Discipling in the Digital Age

It’s no secret that digital technology has changed our world. From the advent of the personal computer and the internet to today’s smartphones and social media, we have access to more information, news, and even each other than any other time in human history. People can get instant answers to just about any of their questions, stay informed with events around the world in real time, and connect long distance with family and friends. 

Technology has not only reshaped our world. It has reshaped everything from our relationships and self-understanding to our ideas of freedom and truth.  

As Neil Postman observed in his 1992 book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:  

[New technologies] alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the world is like—a sense of what is the natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real.  

It redefines freedom, truth, intelligence, fact, wisdom, memory, history—all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask. 

This month’s Lighthouse Voices event, a series co-hosted by the Colson Center and Focus on the Family, will tackle the challenges of living as Christians in our digitally transformed world, and will feature Samuel D. James.  

At the event, James will draw from his latest book, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age, to share how Christians can engage a world that, thanks to digital tech, has fallen prey to “authenticity,” outrage, shaming, consumption, and meaninglessness. 

For a sneak peek of the event, here’s Samuel James sharing about his book on the Upstream podcast: 

The Internet is an intellectual technology. So, when you have an intellectual technology, the power of that intellectual technology to actually commend certain things to your soul is there, and it’s there whether the result is good or the result is bad. So a jet engine—this is Marshall McLuhan’s famous example in Understanding Media—the jet engine creates a world where you should be able to fly to the East Coast from the West Coast in just a number of hours. It creates the plausibility.  

And the railroad did the same thing. It creates this plausibility of, yeah, you should be able to get to this place. Even if you live here. You should be able to go here in just a few hours. Nowhere in the book do I say that that’s immoral or a problem, but it is a different kind of world.  

It shapes us in a particular way, and it creates this sense of “this is what life should be like.” And so, the Internet is the same exact way. The Internet is this technology, and especially because it’s an intellectual technology, the kind of world that it makes plausible is tied to our sense of who we are, of who God is, of what truth is, and of the kind of people that we are and the kind of the way the world really is. … 

Honestly, I think that in a technological world where we’re not going to put the computer back in Pandora’s box, we’re not going to get rid of it, I think that’s kind of what the essence of what the Lord is calling us to do, is to understand the effect that these technologies have and then preach the Gospel—the real, embodied, physical, love-your-neighbor, go-to-church Gospel—to each other in a way that helps each other see through this fog.  

If you enjoyed this and want to learn more about how to live faithfully in our digital world, please join us September 10 at 7 p.m. Eastern at Lighthouse Voices to hear more from James about this pressing topic. You can RSVP—either in person or virtually—for free today by visiting the event page here.