Replay: Put Social Media In Its Place with Andy Crouch

In this Replay episode, Matthew Lee Anderson, Derek Rishmawy, and Alistair Roberts are joined by Andy Crouch — Partner for Theology and Culture at Praxis — to examine what the data on social media and video games reveals about the diverging formation of young men and women. The conversation turns on a pointed question: what happens when the skills adolescence develops are simulations rather than realities? And what does that mean for formative communities — home, school, and church — that bear responsibility for shaping persons, not just managing behaviors?

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Chapters

• 2:00 — Guest Introduction: Andy Crouch
• 3:00 — The Tweet: Social Media, Video Games, and Diverging Outcomes
• 5:30 — Why We Now Have Reliable Data
• 7:00 — Social Media's Harm to Girls
• 8:30 — Why Boys Seem Fine (At First)
• 11:00 — The Idolatry Framework: Things That Work at First
• 17:00 — Pornography as Formation Failure
• 19:00 — The Feminization of Internet Culture
• 25:00 — The Algorithmic Turn: From Chronological to Algorithmic Feeds
• 31:00 — The Algorithm Catches You at Your Worst
• 33:00 — Mobile Devices and the End of Distance
• 36:00 — Practical Applications: Give Resistors an Off-Ramp
• 40:00 — Banning Phones in Schools: A Framework
• 44:00 — "But They Need to Prepare for the Real World"
• 46:00 — Instruments vs. Devices: A Distinction
• 48:00 — Closing & Patron Teaser

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexin Press, who publishes books that love the Word, love the Faith, and Love the Church. Lexin Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our February book of the month is Thirty Key Moments in the History of Christianity, inspiring true stories from the early church around the world. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting BakerBookhouse.com at backslash pages, backslash mere fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes to get thirty percent off our book of the month from Lex and Press.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

And so the challenge that we have requires some sort of collective organization. There can't just be a an individual response to these things. Because it's one thing to say I as an individual can resist some of the tendencies of social media, but I don't think as a culture the tendencies are resistible. On the culture-wide level, the tendencies I think are inexorable.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

Should we ban smartphones and video games? My name is Matthew Lee Anderson, and you're listening to another episode of Mere Fidelity, the podcast where we think together about the word of God and the world we live in. All right. Very delighted to have Andy Crouch back with us. Our, I'm tempted to say, the Mere Fidelity Technology Correspondence. Correspondent. Andy is a partner for Theology and Culture at Praxis. He's the author of a number of books, including The Life We're Looking for Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World with his daughter Amy. All sorts of books. We had him on, we've had him on to talk about several of his books, I think, at this point. Andy, it's great to have you with us.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Thank you. Glad to report back in from the frontiers of technology.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

Yeah. I was trying to decide between describing you as our technology correspondent or our expert on the principalities and powers.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Yeah, same job. Same job.

SPEAKER_02 2:12

That's right. We're not going to ask you how demonic technology is this time, though it's always a hot topic. But this is this is this is a great show. It's not often that we've done episodes that are inaugurated by tweets, but it turns out that the platform turns into some good. So, Andy, you tweeted, I'm gonna remind you of something you wrote on the platform uh a while ago. You tweeted, I'd summarized a lot of the emerging trends this way. Social media is pretty terrible for girls, but not so terrible for their prospects as young women. Video games are not so terrible for boys, but pretty terrible for their prospects as young men. And porn a fortiori. So the first question is unpack this for us. Set this out. Like how what's what's up with these emerging trends with social media and video games with the youths?

