Our students live in the digital world, and the moments and hours they spend on their cell phones, the Internet, Facebook and texting shape their social and spiritual lives.

That’s why we interviewed four experts on youth culture and technology to learn more about how technology is impacting our students and what we as youth workers can do to keep them from getting lost in an increasingly connected and complex digital world. Please allow us to introduce:

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, who doesn’t allow his students to use the Internet for research. He has studied and written about the effects of technology on young people in his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

Peggy Kendall is a professor of communication studies at Bethel University, where her research focuses on teens and technology. She’s author of Reboot: Refreshing Your Faith in a High-Tech World.

After working in the church for a decade, Adam McLane is now Youth Specialties’ technology guy. He spends his days immersed in the digital world, helping youth workers find community there.

Before going into ministry, Shane Hipps was in advertising. He’s now a teaching pastor at Mars Hill in Grand Rapids, Mich., and author of Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith.

YouthWorker Journal: How is technology shaping young people’s spiritual lives?

Mark Bauerlein: One condition of a healthy spiritual life is solitude. That’s where prayer and contemplation happen. In a world in which one is surrounded by input and feedback with screens popping up everywhere, spiritual life wanes. You can’t fit prayer into a multitasking habit.

Peggy Kendall: Technology lulls us into settling. We trade in a colorful Christian life for one that’s duller. Every time we put a piece of technology between us and the person communicating with us, we’re living one step removed from reality. While this mediated experience tends to be easier, more convenient and more controllable, it’s often in the uncontrolled moments and unmediated relationships when we most see God’s hand at work.

Adam McLane: Technology always has shaped spiritual lives. What we’ve seen has been a change in devices that’s affected how people grow spiritually. People are involved in conversations via texts and Facebook that have devalued the interpersonal relationship.

Shane Hipps: The digital age removes us from our present location and the present moment. This creates a relationship with time and space that’s the opposite of the one required for spiritual growth.

YWJ: Which aspects of technology are most important to teens?

Mark: The social aspects. Technology brings the universe of history, science and the arts right onto the screen; but that isn’t what it means for 15-year-olds. It means constant access to what they really care about: other 15-year-olds.

Peggy: Young people seek community. As our neighborhoods become less important, kids adapt. They create communities that transcend place and allow them to hang out with friends who may not know each other and can’t spend physical time together. These friends form a community that’s able to follow young people wherever they go.

Adam: As they look for their own identities, teenagers tend to be attracted to things they can personalize—Twitter, My Space, Facebook. Those become extensions of their personalities.

YWJ: How does a teen’s immersion into the digital world affect his or her ability to socialize in person?

Mark: It blunts it. Much of communication is nonverbal. It’s gestures, expressions and eye contact. It has to be learned. If all your communication is through a screen, you learn to rely only on words. To become fully expressive individuals, young people need face contact.

Peggy: Listening is minimized completely in electronic communication. Text messaging and Facebook are more about sending messages than receiving them. When we don’t feel heard, we can hurl lots of messages into cyberspace; but we’ll never feel as if we’re connecting. As students share every experience and emotion within their social cloud, they lose the ability to figure things out for themselves, to respond with grace and to listen to what God’s voice is saying.

Shane: Increasingly, young people no longer are required to interact face to face. You now have the ability to manage your social impression with impunity. I can project myself on Facebook and no one can see through it. Once you grow up, you realize you’ve lost many of the abilities needed to function in healthy ways.

YWJ: How do Facebook and social networking influence teens’ understanding of their identity?

Mark: What personal profiles do is take a 12-year-old and give him or her a bad message: “You’re really important and everything that happens to you is worth recording for others.” This produces a false expectation about one’s identity in the world. When they reach age 23 and head into the workplace, they receive a discouraging message from co-workers: “We don’t care what happened to you during the weekend.”

Peggy: Whether it’s how we dress or the kind of car we drive, we make intentional choices about how we come across to people. Facebook does the same thing. It’s just easier to change and sometimes has little to do with real life. That leads to increased fragmentation, creating questions such as, “Who am I today?” and “How does that relate to who I am in real life?”

Adam: It feeds our nature to self-gratify. Adolescents hunger to find out who they are from a third person perspective. Social networking gives them a false perspective. People are flippant on Facebook. It’s hard to distinguish between a compliment and what’s sarcastic.

