the immigrants who showed up at Ellis Island, most of us have that deer-in-headlights look as we try to navigate our own journeys in this strange place that’s unfolding at breakneck speed. As a result, we’re prone to miss the dangers.
Our kids, however, are digital natives who have been born into and onto the digital frontier. Because their media and technology are extensions of themselves, they don’t know life without it. So they, too, aren’t really paying much attention. They’re just letting life unfold as it will.
It’s like what happens when you take a group of your students to the beach. Some of them can’t wait to get into the water. Oblivious to any potential dangers that might exist under the surface, they dive in headfirst. Then there are the waders. Aware that unseen danger might exist, they take their time, they move slowly, and they ease their way into the water as they carefully assess the situation.
When it comes to life on the digital frontier, many students tend to be divers rather than waders. They unthinkingly embrace everything new and digital, perhaps only later stopping to inquire about dangers or risks.
Discernment on the Digital Frontier
Youth workers, teachers and parents should address this brave new world by thinking Christianly about how to bring glory to God through our engagement with technology and teaching our students how to do the same. As
Tim Challies exhibits much prudence in his thoughtful book The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion. Challies says his wake-up call came when he asked himself, “Do I own my technology, or does my technology own me?”
In his book, Challies challenges us to go beyond our mere experience of how we use technology. He wants us to develop a theory of technology (how technology operates and the impact it will have on our lives) and as well as a theology of technology (how God wants us to use it).
When I look in the mirror, I see that most of us are experience-rich and theory- theology-poor. We buy the latest tech tools and integrate them into our lives without cultivating a sweet spot of disciplined discernment.
No technology is neutral. Each tool we use changes the way we work for better or worse. The same is true of today’s digital frontier, which holds a mix of promise and peril. Unfortunately, many of us seem to have embraced an ism that says new technology is good technology; but in some cases, our tendency to dive in means we may miss what’s really happening beneath the surface.
Here are four isms that impact our engagement with technology and demand our disciplined discernment.
First, there’s pragmatism. I’m not talking here about a well-thought-out philosophy. Rather, it’s a simple type of functional practicality that most of us have assimilated into our lives without knowing it. It’s about living at the level of experience with a kind of cavalier works-for-me! attitude that leads us to embrace everything blindly that we assume will make our lives better while neglecting to consider that some of these things could have a dark side.
Technology has improved our lives in countless ways, but to assume that it’s good because it works is really not a good thing. For example, a cell phone gives me the ability to stay in touch with anybody at just about any time. That can be a good thing! However, if we lack the discipline to use our cell phones responsibly, our obsession with staying in touch might actually get in the way of our real-world flesh-and-blood relationships.
Who among us hasn’t found ourselves present with our family, but so absorbed in communicating with others and actually distancing ourselves from the folks sitting with us in the same room?
Second, there’s our heated affair with emotionalism. Who doesn’t want to feel good? We are so committed to avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure that the 60s hippie mantra, “If it feels good, do it!” still applies. We don’t say it. We live it.
Think about how the feel-good principle influences our eating habits. Our culture needs to be reminded that fast food and pizza aren’t better for us than fruits and vegetables. Still, we follow our culinary emotions even when we’re told it’s not good for us. Then, we wake up one day when it’s too late, asking, “What have I done to myself?!”
In a 1998 speech, media critic Neil Postman said, “The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable, and largely irreversible.” Without stopping to think carefully about the technology we use along with how we are going to use it, we cave to our emotions and dive right in. My guess is that a few years from now, we’ll regretfully be recognizing dangers that we should have recognized today.
Third, there’s our growing love affair with ourselves. That’s narcissism. We live with ourselves placed at the center of the universe. For the person who knowingly or unknowingly worships the god of self, decisions are based on what will elevate and advance us. This idolatry sneaks into our kids’ lives at the level of their service to others.
For example, a growing number of our youth group mission trip participants may not be so much driven by a desire to love and serve God by loving and serving others as they are by a desire to elevate and serve themselves by building an impressive and well-rounded resume for a college recruiter.
New advances in technology tend to cater to our narcissistic bent, allowing us to create an idealized self (or multiple selves!) that we post for the world to see. Then, we promote ourselves and our brand to a following that we endeavor to build. A vicious cycle is the result. The more we advance ourselves, the more self-consumed, self-promoting and self-worshipping we become.
Fourth, there’s our blind acceptance of a contemporary Gnosticism. Gnostics conveniently divide life into two categories: the spiritual and everything else. While we recognize God has something to do with the spiritual part of our lives, we conveniently eliminate God from having anything to do with any other part of our lives. The result is that we fool ourselves into believing we can be Christian…and then do whatever we want however we want.
This reality is captured in Christian Smith’s description of the type of faith embraced by today’s kids—Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. In our contemporary world, people of all ages fail to understand our calling is to integrate our faith into every nook and cranny of our lives, including how we choose to use and live with our technology. The fact is that our selves are integrated wholes rather than a collection of unrelated parts.
If God is truly Lord of my life, then I will endeavor to understand what it means to allow God to be Lord of my technology rather than inventing a separate spiritual realm where I store God away from the rest of my life.
Our Tools Shape Us
It’s been almost 50 years since media guru Marshall McLuhan prophetically said this about media and technology: “We shape our tools, and afterward our tools shape us.”
History has proven that every technological advance presents us with moral issues and difficulties. The problem is those moral issues and difficulties usually don’t show up until a few years down the road, long after we should have been wading rather than diving. This reality typifies who we are as Christians. When we’ve had and expressed concerns, it’s usually been about technology’s content (i.e., violence, sex, profanity) rather than technology’s ability to indulge and expand things such as our tendencies toward pragmatism, emotionalism, narcissism, and Gnosticism.
The question for us as youth workers is: How is technology and our use of it affecting our relationships with God, ourselves, others and the world? Our commitment to spiritual nurture and the life of discipleship demands that we ponder, keep pondering and answer this question for ourselves and with our students. After all, it is the gospel—and not our technological tools—that should shape us.
Committing to this approach will bring glory to God and save a few garage doors, as well as a few lives!
