Being Constantly Online Has Changed Us More than We Think

A Mental World vs. Physical Reality

When we think about being online a lot—and the average person is online a lot—there are statistics that say that we’re checking email for anywhere from three to four hours per day. And we’re on social media for about that same length of time every day. So that is a solid eight hours or so of online consumption.

And so when you ask, How could that be shaping us? Well, the real answer is, How could it not be shaping us? This is where we are putting our attention. This is where we’re doing most of our reading, most of our work, most of our communication, and even things like digitally mediated worship.

Digital Liturgies

Samuel D. James

People search for heaven in all the wrong places, and the internet is no exception. Digital Liturgies warns readers of technology’s damaging effects and offers a fulfilling alternative through Scripture and rest in God’s perfect design.

And so what that does is it trains us to expect certain things out of our lives. For example, we tend to think that everything should be immediately available because that’s how things are online. And so we kind of develop this impatience with regular life, which tends to be delayed and not as instantly gratifying as we might wish. We tend to view things through the lens of convenience and efficiency rather than the difficulty of maybe making a phone call or having a face-to-face conversation. As we are immersing ourselves in online technology, it becomes very difficult to imagine the world in a different way.

The Bible identifies us as embodied creatures who need the real world that God has made—not simply the mental world of the internet.

We just become attuned to this way of living and we think that this is the way life should go. And that poses challenges for us spiritually because the Bible identifies us as embodied creatures who need the real world that God has made—not simply the mental world of the internet. And so that’s one way that the internet is pushing our consciousness in a specific direction.

Samuel James is the author of Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age.

Samuel James is the associate acquisitions editor at Crossway. He is the author of Digital Liturgies, a regular newsletter on Christianity, technology, and culture. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Emily, and their three children.

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