SPEAKER_00 3:14

That's right. Well, you know, the first thing is that we actually have data to talk about uh that is fairly reliable as social science data goes, which there's a big, big asterisk on that, or multiple asterisk maybe on that. Um, but uh so I wrote this book, The Techwise Family, in 2017, because I was just myself, as as all of us are in this era, trying to make sense of like what's a good path for technology uh in all kinds of places, including the home. And the number one question I would be asked, um, you know, when I would speak about the book in 1819 BC, basically, um before COVID, was what's the data? What do the data show? And I found this a very annoying question because for a couple of reasons. One is the you know, these usually very well-intentioned parents. It's such an American question to ask, well, you know, what do the experts tell us is happening? Like, well, the most important data is the data you have from your own child. Like, tell me, you you have way more data about your own child than anyone else does, and that's what matters the most for your own decision. So you don't need like some, you know, controlled experiment out in on a population N of 5 million to tell you what's happening. Um, but the other thing I would say is, well, it's too soon. We don't have evidence yet. It like it takes a really long time to collect anything like uh reliable data about social uh effects. Um, well, it's now um seven years after I wrote the book, and five or six years after I was fielding all those questions about the data, and now we actually are getting more and more data that has the kind of reliability that comes from time, from people having time to kind of spool up survey design, from these questions about, for example, social media use getting incorporated into just general social survey type uh measurements and so forth. And I was reflecting as I read that tweet, Matt, that um I was reflecting on, you know, Jonathan Height and collaborators' work that has been collating all this data. And it really is converging on a very consistent story, which is, and this was the first thing I said in the tweet, social media is pretty terrible for girls. Uh, there's a really strong correlation between the number of hours a girl spends on uh social media in a week, say, and um depression. By the way, uh Hayton uh about a year ago kind of summarized this, and he made the really interesting point that it's not like poison, as in you take a dose and then you immediately feel really terrible or something terrible happens. So some of the studies that are done that are allegedly show there's no effect have look at it just over a single week. And in a single week, it probably doesn't make any difference, like so many things don't. But uh the longer-term studies that look at use over time show this very strong effect. So it it really is um pretty hard to dispute that the the mental and emotional health of adolescents uh uh around the world in many, many different cultures, actually, um, though I'm most conversant with the data from you know the Anglophone world, the US and UK, that girls really suffer when they kind of get caught up in this uh kind of system. And you know, of course, Meta, uh once known as Facebook, themselves had this data from their own internal studies. So this really should not be a surprise, right? The the really complicating thing is that even social media proper doesn't seem to have the same effect on boys. And then more generally, all these hockey stick effects that we're seeing in girls' mental health troubles, uh, where the hockey stick is you know suddenly trending up in the last five plus years, the it's a much more muted effect for boys. So that's the first thing I was thinking about. Then I was thinking about on the whole, and considering the background population level phenomena, which is everybody's getting more depressed and anxious across the whole all age groups, um at least in the United States. But but given the background trends, young women are actually not doing so badly. So young women are now the majority of college students in the United States, they're the majority of elite college students, they're the majority of professional students, they are excelling in the workplace now that barriers for to women for participation in professions or whatever have dropped. Um they're actually doing pretty well. And so now ask how are young men doing? And uh not it's not a zero-sum game. You know, young men do poorly at the expense of young women, at least I don't think so. But young men are doing terribly. I mean, uh they are not uh seeking out challenging employment, they're not even seeking out just good, solid jobs like plumbing, that we all really want there to be another generation of plumbers for very practical reasons, speaking as a homeowner. Um uh young men are not seeking out the trades, they and you know, the trends aren't like catastrophic and they aren't as hockey stick-like as for girls, as near as I can tell, but they're still very notable. So then I started thinking, well, what if it's because the things boys get hooked on through digital media in adolescence are not terrible in the moment or in the short run. That is, you're playing a bunch of video games with your friends. I mean, that's pretty fun for a boy. And these games are quite social, as any parent of boys knows, both in if they're played together, like in the same room on a game console, but also the the online games. Uh, you know, you got you're you got your headphones on, you're talking to your friends, uh, some of them you know, some of them maybe made through the platform. So you feel kind of connected, you're on a mission together, you're doing the thing, and this is a little speculative, but I think one of the fundamental kind of masculine motivations, especially sort of unfiltered in a way in in childhood and and early adolescence and boys, is just to show mastery in front of other boys. Like you want to show that you have figured out how to do something. If it's a Rubik's Cube and you're a nerd, that will work. If it's basketball, yeah, that'll work. Like you want to show that you've mastered something and get other boys to recognize it. And they're getting to do that. And then you add in porn, and you know, it could be the case that in the short run, porn is a good way of kind of satisfying sexual urges for men. It doesn't seem to be so much for women, but for men, it seems to kind of work. So in the short run, your mental health might not really diminish that much. Now, I think all of us have seen that boys have fairly compulsive behaviors when it comes to video games, let alone porn. And that troubles families and parents. But but if you if you were just measuring, like how are they doing, if you ask them on the kind of things we ask on surveys, they might do fine. The problem is, sorry, Matt, I feel like I'm going on really long with this technology. No, this is great. But so one more kind of paragraph here. The problem is the things that social media leverages for girls that are that make it so terrible, and maybe we can unpack that more with four men trying to figure out why it's terrible for girls. We'll see how we do. Um, this it involves, it's about positioning yourself socially to have influence, basically. And this turns out, in my opinion and observation, to be kind of a general, generally a kind of fundamental motivation for women is to uh influence in a social setting. It's not so much about mastery of the world demonstrate, it's it's kind of more mastery of the relational world or knowing how to operate within a relational world with all the feedback that we're meant to get from each other. And girls are very motivated to figure that out. Now that gets very toxic in the way social media channels it, but the skills that it's developing are extremely translatable uh to the world of the professions, to the world of kind of high achievement, uh, even just kind of ordinary life in our very information uh and relationally flowing kind of organizational context that we now live in in college. And and so what my kind of working theory here is that it's terrible when it's kind of infected with the immaturity of adolescence, but it matures into a kind of relational fluency that's actually transferable to real world um success on the terms of postmodern capitalism. But for boys, that mastery that you achieved in the video game has, unless you go to fly drones for the Air Force, which you can, which you can do, it has very few real-world correlates. And it has substituted for developing any real-world correlates. In other words, you have no idea what to do with a wrench, you have no idea what to do with an actual truck, you have no idea what to do on an actual football field for that matter, if you're only playing FIFA football. Um, and and and so you've spent the formative years of your life developing a simulation of skill that's very satisfying to exercise, but does not translate into any efficacy into the world that you as a young man are trying to enter. So this is my theory. And and then I'll just say one more thing, which is you know, uh, in one sense you can say, so so the young women are okay. The problem is most of the young women want to find a young man, just statistically speaking, and form a life partnership with him. And what do you do when all the young men have have had all their development attenuated by these simulations, not least their sexual development, and they're you're like, you're stuck. So it's bad for young women too, in the you know, long run. Sorry, that was really long, but that's that's how I'm thinking about it.

