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Part 1: A Summary Post from Tony Reinke’s book, “12 Ways Your phone is Changing You”
What follows will be several statements, principles, and truths that Tony Reinke shares in his book that I wanted to pass on. Concerning the relevance and significance of this book, Bruce Ashford states, this book is “one of the most important little books a twenty-first century Christian could read.”
The first six ways Reinke shares that our phones are changing us are…
Take-aways:
- We check our smartphones about 81,500 times each year, or once every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives (41)
- The average user of Facebook spends 50 minutes everyday (42)
- Our spiritual condition is one of ADD (47)
- Phones can facilitate a myriad of unchecked distractions that can 1) blind souls from God, 2) close off communion with God, and 3) mute the urgency of God (48)
- The more distracted with are digitally, the more displaced we become spiritually (51)
- Our phones buffer us from us diversity (71) because we can separate ourselves from people who don’t think like us (70)
- Communities that fail to embrace the benefits of disagreements and fail to work through tensions and differences tend to become homogenous and unhealthy because they tend to have exaggerated blind-spots and unaddressed weaknesses (72)
- The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation (75)
- The itch for human approval ultimately renders faith pointless. Why? Because faith is the act of being satisfied with Christ. “If you are bent on getting your satisfaction from scratching the itch of self-regard, people’s affirmation, you will turn away from Jesus, because you can’t serve two masters” (74)
- You must deprogram yourself from “online hunger” (76)
- Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity (83)
- Smartphones hamper our ability to for sustained moments of concentration and therefore, the One to whom we are to have a lifelong engagement with suffers (86-87)
- Digital technology now accelerates and particularizes our search for belonging (111)
- You shouldn’t treat another person the way you treat Twitter – Douglas Groothuis (116)
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