Do you?
With our smartphones in hand, we are connected. Always connected. Facebook, Twitter, email, instant messaging, SMS, and that’s just the beginning. Always connected. Always checking.
I remember my first smartphone. For the sake of my family (and weekend) I changed the settings so that I wouldn’t be alerted every time an email hit my work email address. It was bad enough that I would manually check my personal email, Facebook and Twitter. Adding an alert for work related emails only added to my check-in addiction.
If I wasn’t reaching for it, it was reaching for me.
Does it even matter? Does it matter that we are constantly connected to our cyber-selves?
Tim Challies, author of The Next Story, tackles this topic as he answers some key questions:
- How has life—and faith—changed now that everyone is available all the time through mobile phones?
- How does our constant connection to these digital devices affect our families and our church communities?
- What does it mean that almost two billion humans are connected by the Internet … with hundreds of millions more coming online each year?
This is a great wake-up call. What I like about this approach is, it doesn’t abandon technology. If I only had a nickel for every time someone had a “Facebook fast.” Fasting, boycotting and ignoring these technological advances isn’t the answer. That makes as much sense as living in the early days of the printing press and deciding to ignore books. This isn’t a question of right or wrong, it’s about balance; and you can’t achieve that balance until you fully understand all the effects. You can’t find the middle until you know the full length.
Shaun Groves posted a few months back, Dumb Phones Are For Dumb People. Awesome title, right? After having needed a smartphone during a huge project for Compassion International, he found himself at a crossroad. He said this about the importance of using a smartphone:
I had an idea for for a fundraiser so massive my boss demanded I get a smart phone before he would even let me attempt it. “Only if you get a big boy phone,” he said. And I did. And he was right. I received more than 100 e-mails an hour at one point! And many more texts. There’s no way I could have lead that project without that phone.
With smartphone in hand, Shaun Groves was able to do a might work for God’s glory. I’m glad Shaun wasn’t in the middle of a smartphone fast.
But, that’s not the end of his story.
The people in our lives – especially our children – feel that they are in competition with our technology. Sherry Turkle says kids have grown up disconnected from parents who pushed them on a swing while texting, spoke to them while staring at a laptop, thumbed their Blackberry while “watching” soccer practice, read blogs and posted to Facebook instead of doing any number of things with them. Technology-wielding multitasking parents have left their children feeling like a task.
With the Compassion project behind him, and an overbearing need to always check his smartphone, Shaun decided he needed a downgrade:
I’m too dumb for a smart phone.
So today I asked Brent to sell me the dumbest phone in the store. It was free with a contract extension. It feels like Legos. It doesn’t get e-mail. It’s painfully slow to text with. The ringtones are vintage. It does so little and is so unfun to do it on that, well, I’ll barely use it.
That’s just what I need.
Is that what you need?
Then again, maybe you don’t have a choice. You have to find where the balance is. The middle. Once you’ve surveyed it, you’ll either need to downgrade your phone or learn how to control your check-in addiction.
If you need some help with the latter, we’ll be posting that tomarrow: How to Control Your Check-In Addiction.
[via Shawn Groves]
[…] however, there are healthier ways of dealing with it. Yesterday, I asked the question:Do you have a check-in addiction?Constantly needing to check-in to your mobile device can often pull us away from what truly […]