Shane: The University of California did a longitudinal study of narcissism rates in our culture. People born after 1992 had elevated levels of narcissism beyond what had been seen before. Those conducting the study surmised it had something to do with self-focusing technology. Social media appear to be about connecting us to others. In reality, they become a mirror that reflects ourselves back to us. We craft and review our images and check to see the metrics of who we are, such as how many friends we have. This creates heightened levels of narcissistic traits. Higher levels of narcissism correlate to higher levels of substance abuse and the inability to stay in long-term relationships.

YWJ: How does the information that teens have access to through technology impact their understanding of authority?

Peggy: No longer is it OK for one smart Encyclopedia Britannica guy to write out the things we need to know. Now we feel more comfortable accepting the ideas of lots of pretty smart but anonymous guys providing us with answers. If enough people come to a consensus, the information must be more true than if one person says so. This change in information gathering belies a lack of trust in authority figures and can translate into a lack of trust in documents and teachings that emanate from one source and are not fluid. Today’s students have a great need for a place where truth is not developed by the mob and God is not something that changes from one day to the next.

Adam: We should train students constantly to question authority in respectful ways. Technology allows truth to be validated because students can look it up.

Shane: Authority is about who has power. Power is derived from information control. The printing press toppled the hierarchical authority of the church because it gave widespread access to information that previously only priests had. The authority went from people—the priests—to a medium, the book. Books were held as sacred and authoritative. Now, because that medium is in digital format, it’s connected to everything so it becomes increasingly difficult to define authority. There’s no ability to evaluate one thing over another. Because of this, the Bible as authority will continue to be dismantled.

YWJ: If much of technology results in instant gratification, how can we teach kids the value of waiting?

Mark: Mentors need to press home the message that kids need to consider the long-term gain, to realize that the things that bring them praise at age 17 are not the things that help them when they’re 30.

Adam: We have no concept of perseverance or what it means to wait. We get upset when we can’t access the information we want right now. This definitely affects how we process things spiritually—in a bad way. Youth workers and parents need to teach kids to be patient by teaching self-discipline.

Shane: Create spaces and situations that force kids to renounce their technologies for periods of time. Observe what happens when they no longer use it. Go on a mission trip and take away their technology. Give them a journal and say, “Whenever you have an impulse to use technology, write it down and ask yourself why. Were you bored? Restless? Curious? Angry? Technology is an addiction. Withdrawal is painful and frustrating; but if you give them the space, as those emotions get released you’ll see that something resides beneath them. It’s often wisdom.

YWJ: How can youth workers use technology to minister to teens?

Peggy: Be intentional and strategic. Communicate in a language your students understand. If that means having inane conversations through text messaging or thinking up one more status to put on Facebook, that’s what you do. Once you meet students there, then you can model and encourage them to use technology in ways that honor God and communicate His love to the important people in their lives. If we don’t take the time to intentionally teach them how to use their technology well, who will?

Adam: I’m an old school youth minister, trained to do contact ministry. Go where kids are. Engage kids on Facebook and by text because that’s where they are.

YWJ: What else should we know?

Adam: The church always labels new things as the enemy. Today, it’s Facebook. Tomorrow, it’ll be something new. However, technology is never the enemy. The fact that people are talking about the church online—in positive and negative ways—is good.

Shane: No technology is neutral. Every technology has an innate bias, and it will use you. Once you become aware of its bias, you can use it. The digital diet, the technology we consume, affects the soul as much as food affects the body. If your job as a youth worker was to physically develop body builders and your kids said, “Ice cream has protein,” you’d say, “We should eat ice cream as much as possible.” Ice cream also will make you fat. Facebook may have protein in it. It may increase connectivity, but it also has incredibly high amounts of fat that make you spiritually incapable of doing what Jesus called us to d Love and serve the world with our physical beings.

Recommended Resources
Hipps, Shane (2009). Flickering Pixels. Zondervan Press.

Hipps, Shane (2006). The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel and Church. Zondervan Press.

Ellul, Jacques (2001). The Humiliation of the Word. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Kendall, Peggy (2010). Reboot: Refreshing Your Faith in a High-Tech World. Judson Press.