SPEAKER_02 12:45

That's a lot. That's that's so good.

SPEAKER_03 12:47

No, that's super helpful. And even on on the on the porn double, I mean, leaving aside the obvious big moral uh issue in terms of just the isolating and underdeveloping any social and emotional skills that you need to actually relate to, connect, uh, find, attract, and and communicate in any way that that would generate any sort of the sort of relationship that would be uh the biggest marital bond. Yes, yes, yes. It's it's the exact inverse. Uh even more than video games, which at least you can be friends with people and still have some amount of social fun and so on. I mean, I don't. I don't I I'm terrible at video games, but other people, from what I've heard, still do. Uh but but but but that that that that inverse relationship. So that's very helpful. It's very helpful to think that through in terms of how that shrinks the capacity.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

You know, you said something interesting. You qualified that, Derek, in an interesting way. Um, you said leaving aside the moral kind of considerations. And I think I know what you mean, but I almost wonder if that's um an unnecessary apology for what morality actually is. Because I think morality actually is a claim about what forms you in the long run into a person who can live even the life you yourself want, let alone the life your community wants for you or whatever. And like, you know, so I just think we don't have to apologize, like morality is a uh ideally time-tested like set of judgments about what makes for someone who can form the kind of life, the kind of life we should have. So, you know, it's funny that we feel like we need to say, oh, just on a practical level. Well, morality is practical, it turns out.

