In the opening paragraphs of his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicolas Carr writes: “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain . . . I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article . . . Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Nicolas Carr then explains that this change in our brains is caused by the way the Internet presents information. When you regularly consume text, images, and video in short bursts, your brain begins training itself by reinforcing certain neural pathways. Eventually, those pathways can become so strong that your brain will lose its ability to focus. Carr said: “Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

The Shallows was published in 2011, right around the time that Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms exploded into the culture and made their ways into our pockets. If anything, our brains are under a much greater assault than they were over a decade ago. The Internet of 2011 could affect our thinking, but the latest crop of smartphone apps has ratcheted up their ability to distract us and suck away our time far beyond what was possible before. Much of this ability to distract us is not an accident; in fact, there are teams of software developers whose job is to design apps to be as distracting and addictive as possible.

Designed For Addiction

Yes, you read that correctly. People are designing the devices we use to addict us. This isn’t happening due to some dark and nefarious purpose but because of simple economics: The more time we spend looking at our phones, the more ads we see, and the more money tech companies make. This direct relationship between screen time and income gives these companies an incentive to keep our eyes locked onto our phones as long as possible. They keep us glued to our phones by following the same methods used to develop one of the most addictive devices ever designed: the slot machine.

Slot machines are known for being so addictive that many people can’t stop playing them. In Adam Alter’s book Irresistible, gambling experts and current and former addicts say, “Slots are the crack cocaine of gambling. They’re electronic morphine. They’re the most virulent strain of gambling in the history of man.”

Even though the odds are completely against winning at slots, casinos can somehow keep people playing the machines for hours. Slot machine designers achieve this by using the findings of behavioral addiction research to make people keep playing even when they are losing. The designers of apps and websites use similar tactics to make our devices as enticing as possible.

In the early 2010s, app designers began adding the Like button to allow users to “like” posts. This simple feature greatly changed how we interacted with the apps. Before, we would get very little feedback from things we would post, but now we post a message or a picture and wait anxiously as the likes trickle in. Each ding or buzz of the phone in our pocket injects a dose of the pleasure chemical dopamine straight into our brain. This positive feedback keeps pulling us back into the app throughout the day and makes us want to post again so we can continue to feel the dopamine rush from replies or likes.

Another way Facebook, YouTube, and others keep us on their apps is by employing an algorithmically generated feed. Before algorithmically generated feeds, we would scroll until we reached posts or videos we had already seen and then close the app or website. Now the app collects data every time we click on something to learn what we like. Once it knows we enjoy watching cooking videos or reading Facebook posts about conservative politics, the app will begin giving us what we want. Every time we refresh our YouTube Recommended page or our Facebook timeline, the apps gladly oblige with ever more content that appeals to our desires. Now we have a bottomless buffet in our pockets that has been carefully prepared to satisfy our every appetite. It is hard to pull yourself away when there is a continual promise that another tasty morsel might soon appear.

The force pulling us towards our phones and causing us to check them tens or hundreds of times each day is not an accident. It has been expertly crafted to fragment our focus and compel us to spend even more time on our devices so tech companies can turn our attention into money.

The Danger of Distraction

Becoming so addicted to our phones that we can’t focus long enough to read the Bible or pray is dangerous enough, but the continual drip of distraction can destroy more than just our devotional lives. In his book 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, Tony Reinke outlines three main ways that distraction pulls us away from better things.

We use digital distractions to keep work away. Instead of fulfilling the hard but necessary responsibilities we face in our work and our homes, we let ourselves be drawn into a never-ending churn of posts, replies, and likes so we don’t have to face whatever we are trying to avoid. For a time, we can forget our responsibilities and give ourselves over to consumption.

We use digital distractions to keep people away. God calls us to love our families, our Christian brothers and sisters, and our neighbors. How often have you buried your face in your phone instead of talking to someone else? When we do this, we portray to others that they are less important than whatever we are looking at right now.

We use digital distractions to keep thoughts of eternity away. Researchers at the University of Virginia found that many people would rather endure painful electric shocks than be left in a room with nothing to occupy their minds. It seems that we desire something, anything, to distract us from being alone with our thoughts. Instead of pursuing quiet time to think seriously about ourselves, others, and God, we pursue distraction and diversion. Soon, our lives are so filled with noise that our thoughts and the voice of God are largely drowned out.

“For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it.” —John Ortberg

Technological Consequences

Technology throughout history has always brought unintended consequences. The printing press made Bibles cheap enough that the common man could own one, but also made it cheaper to print heresy. The automobile allowed us to visit family and friends who live hundreds of miles away, but has fragmented our local communities.

Part of what has made the last twenty years so disruptive is the pace at which change has occurred. In less than a generation we have transitioned from dial-up Internet and email to smartphones and social media. During the transition they seemed like useful tools, but now we can look back and see how these technologies have profoundly changed our lives in both good and bad ways.

Should we go back to a time before we had the Internet, social media, and smartphones? Or can we learn how to use digital technology for beneficial purposes while resisting the slot machines in our pockets? For some, implementing a few common-sense restrictions will help. Others may need more drastic measures.

Digital technology is not going away and will continue to be an ever more present part of modern life. If we do not plan to renounce all use of it, then we must learn how to use technology in a way that doesn’t keep us from loving God, our families, and our neighbors.

Bibliography

Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton, New York, 2011.

Reinke, Tony. 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You. Crossway, 2017.

Alter, Adam. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Penguin Press, 2018.