Today we begin a three-part series addressing a parent question about how we can use tech well. To begin, however, I need to address the elephant in the room: Tech isn’t without goals of its own. Tech makes four promises it cannot keep, and we run into trouble when we begin to believe these lies and try to use tech to fulfill needs it cannot meet. I end the conversation with a host of amazing thinkers and writers who point us to steps we can take to use tech on purpose, not for purpose.
Show Notes:
- John Mark Comer book: Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace
- John Mark Comer book: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World
- Anna Lembke book: Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
- Sherry Turkle book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
- Andy Crouch book: The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place
- Kevin Kelly book: What Technology Wants
- Khan Academy
Ways to listen:
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🎧 search Gospel Tech in your favorite streaming service (iTunes, Amazon)
Transcription:
Hello, everyone. And welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. My name is Nathan Sutherland, and this podcast is dedicated to helping families love God and use tech. Today we are going to be talking about tech being awesome. It’s actually a conversation spawned by a question sent in by a parent, so thank you for sending in questions. If you want to, you can send a question to [email protected], to me directly, [email protected] or on social media @LoveGodUseTech. You can just send me a DM. This came in from a question survey that we put out at a talk and the question, here’s the whole question. It says, “There needs to be good news of some sort. The walkaway point appeared to be tech is an unclean public bathroom. What is available is manage the restroom. What about how do you raise your kids to utilize tech to be successful?”
I love that and I hope you heard the layers there because the questions at the end, how do we raise our kids to utilize tech to be successful? And we will get there, but it’s couched in some very clear, obvious frustration. I will tell you honestly that I had considered changing this prompt because I’m like, “Ooh, it seems like there’s some frustration and some anger there,” and then I was like, “That’s first of all disingenuous. Second of all, I think this needs to be addressed because I am sure if this individual thought to write it down, it’s just like in class. If one kid raises his or her hand to get called on, someone else in the room has the same question.” So I am going to start this conversation with the promise that we will land on how do we use tech to be successful.
In fact, I’m going to set the stage today talking about tech being awesome and starting with an apology. Then we’re going to go into a little bit of the reflection of, how do we know this is healthy? How do we use it well, just as a family, how do we set it up? I’m not going to go over the hedges because I just did an episode on the three hedges, so if you need that, go back to the start here on building hedges and making tech safe at home. And then the third one’s going to be like, “My kid has ready for an iPhone. What do I do?” We’re going to walk through that in the third. I was going to jam it into one super episode and then the voice of reason in my life, Anna was like, “How about you not?” So today, so it’s like a little miniseries now based off this question, but I want to start it with an apology.
If this parent walked away with Nathan has proved to me that tech is bad. There is no hope in the world is just the digital world, at least it’s just a public restroom that can at best be maintained but just comes with certain hardships. That’s not the point of my talk at all and I have failed you. So first my apologies, if that’s what you’ve heard from this podcast or my YouTube channel or the social media that we run or my live workshops that’s on me. I am quite literally a professional communicator and I should be able to do better than that. That is not at all my job or my hope is to simply cause despair in parents, and then walk away being like, “Well, at least I showed you.” My goal always is to help you and equip you to have conversations about technology that are based on hope, this idea that you are fighting for your children in a tech world, not with them so that they can use tech on purpose, not for purpose.
That’s my number one goal and I have failed this parent. I do so wish this parent had come up to me personally so I could have found out what part of my talk had inspired this because man, it’s not great. So that’s my first starting apology. I pray into this and I prayed about this one specifically that as I go and give live presentations that I would be very mindful about the words coming to my mouth and the words, the way I set them up because in my head it makes sense, but it doesn’t always land that way. So that’s the first thing I wanted to start with. Second is let’s talk about some of the ways tech is awesome because tech is awesome. It’s absolutely incredible. We have trillion-dollar companies spending billions of dollars in some of the brightest minds in the world.
When we talk video games, video games are some of the best stories, the best graphics, the most engaging. They’re incredible experiences that are enjoyable for wide swaths of humanity. It’s why the two thirds of Americans are gamers. There are more gamers actually over the age of 45 than there are under the age of 18. Why? Video games are awesome and you don’t just grow out of awesome. Instead, it keeps getting more awesome and you find new things to love and introduce young people to them, and they happen to follow in our suit. But video games are awesome. Social media is incredible, especially when it’s done well, and I’m not talking about a specific company, but if I were to talk about a specific company that I see doing social media well, I would look at Strava. Strava is an exercise app. I think they’re going to pivot and unfortunately focus more on income, but right now, early 2024, Strava is an exercise app.