SPEAKER_03 14:30

Well, yeah. Abs absolutely. Yeah. It's just there's that level of the big bright shiny red line of the Lord has said, don't objectify. And then it turns out doing that consistently for years and years and years and years tends to shrink you. Yes, right, correct. As as a as a as a as a functional human in a lot of relational ways. And so in the measurable ways.

SPEAKER_02 14:50

On this theme, Derek, I mean, the setting the moral considerations aside. I mean, Andy, as you were talking about the porn dimension specifically, you actually had a line that I thought, oh man, if people took that out of context, it'd be hilarious, right? Because you said something like, porn is actually pretty good, could be pretty good in the short term for satisfying young men's sort of sexual appetites. And I thought like, oh man, if anyone were to sort of like want to cancel Andy Crouch, they could take that little bit.

SPEAKER_03 15:18

And it happened here first.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

It wouldn't be the first. But but I actually think there's there's something about the way in which I mean, I'm reflecting about my own writings about pornography, which I've I've had several at this point in different contexts, and and sort of the dimensions that I have missed about this. And one of the things that I I find really gripping about your presentation and your thoughts on this is just trying to weave together the short-term benefits with the long-term damages, and how things that are short-term very satisfying and rewarding, are in fact long-term very degenerative and uh not conducive to our happiness and harmony. And there's something about the way in which this is this is not really on the theme, but there's something I think about the way in which evangelicals, including me, have talked about porn and the the prohibitions and tried to persuade young men to not engage in it, that has missed this social social ecology and has missed these finer grain dimensions of the lack of formation that's going on. I that's that's my and maybe this is personal. Maybe maybe evangelicals did do better at it, and it was my failure, and I'm and I'm actually really open to that. But I but I think there's something about the social ecology of these practices and the ways in which they're forming us that is very helpful to expand our moral horizons and the ways in which you're talking about to situate these technologies not just in the the kind of immediate short term, what's it doing right now? Oh, totally. What is it doing to us over the next 20, 30 years?

SPEAKER_00 16:53

And you know, so and I think the reason that that thought comes naturally to me is that I I have already really decided that all addiction is just a species of what the Bible calls idolatry, and that and one of my fundamental convictions about idols is they work at first. I I don't think things become idols without delivering initially on the promise. Even the fruit uh in the garden, which is the primal, primordial idol, in a sense, does deliver knowledge of good and evil immediately, as as advertised. They immediately have a new sense of dimensions of shame, responsibility, guilt, etc., that they didn't have before. I think that one's a little tricky, but but you know, we look at the ancient or eastern figurines that we've dug up in archaeology that that we also read about in the Old Testament, uh, bull, little statues of bulls, fertility statues and so forth, and especially the bull, like, why would you worship this thing? Well, I think the reason you would is somebody worshiped it at some point when they really needed a crop or s or some some fruitfulness of the ground, and it happened. And you're like, oh, we found the trick. Let's worship it again. And I I just don't think you would, I don't think primitive people were um somehow co so cognitively different from us that they, you know, like we can't imagine worshiping that thing. But we absolutely devote ourselves now to things that in the long run are not going to work, but that in the short run uh have delivered. And to me, that's the pattern of idols. So, so it would make all the sense in the world to me that the really powerful idols actually deliver at the beginning reasonably well. And I think social media does that too for girls in that inchoate uh disorienting stage of middle school where you're suddenly aware of social dynamics and of competition and conflict and all these things that suddenly come to the fore. To have an app that channels that, gives you some control over it, gives you some feedback that you don't know how to get otherwise, like it kind of works for you, you know, at the beginning. So I just think that's idols.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

