Is Your Phone Changing You?

Review of Tony Reinke, Crossway, 224 pages, 4 of 5 stars

I read this book slowly because I hate how often I check my smartphone (SP). I had held out with my dumb phone as long as I could. I’ve never used Facebook, X, or Instagram. But I see how my SP serves as both a tool of good and bad. This book helped me. See the full summary HERE.

Overview

Humans check their phones about every 4 minutes. And the vast majority of Christians Reinke surveyed check their phone within minutes of waking up. More phone time often means more depression, anxiety and less sleep. It means more porn, worse vocabulary, less meditation, increased pride, and extra loneliness. The SP yields both the bewitching power to waste our time and the enormous benefit of making our lives more productive.

Summary

Each of the book’s twelve chapters explains a way our phones are changing us. I think the most relevant chapters moved from one to twelve. So read chapter one first if that’s all you have time for.

• Chapter One (“We Are Addicted to Distraction”) gives three reasons we succumb to the distractions of smart phones so easily (it keeps work away, people away and thoughts of eternity away).
• Chapter Two (“We Ignore our Flesh and Blood”) shows how it’s easier and more dangerous to form and keep online relationships.
• Chapter Three (“We Crave Immediate Approval”) demonstrates how SPs prick our impulse for appreciation and self-replication.
• Chapter Four (“We Lose Our Literacy”) illustrates how digital readers naturally read too quickly. They skim instead of pondering. Those that struggle to read often have an addiction to SPs.
• Chapter Five (“We Feed on the Produced”) urges us to enjoy each moment with our full senses. SP’s produce actors and temp us to capture everything with pics.
• Chapter Six (“We Become Like What We ‘Like’”) demonstrates how our object of worship is our object of imitation, which is why modern man is so narcissistic.
• Chapter Seven (“We Get Lonely”) shows how SPs produce loneliness. Six instinctive reasons push us to our handheld computers.
• Chapter Eight (“We Get Comfortable in Secret Vices”) reveal the magnetism to porn. This is clearly a male dominant vice (e.g. Ashley Madison).
• Chapter Nine (“We Lose Meaning”) shows how Huxley’s Brave New World‘s prediction was right–books will be marginalized by a data torrent.
• Chapter Ten (“We Fear Missing Out”) unmasks how envy thrives with the SP, comparison culture.
• Chapter Eleven (“We Become Harsh to One Another”) gives a good Spurgeon quote that summarizes the chapter: “The easiest work in the world is to find fault.”
• Chapter Twelve (“We Lose Our Place in Time”) reveals how SPs waste so much of our time.

Who Should Read this Book?

Phone pastors that have lost their ability to pray long and study deeply, phone moms that ignore their kids and can’t enjoy moments w/out taking pics, phone teens that love porn and crave approval, phone dads that follow celebrities over heroes, phone men-children that fear responsibility and pain, phone gossips that love finding fault, phone loners that wear headphones to mask their social awkwardness, and phone illiterates that have lost the beauty of their language.

Good Quotes

• “The sad truth is that we are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation.” (75)
• From Flavel: “[Satan wants] to distract our thoughts, and break them into a thousand vanities.” (127)

Five Personal Response Goals

1. Resist the constant urge to capture every memory with my phone. Enjoy the moment with my full senses, then journal about it later.
2. Remember that feeding on vanity in isolation will starve me. But communing with God in isolation will feed me.
3. Spurn useless chitchat, stupid jokes, GIFs, and endless sports. Redeem the time. I’ll give an account for everything (Mt. 12:36)
4. Guard my spiritual disciplines by keeping my phone away from my bed, using a real alarm clock, and responding to messages at only certain key times.
5. Guard my relationships by trashing any non-essential apps, turning off most notifications, asking family to give feedback on my SP habits, always leaving my SP out of sight and occasionally digitally detox.