How Technology Is Changing the Way We View People Created in God’s Image

Disembodied People

I think one of the ways that modern technology is changing the way we view other people has to do with the disembodied nature of so much of modern technology. We interact with people across great distances through screens and through avatars. The people that we’re talking to, oftentimes we don’t even know what they look like because all we see is their social media avatar, or we’re talking through FaceTime or some other medium where their physical presence is not present to us.

And so the cumulative effect of that, when you’re interacting with most people in the digital age in a disembodied way, is significant because it starts to have us view humanity in a less human way, where people are not holistic or embodied. They’re just the ideas that they share on social media, or they are the projection of a persona that they put out there on social media.

That’s how we start to view people, and it’s how we start to view ourselves. Modern technology has changed our view of ourselves, having us start to think of ourselves in terms of what people out there—the disembodied masses who follow us on social media—think of us. And then you start making choices and decisions based on How is this going to play with that audience? How is this going to look publicly?

Scrolling Ourselves to Death

Brett McCracken, Ivan Mesa

Drawing from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and applying his insights to today’s scrolling age, this book helps believers think carefully about digital technology and inspires the church to turn difficult cultural challenges into life-giving opportunities.

And so that’s weird. That changes how you view your own humanity. You become a performing commodity more than a human who’s inhabiting a real community of actual life. And so that’s one way that I think modern technology is changing the way we view humans.

The way that modern technology changes how we view God is significant. One thing that comes to mind there is we view God as less present because we simply have less time to be present with God.

We fill all of the gaps in our days with scrolling and doing things on our devices. And if a generation ago, maybe we had more free space in our lives where we could think about God, seek him out in prayer, read his word, we’re kind of eradicating all of those gap moments in our lives and filling them with scrolling life.

And what happens when you do that is that God becomes distant. He becomes more abstract. Maybe he becomes less necessary. That’s another way I think modern technology is changing how we view God. Modern technology is nothing if not trying to give us a heightened sense of our own control over things. The smartphone is almost like a god-like mechanism where you get to kind of play god with the power that you seem to have over all things. You can control this, you can order this, and it arrives with next-day delivery. You can manage your healthcare and visit a doctor and manage your schedule and your appointments, and you can just do everything right through this smartphone.

Modern technology is nothing if not trying to give us a heightened sense of our own control over things.

And it starts to make you have this inflated sense of power. You don’t need, and you aren’t dependent on people anymore, and you’re not as dependent on God, perhaps. You don’t think, I need to ask God for this thing. I need to pray to him. I’m reliant on him.

Technology dovetails with secularism in a lot of ways. And if you look at history, this turns out to be true in various moments of technological development. It dovetails with a rise in secularism. And that’s not coincidental, because technology generally is connected with the Babel instinct of humanity wanting to think of itself as higher than it ought to think and almost replace the power of God and give it to ourselves. And when we do that, we naturally start to have a lower, less important view of God in our lives.

Brett McCracken is coauthor with Ivan Mesa of Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age.

Brett McCracken is a senior editor for the Gospel Coalition and the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World and Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. He lives with his family in Southern California.

We’re Living in the Dystopian Future That Neil Postman Predicted Forty Years Ago

Brett McCracken

April 24, 2025

Heads down. Phones out. Fingers scrolling. This is the humanoid posture of our age. We see it everywhere. Sit in a coffee shop and look around you. All eyes on devices.