Technology and Transformation

Listen in to our family worship Sunday and how transformation in the gospel interacts with technology:

Notes/Quotes:

Romans 12:1-2

"We may well find that the best starting place for thinking about how we live is to think about worship.” Beverly Gaventa

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” - Romans 12:1-2, The Message

“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.” - Neil Postman

“If you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smartphone." - Catherine Price - How to Break Up With Your Phone

“The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment. What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. 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.” - Nicholas Carr - The Shallows

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal

James 1:5

“We are continually being nudged by our devices toward a set of choices. The question is whether those choices are leading us to the life we actually want. I want a life of conversation and friendship, not distraction and entertainment; but every day, many times a day, I’m nudged in the wrong direction. One key part of the art of living faithfully with technology is setting up better nudges for ourselves.” - Andy Crouch

Tools for Technology:
Parents: BE INVOLVED. Kids: THANK THEM
Mindful usage: Use technology more than being used by technology.
Digital sabbath//Sabbatical - 1 hour per day, 1 day per week, 1 week per month, 1 month per year.
Phone/Devices to bed before you//wake up after you 
Go outside. 
Track your time. Observe it. What’s it being used on?
Don’t simply consume. Contribute in community.
Remember the fear of man is a snare. 
See real people and pray in real life.
Think before you post. Is it true? Is it Necessary? Is it Helpful? Is it kind?

Don't underestimate how much Satan intends to affect your effectiveness. He will disrupt and destroy everything if it means you'll stop being fruitful. - Jackie Hill Perry