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Your smartphone is not your best friend.
Nor is it the key to finding personal security and happiness.
That’s the message being embraced by more and more health care professionals to those who are having a hard time turning off and turning away from their phones.
San Diego State psychology professor Jean Twenge recently asked her students what they did with their phones while they slept.
“Their answers were a profile in obsession,” she reports. “Nearly all slept with their phones, putting them under their pillows, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed… Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep, and the first thing they saw when they woke up.”
A number of them talked about depending on their phones the way an addict would talk about crack: “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it,” said one student.
It’s hard to fall asleep when you’re waiting to see how many Likes you get for that selfie you posted. And studies have demonstrated that the blue light emitted by smartphones mimics daylight, tricking our brains into thinking it’s OK to be awake at 3 am.
Twenge isn’t your run-of-the-mill blogger. She is a recognized expert on generations, particularly how Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and the newest crop of young Americans compare to each other in their growing-up years. Her signature book is the audaciously titled iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.
Twenge coined the term “iGen” for those born between 1995 (the year the internet was commercialized) and 2012 (the year it became clear you were well behind the social curve in middle school, high school, or college if you didn’t own a smartphone).
She observes, “Sometime around 2011, we arrived at the day when we looked up, maybe from our own phones, and realized that everyone around us had a phone in his or her hands.”
The numbers are daunting.
According to studies, high school seniors spend more than two hours a day texting, two hours a day on the Internet, at least 90 minutes playing electronic games, and around 30 minutes doing video chats with friends. That’s six hours a day on so-called “new media.”
Significantly, owning a smartphone (and being obsessed with it) has nothing to do with class or income bracket. This technology is fast becoming the great leveler of social standing and opportunity.
That has the potential of being a wonderful thing.
Then there are those other things that aren’t quite as wonderful.
Authorities in a number of countries – including Brazil, Japan, South Korea, France, and the United Arab Emirates – have concluded that smartphones may actually be making students dumb. A slew of regulations currently prohibit kids in those nations from bringing flat screens to school.
Educators and sociologists agree that if a child is experiencing six hours of daily recreational screen time, they no longer have time for other things people used to do.
More often than not, that would be face-to-face encounters with real, live human beings.
Twenge believes the smartphone generation will be the first to know the perfect emoji to represent every emotion, but won’t be able to recognize actual emotions and discern the body language of people standing right in front of them. The fact that smartphones give users the power to create “digital friends” or A.I.-generated “dates” is not regarded by most psychologists as a positive development.
Reading appears to be another casualty of the new media.
The market for print media (books, magazines, and newspapers) continues to decline. Let’s face it: books aren’t very fast. In a recent cartoon, a librarian hands a book to a teenager with the words, “Just think of it as a long text message.”
One SDSU student said, “My dad is still into the whole book thing. He has not realized that the Internet kind took the place of that.”
The Internet is incredible. It is revolutionizing civilization. Every night, any one of us can crawl into bed holding in our hands all the knowledge humanity has ever acquired. That’s the happy part. The sad part is that all too many of us devote our screen time to watching videos of kittens and epic fails at wedding receptions.
Meanwhile, underneath all the excitement of technological upgrades and the never-ending buffet of digital distractions, we suspect that we’re missing something.
It’s the bedrock conviction that we need to be hearing from God. Our souls ache not just for words, but the Word. We long to hear God speak. And it seems more and more obvious that that’s not going to happen through a text.
The Hebrew word for “word” is debar.
In English, there are a variety of prefixes that negate the meaning of a word – “non,” “in,” and “un,” for example. One Hebrew way of achieving negation is to affix the letter “m” to the beginning of a word.
When “m” is added to debar, the result is midbar – the Hebrew word for “wilderness.” In the Bible, a wilderness is a “wordless place” – a place where God’s Word is no longer heard.
We can become so devoted to our flat screens – with social media, Netflix, and the myriad pictures we’ve posted on Instagram – that our souls take on the reality of a spiritual wilderness.
What can we do?
Carve out specific times to turn off your phone. Keep it beyond your reach in your bedroom. It is not your best friend.
Choose times of quietness. Open God’s Word. Ask God directly, “Please speak to me. Help me recognize your voice.”
Then just listen.
Turning away from our phones and toward the Living God will surely turn out to be the smartest thing we’ll ever do.