You go on a run, you do a workout, you lift weights, you row, you climb something, ski somewhere, go on a bike ride, Strava will track that and post it to just your little clouds. I have mine set on private only people that follow me can see my stuff, but I ride with a group of people here in the northwest and they expand, so some of them go to Arizona, to Colorado or wherever on longer rides, but they live in this area, and so I’ll see their workouts during the week. I know that there’s a guy named Leon who will ride 75 miles on a strainer on just an average Wednesday morning like, “That’s amazing, Leon, what is happening?” So you can send Leon a message. When my bike exploded on a recent ride, someone from Strava reached out and was like, “Hey, I’ve got a used one. I’m in your area. Let’s connect.” That’s super cool, but there’s no algorithmic feed, there’s no leaderboards for anything other than showing you how many miles you have.
You can’t put yourself in a group so I can be joined to people I ride with and we can see who’s got the best PR stuff going on, but that’s the point of social media. We know each other in real life. We have an activity that connects us and we’re enjoying that, and it’s not trying to get us to do anything other than celebrate the wins others have and enjoy a sport together. That’s social media done well, and I want to emphasize that it could be done. It also puts in stark foil contrast what some other social media do which has just meant to build malcontent. I mean, look at your Instagram feed. I’ll tell you, I go on Instagram only professionally I do it, I don’t know, less than an hour a week probably including posting and doing stuff.
And in that hour I can feel wildly discontent about my achievements as a speaker and as a nonprofit worker and as someone who just loves Jesus because clearly there are some people out there that are doing better than me, and that is the point of that platform. The only reason I have content on Instagram is because it’s a place people are familiar with. It’s a Roman road, you’ll hear that term, but it’s a place people go for help and hope, and I do want to reach those people and so I’m in that space for now, but there’s a definite contrast when it comes to social media. There’s a lot of tech out there that just helps us connect and helps us reach with the gospel. In fact, Anna was recently at a conference where Jennie Allen and David Platt both announced that they have this organization they’re supporting to get the gospel to the corners of the world, and in fact, they’re talking about using leading edge technology to translate the gospel, to distribute the gospel, to deliver it in a way that is making sense to people around the planet, and that’s incredible.
So is digital technology the public restroom of the planet? No, it’s not. It’s not just where people go to drop their refuse, and we need to know three things. First, the tech is awesome. Second God is better. God brings us more joy and more hope, and our hope is not found in digital pathways, in Roman roads and the next cutting edge of translation technology, our hope is found in Christ alone who died for us and rose again, gave us his Holy Spirit that we might be a part of this work of God’s kingdom coming. He says, “The kingdom of God is here,” not just himself, the kingdom, but the kingdom of God is among us and now it dwells inside us so that we are called for good works, Ephesians 2:10 tells us.
That we are prepared beforehand to do and that as Jesus says in John 14 and again in John 16, the Holy Spirit’s job is to teach us to admonish us and convict us, and to help us carry the hope of God, the good news that God saves sinners to a broken and hurting world that God loves, that he loves so much that he sent his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God is better than even our best tech, and we have to have that in mind because we need to recognize there is a pecking order, there is a priority, and if tech starts taking away from God’s purview and territory, then that has to go. It just became expendable. But as long as it’s supporting God’s mission, then it’s wonderful and it can be a beautiful thing, and that brings the third thing that we can trust him even when God asks us to give up our favorite form of technology or entertainment, or connectivity.
If we’re giving it up because we’re cutting something dangerous off or gouging out something that’s harming us or others, then that’s loving and it’s appropriate to do, and that’s what I don’t want to shy away from because technology, while it’s amazing, remember there are two kinds. There’s tool tech that helps us create, drool tech that helps us consume, but it’s not good and bad. It’s just that drool tech comes with hooks. It wants to take your time, your focus and your money, but I’ve misused email before. It’s not email’s fault, it’s not built to be misused, it’s just accessible, and I like work. I like to be able to go out there and help people, know that I’m needed. That feeds a little part of me that’s really unhealthy, but it’s very real.