One thing I wonder about with social media, first of all, there's a variety of social media. We might think about the differences between something like Facebook or Twitter or TikTok, Instagram, Tumblr, um, Discord, all of these have their different dynamics. And it also seems to me that one of the developments of the social media age has been a more general feminization of social context. So whereas previously the internet was a far more male space. I mean, the the old slogan there are no women on the internet um or there are no girls on the internet, the idea that there is a certain social cachet that women have within mixed settings that was not operative in a context where you're just operating anonymously for the most part, or pseudonymously, and in terms of the days of Usenet or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Yeah, it was uh it was a lot of guys.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

And also when you introduced these vast sort of planes of discourse, whereas formerly you'd have these smaller niches, these fora or uh and blogs and things like that. Now you have these vast open planes, as it were, where people are herding into tribes and there's a certain liveness to speech that comes as a result of um the immediacy of discourse. Whereas if you're reading a book, that word has been written many years ago for the most part, and so there's not a sense of liveness to it. But on something like uh Twitter, every uh element of a speech there, every statement is uh a speech act. And so people are wondering what's this person signalling, how are they associating, is this a um a statement of alignment, or whatever it is. And what we've seen, I think, in the last uh um ten years particularly has been a shift uh cr culture wide towards a society that has more feminine norms of discourse. If you think back to the earlier period of the internet, it was the place where new atheism was all the rage. It was a very male form of debate, uh belligerent uh argumentative discourse really built along an oxbridge uh mode, with the key leaders being um men like Dawkins, Hitchens, um Sam Harris, Dennett. And uh what happened was a very significant and marked shift with the rise of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter as they went mainstream and the movement in the tumblefrication of discourse that Catherine Dee and and others have described to a feminization and to social justice um discourse which is very much focused not upon the sort of old vibe of the um new atheist uh uh discourse, which was very much about um uh truth that doesn't care about your feelings. Hard science, um belligerent argument. It became very much sensitivity, um, recognition of equ the need for equality, inclusion. It's very much a shift to the culture of the old fan fiction um groups, which were really mainstreamed in many ways by Tumblr and its discourse about various franchises and discourse about Harry Potter and things like that and all the morals surrounding them. And so I think there's been this more general shift that's happened in the culture as a result of the internet. So it's not as if women are participating in this realm of social media and then finding it fits very well to the wider culture of the university, the workplace. The culture of the university and the workplace has been tumblerified, has been um brought into this culture that's been formed online. The internet now is the wider culture. And so it seems to me that that shift is an important one for the dynamic between the sexes in ways that men would not have struggled in quite the same way in the world of 2005. But this shift, I think, is an important one that has shaped the cult culture more broadly.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Yeah, I was I was feeling a little I I was going to object in a way that um I'm not sure girls use social media in the in the ways that you're describing. Uh and and I I think we shouldn't overestimate, and this is based on very secondhand understanding, because my own daughter, for example, is now in her 20s and completely off social media and has been for years, but um I I think we shouldn't overestimate the the amount to which social media for girls is even public. You know, it's it's it's very much about a kind of too-wide community of of reference and um, you know, like a school, uh, say, uh, where you really should be known by your group of friends and not care about other kids, is how I think you should live. But it's about kind of expanding your community, but it's not about entering this kind of world of discourse like the new atheists or something like that. I don't think hardly any 13-year-olds are doing that. But you what you're saying is.

SPEAKER_01 24:14

I mean, I think the key shift is that identity has become the big political thing. And so the internet is a place of self-representation where you can kind of that became an obsession, particularly the norms around that Tumblr. And then they became mainstreamed through Facebook and then Twitter, and that becomes more general discourse. So politics becomes about very much projecting your identity. There's a certain therapeutic shift within the wider discourse.

