Season 3, episode 6: "Technology is Forming You and Failing to Transform You."

Your phone is not a tool. It is not neutral.

Your phone is a cash-cow device designed to get you to pick it up, use it, never put it down, and in the process, make other people lots and lots of money.

Friends, we are being formed by an algorithm, created by neuroscientists and computer programmers in California, on full display across all major social media platforms. Our eyes and our minds get pulled into video after video, feed upon feed, all based on what other people perceive we want to look at or consume.

We are being formed...or perhaps, de-formed.

The You Do You Era is marked by rampant use of electronic devices: Phones, tablets, computers, watches, and more. Our behaviors have become daily liturgies. Rather than organizing ourselves around time in service to God-in-the-world, most everything we do is orchestrated around or deeply influenced by inputs from our smart devices.

In this episode, we pull heavily from James K.A. Smith and Andy Crouch (The Tech Wise Family). We unashamedly encourage you to be weird, to adopt odd practices and thick boundaries around technology. Why? Because you and your kids are being formed by these practices....or, perhaps, de-formed! The question to consider is "What image am I being formed into?"

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Throughout this season, we want to remove the cultural scales from our eyes using insight from:
Alan Noble (You are Not your Own)
Andrew Root (Ministry in the Secular Age series)
Alan Ehrenberg (Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age)
Charles Taylor (A Secular Age)
Andy Crouch (The Tech-Wise Family)
Leonard Sax (The Collapse of Parenting)
All of Jean Twenge's (SDSU) recent interviews / articles / and her books
James K.A. Smith's books and articles
N.T. Wright (The Day the Revolution Began among others)
Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue)
The New and Old Testaments... plus other works that we sprinkle throughout.

[The views presented are those of the speaker or author and do not necessarily represent the views of DoD or its components.]

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