I am tempted to check my messages more than I need to, more than will behoove a helpful ministry worker. Or, I want to get back to people, that’s cool. I could actually check my email three days a week and still be faithful stewarding the work God gave me, but I don’t. I check it a lot more because I love responding to emails because I know another one will come and that’ll keep the conversation and the momentum going. It makes me feel important and valuable. Is that tech’s fault? No, that’s my fault. And yet there are tech pieces that are designed to hook us in, notifications, infinite scrolls, likes, subscribers, followers. With notifications, certain types of notifications like, “This person’s read your message but hasn’t responded,” that’s another layer under notification. But those things are to motivate behavioral loops.
That is important to know because at the end of the day, while there’s two kinds of technology, what we care about is using tech well, and that’s I guess, where we want to get to on this. We know the tech can be awesome, that God is better and we can trust him even with our joy, that we can use those kinds of tech well, but some of them have hooks built in, and then we also need to recognize that our job as Christians is to discern and to expose lies. John Mark Comer in his book, Live No Lies, talks about the problem of lies, and the main problem with the lies is that it brings with it death that Jesus is very clear that the native tongue of the devil is lying. He invented it. He’s the father of lies and it is his go-to. It’s how he communicates that we see in Genesis 3, the beginning of the conversation, he doesn’t start with an outright lie. He starts with a deceptive question, “Did God really say that if you eat this fruit you’ll die?”
And once he has Eve on her heels, he comes with a claim and says, “You’re not going to die. He doesn’t want you to do it because he doesn’t trust you. You’re going to be able to be like God, choosing good and evil.” And so Eve makes a decision. In fact, there’s three things that go into the decision. She sees that the fruit is good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes and that it was useful for knowledge. Eve did not make an ignorant decision. She made a calculated choice to not trust God. She heard it. She ingested the lie instead of rebuking it and claiming what she knew about the God that she walked in the cool of the evening with, she said, “You know what? I think you’re right. I think God’s okay, but I also think I could do better. I’m going to make my own choice,” and she did.
But like that genie in Aladdin 2, straight to home video, you get your wish, you just didn’t get it in the way you thought you would. And when she chooses that for herself, she does in fact say, “This is now right. It’s on my terms and I’m doing it, but with it comes hardship and heartache, and confusion and anxiety and death,” and that is the problem with the lie is that it always leads to sin and sin always gives birth to death. If it’s not rooted out, exposed and put to death itself, removed, which is Jesus’s work in our hearts by his Holy Spirit. So that’s the problem we’re dealing with in technology is that if you had to pick a single area of our lives that bring lies that we eat, hook, line, and sinker more than technology, I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Tech bring some lies and we love to believe them.
And that might be where this negativity comes, where you’re like, “Nathan, you seem to hate technology and you’re not giving me anything I can do here.” So please hear me. Tech is awesome. God is better and we can trust him that the problem with technology is lies, that lies are the language of the devil and they are a direct assault on the kingdom of God arriving in this time, space and reality, and their direct assault on reality itself because it ruins our ability to see truth. The thing that best exposes reality. Reality as John Mark Comer says, “Is what you run into when you’re wrong,” and we are running into a lot of stuff and technology is one of the things bringing it. There’s four lies I want to address today that technology tells us, and again, I’m not doing this to bum people out. I’m doing this to be very clear on why the conversation about technology can be difficult.
The first one is that technology promises to make us feel good. It says, “If you just use this particular device, if you use this particular app, if you use it enough or in the right way, you will feel good. You’re going to be happy, you’re going to feel connected. You’re going to feel like you’ve got a purpose and that you know what’s going on.” And instead, that’s actually not the case. I’m just going to read this, Stanford psychiatrist, Anna Lembke notes that too much reward for your brain. This is specifically referencing rewards of getting a flashing light or a point splash or whatever the reward might be, a new follower or an extra comment. So digital rewards in this case leading to dopamine that motivates you for the next behavior, which is all part of the loop. She says, “It can cause the players on team dopamine to take their balls and their mitts and go home.” In her words, “Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind,” this is from page 57 of Dopamine Nation.
So we have a Stanford psychiatrist saying, “Yeah, this can make you feel good. You can go on digital spaces and you can get rapid feelings of excellence and belonging and just happiness. But the problem is you can get it so fast and so often that your brain actually starts to shut down some of its ability to create that feeling because they’re simply overwhelmed. The dopamine receptors in your neural transmitters quit taking or receiving the information.” If it was like baseball players who were throwing a ball back and forth and you had 10 of them, seven of them walk off, you left with three, which means when you get just the stimulation of real life, it feels overwhelming.
It doesn’t feel joyful. If you have a kid who can only feel happy using tech and seems to melt and fall apart when real life happens, well, it could be at least in part because they’re so overstimulated that their brain actually can’t feel happiness at the pace of real life, they need another level, another intensity, and their brain has adapted to that level of intensity. Some of it’s because of how fast information comes. Some of it is because of the intensity of that flashing lights and brightness or the sound of it, but whatever the reasoning being, some of it’s just it’s so good at rewarding your brain saying, “Great job, great job, great job, great job,” and motivating you to stay back on that your brain can’t keep up and the pace of real life like doing a math problem, well just can’t compete.
The reason that matters is that we find that this quick pleasure is actually impacting our youth to the point where in 2017, a study done by Twenge et al, Jean Twenge is out of San Diego State University, found that with two hours a day on just digital mediums, this isn’t just social media in this study. So using smartphones, internet, that two hours a day increase the likelihood of depression and suicidal ideation more than 20%, and that by five hours a day your likelihood goes up to 66% more likely to experience depression or suicidal ideation, the thought of taking one’s own life. In teenagers, 66% more likely at five hours a day, and that your average teen is spending more than eight hours a day on drool tech, on not school related digital mediums for entertainment. So first promise the technology makes is, “I can make you feel good, I can make you happy,” and it’s absolutely true. It’s 95% correct except as pointed out by Dr. Anna Lembke, it doesn’t last.
In fact, you can get so much good feeling that your brain to survive starts to shut off some of its receptors to the point where real life no longer can bring you meaningful happiness. The answer to that, by the way she goes on to point out later in the book is that you need 30 days off. The first two weeks will feel awful, and she’s like, “Brain scans show us that the happiness part of your brain is not operating properly, and then in the remaining two weeks of that month off, it starts to re-acclimate and open up, bring back some more of the players so that you can begin to feel the joy of a sunrise and a walk and a good conversation with a friend, which may not do it if you’re overstimulated.” But that we also then understand that when tech says, “I can make you feel good,” that it’s not following through on that promise. That more time on this tech than this thing that’s making me feel good is also making me anxious and lonely and depressed, and even me wondering if being here is worth it.
That is huge. We need to pay attention to that. It is happening. It’s backed by experience and by research, so be mindful of that. That’s the first lie. The second lie is that tech promises to connect us to people. It promises that if we get on there and we do the right things and we get the right profile, and we’re in the right spot, we’ll get connected and have meaningful relationships. I shared an example where that happens well with Strava, but what we’re seeing is people like MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, who in her book, Alone Together, says this, “Technology promised to be the architect of our intimacies.” She notes that people see the internet as the place for hope in life, the place where loneliness can be defeated. She talks about a woman who in her late 60s describes her new iPhone as, “A little Times Square in my pocketbook, all lights and all the people that I could meet.”
Her reflection from this is that people are lonely, the network is seductive, but if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the reward of solitude, the reward of solitude, that we get so connected, much like the first promise, “Hey, I can make you feel good,” and it’s true, but it comes with that dark genie promise of like, “Oh, you felt so good, you no longer feel good anymore.” And this one, “I’ll connect you so well that you’ll no longer actually be connected. You’ll be spread so thin in these partial relationships of convenience that you won’t actually be known by anyone,” and at the end of this Turkle points out that, “Tech encourages us to trust it with our emotions, to bond with it, and therefore to need it more than it needs us.”
And I think that that is a key point when we’re talking about promises made by tech that it can’t keep. That it will connect us to others, and it’s true, but it ends up making us dependent on it for the connection rather than it serving us, and that is a key point that we need to keep in mind when we’re talking about technology with our kids. First, it can make you feel good. How do you know that’s the right amount of goodness? Second is it can connect you. How do we know it’s connecting us in meaningful, purposeful and godly ways? Third promise it makes is that it’ll make us smart. That’s incredible. Think about the amount of information that’s available. I mean, just Netflix on an average month is adding 10,000 hours of new content. You can learn lots of information, but there’s also research as John Mark Comer in his book, Ruthless Elimination of Hurry points out that there are studies that show that just having a smartphone in a classroom will, “reduce someone’s working memory and problem solving skills,” that would be the antithesis of getting smarter.
If you can’t problem solve and you can’t have a high caliber working memory, then it’s not going well, and if the device is the cause of that, we need to recognize that. It also promises to bring us lots of knowledge. You can watch Ted Talks, you can watch YouTube. I’ve learned tons of stuff, how to fix air conditioners, how to be a better cyclist, how to solve problems in my home or even in relationships. There’s stuff about relationship building and problem solving that’s incredible on YouTube. I have content on YouTube, but what is it set up to do? A really interesting resource for this is Kevin Kelly co-founded Wired Magazine, interviewed George Lucas back in the 1990s, 1997, and this is what George Lucas, the founder and creator of Star Wars had to say about the knowledge trajectory of humanity.
And remember, this is just a few years into the creation of the public internet. Here’s what he has to say, “If you watch the curve of science in everything we know, it shoots up like a rocket. But the emotional intelligence of humankind is equally, if not more important than our intellectual intelligence. We’re just as emotionally illiterate as we were 5,000 years ago.” The internet promises, “I’m going to make you smart,” and it’s true. You can learn anything. Go to Khan Academy, khanacademy.org. There is a whole math curriculum that can lead you from kindergarten to calculus, and it’s impeccably staged and step. There’s just enough drool tech in there to make you feel good about finishing a lesson, but not so much that you are getting distracted by side quests. It’s just math and it’s very well done math, very well-supported, little three minute YouTube videos for every single step along the way, incredible tons of information. And yet all of that information in the world, without wisdom, without discernment, I don’t think that Hitler’s problem was he didn’t know enough German or didn’t have enough college level courses.
I think his problem was he was evil. He had lots of knowledge and lots of influence, but not so much with the wisdom and discernment thing, not the ability to truly discern right from wrong. He was basing his life on lies, specifically lies around race, and what makes someone valuable or good. That is an important knowledge piece to have that he was missing because it wasn’t fact knowledge, it was wisdom knowledge. It was the ability to apply truth to reality. This is so, so important. We’ve progressed so much intellectually. Tech has brought us there, and that’s incredible. I want people to have wisdom and knowledge. That’s why I make a podcast and record YouTube videos, and do this stuff because I believe it’s helpful. And my prayer, the reason it’s Flint and Iron, Sparking Positive Purpose for the larger nonprofit, public facing and gospel tech for ministry and Christian spaces is because I want the Lord to use this information like a spark to start a little fire to go and continue to make a difference well past when I’m gone.
And I want the gospel to be the driving force for why we use our technology. This idea that I am a new creation, and that should show up in the tech I use and how I use it, so we need both sides. We want to get smart, tech promises that. But not much tech promises to make us wise. You won’t see that branded, but lots of stuff about making you powerful and smart. So then our fourth and final piece for today is the promise that tech makes that it cannot fulfill on is that we take life on our own terms. We can get life in the order we want at the cost we want with the people we want in the locations we want. The way we want life, it’ll happen on our terms. Tech can make this happen for us, and this is a very attractive thought that tech is flat out lying. It cannot help us with this.
It gives this idea, we’ll go back to Kevin Kelly again, co-founder of Wired wrote in his book, What Technology Wants, and he said, “We take this bad deal from a bad,” genie in my words. And he says, “We willingly choose technology with its great defects and obvious detriments because we unconsciously calculate its virtues. We do the risk and we go, ‘Oh, but look at the positive shiny piece over here.’ We do a risk benefit analysis, and most of the time after we’ve weighed downsides and upsides in the balance of our experience, we find that technology offers a greater benefit, but not by much. In other words, we freely choose to embrace it and pay the price.” Again, What Technology Wants, page 215. His point here is we make deals to accept marginal gains but with an unknown cost. And as we’ve seen already, sometimes that cost is the cost of wisdom at the benefit of increased intelligence.
Sometimes the cost is incredible connectivity with others at the loss of actual interpersonal relationships. And I don’t actually know if I said Turkle’s book is called Alone Together. I may have said that, but that’s the book in which I got that citation. And then it promises to make us feel good, and it’s true. But as Anna Lembke points out, it makes you feel so good that life quits feeling good. So what do we do about this? And I did want to give some good news here. There are some amazing people who bring this into stark contrast of what can be done. We have people like Andy Crouch with the Tech-Wise Family that we can put tech in its proper place. If you want to read the book Tech-Wise Family, that’s the takeaway. Put tech in its proper place. Make sure tech waits for you, make sure that you use it on purpose, not for purpose, and it can be an incredible boon to your family.
He also has a book called The Life We’re Looking For, that talks about the difference between instruments and devices. It’s very insightful. I hope you will check those out. Dallas Willard talks about how we need to apply discipline to our lives. And it can be a bad word, especially in a spiritual space because we’d be like, “Oh, spiritual discipline is like you’re trying to prove yourself to God and leverage your way to salvation,” that’s not what it is. His definition of discipline is awesome. He said, “Discipline is doing by choice what you can’t do by will alone.” And I love that idea of, “I want to love God more.” Well, I can’t just make myself love God more. So what do I do? I choose to wake up every day and read scripture. I choose to put a verse into my heart.
I choose to talk about God and confess my sins, I make these little choices, and what ends up happening is I love God more because of exposed time, because of his word in my heart, because of truth being brought into the light of his light and exposing the darkness in my heart. Those things happen. It’s a discipline though, so we do need to bring these in and intentionally walk after the Lord. John Mark Comer, this is from his book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, that we become what we behold, that we need to set our minds, as Paul says in Romans 8:5 and 6, “Set our minds on the things of the spirit, not on the things of the flesh because the mind set on the things of the flesh is death, but the mindset on the things of the spirit is life and peace.” So set your mind on the things of the spirit. How do we do it? Discipline is a continued choice to turn our eyes upon Jesus, to pivot our hearts and our minds and have something we’re returning to and we’re feeding our soul with truth.
And Maryanne Wolf, actually not a spiritual writer at all, in the squid talking about how those deliberate choices of discipline actually adapt the way our brains work, which would be the argument of Sherry Turkle from MIT. That the way we’re using technology, and actually Anna Lembke from Stanford, the way we’re using technology is changing the way our actual brains work, the way our society functions. And Maryanne Wolf is specifically talking about reading and how we’ve learned to read, and how society is formed around something your brain isn’t made to do. Reading is not natural. It is very much trained, and it’s using parts of your brain that are natural. “Oh, your brain’s really good at object recognition. Oh, your brain is really good at connecting these kinds of ideas,” that’s cool. Reading hijacks that, but it isn’t a part of your brain, like smiling is natural. Everyone, babies, they know a smile when they see one and they know it without ever being told, “That means someone’s happy.”
It’s a natural, instinctive, wired thing, reading is not. So we should then deliberately practice. We should discipline spiritually, certainly, but we should discipline our technology so that we’re using it in ways we want the effects that we’re training in. And finally, Anna Lembke is that our brain is being wired by our digital culture, Anna Lembke is the Sanford psychiatrist, to get a lot of rewards quickly and that we need to take a step back deliberately. Some might call this fasting, but as a step of intentionality to use technology well, we need to pick times to be away. For you, that might mean at this time of day, the phone goes away and I’ll check it during this window to make sure that I didn’t miss something critical or someone needing prayer or whatever it is.
But then the tech goes away again, and this is the Andy Crouch idea of putting tech in its proper place. So first know tech is awesome, then know that it also lies to us in four main ways. It promises that it can make us happy, that it can connect us, that it’ll make us smart, and that it can make life happen in our terms, and those are not true. Tech has yet to be able to deliver on those and deliver on them in the way that it was intended. I can make you smarter with no downside. All of them do those things well, but it ends up being much like Eve. 95% of this is true. You are choosing good and evil. Oh, but you definitely don’t become God. That just doesn’t match reality. Your choices don’t affect who is God. It just simply affects whether you follow him or not, so that is what we need to get to here at the end, we can make deliberate choices in tech to make it a glorious space.
Social media can become more like Strava and less like Instagram. That’s going to be something that we as consumers help make happen. And I want to focus on that to begin this conversation, that tech is awesome. It is incredible, and it doesn’t come without hooks or costs, and we want to be aware of that too. So I hope this is encouraging. If you have any questions just based on this introduction part, please write to me, [email protected] or find me on Instagram @LoveGodUseTech. Check out the YouTube channel. There’s some resources on there like how do you set up screen time? Or the podcast versions of these conversations as well. And then share it with a friend if this is helpful, please do. You can check us out more at gospeltech.net, and then join us next week as we continue this conversation about how we can love God and use tech.