SPEAKER_03 24:46

Alistair, I I think what you're talking about applies more to millennials, elder millennials and younger millennials, etc. etc., rather than like the Gen Z, the the the junior high to high school Gen Z Zoomer kids that I think were we initially were talking about I think I'm not disputing the social trends, but in terms of like how it functions psychologically.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

We're talking what I'm talking about is the experience of young men and young women. Um whereas there's another conversation about boys and girls.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Right. So what I'm hearing is like there were two things going on. One was kind of the sudden explosion of the usage of these various things for for boys and girls, you know, um adolescents. Uh, but then like when they hit adulthood, it's almost like they they're they're uh meeting a moving target in terms of what the relational norms are. And in that sense, it's it's a world where boys turning into men, maybe you're you're saying are even less equipped, like even more disoriented and have our time like finding a way to operate in this in this new world of the new adult world that didn't exist, that has also had its own story of how social media has shifted. That's interesting. I mean, I yeah, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 25:59

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SPEAKER_02 26:58

Yeah, just to put a point in for Alistair's thesis, Caitlin Tiffany has a book, Everything I Need I Get From You, How Fangirls Created the Internet As We Know It, right? In which I think this is part of Alistair's story, the actually the identification of groupies on the internet and their ability to follow, say, one direction and the development of Tumblr and in the middle of that process really had pervasive influences on how people identified themselves more broadly. In a way, but I think Derek's point is also really salient here in that there are, in one respect, two different conversations happening. Well, where Alistair is is reflecting about the ways in which those those transitions that happened in the 2010s really reshaped sort of broader public discourse beyond the internet, even. There is still this psychological question about what's happening with young people who are not on Tumblr right now, where young people means the high schoolers, where the nature of the I the usage of social media seems to have shifted between what what's happening on TikTok. There's still fandom that's happening. Obviously, the Swifties are more than enough evidence of the sort of the power of fandom. So that hasn't gone away, but there is something that has become more pervasive, more consuming about these different types of social media that are in your pocket versus what happened on Tumblr. Um it's been it's been more mainstream, and that seems like it has it's a slightly different conversation than I think that that which Alistair has introduced.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

I will I will say I I kind of wonder if we're entering, I mean, this is a bit speculative, and who knows where it's all going. And of course, the most dominant app that exemplifies this could be banned any day almost by almost any American administration or Congress for different reasons. But TikTok, which is like the the the latest apotheosis of a kind of I think unfolding trend, um is so much about the algorithm, and the algorithm is so inescapable. I mean, that's the other, that's the thing that is really, I think, shaping the next generation's experience uh far more than even Tumblr ever had. Because so the you know, the big shift in all social media is from the chronological to the algorithmic, the chronological being just kind of a in-order list of the things the people you follow have said or posted or whatever. The algorithmic is a response to the failure of the chronological, which is you end up wanting to follow too many people, it's it's a flood, you need a way to sort, and so the algorithm will sort for you. And it almost feels to me like the algorithm is disrupting the collectivities that formed in the age of the chronological timeline. Whether it was the blog role to go like deep gen X here, uh or uh I gosh, uh you mentioned you alluded to a couple of these, Alistair, like the or just the the collectivities that could form actually are now broken up by the algorithm because the algorithm is going to serve you, not your next friend in your kind of niche uh community that cares about a particular uh fantasy uh novel series or something. It's going to serve you like the just the next thing that scratches the itch that's closest to the surface that the algorithm can measure. And it bounces around. It doesn't like embed you in any kind of tribe. It just bounces around from titillating thing to titillating thing, and and using that word very broadly for whatever it is that tickles your little, you know, dopamine uh receptors that the algorithm can detect. So I almost wonder if the next generation is there's this even more isolating kind of um phenomenon going on, it seems to me.

SPEAKER_03 30:43

I'm just speculating. It even feeds you your next hate read, the next person, like you click on one tweet, you're like, man, that guy is a dope. Why do I keep seeing his stuff? Keep getting madder. Why do you keep and then and then you click, and there it is. And now you're the next person you don't like. The algorithm knows what you don't like.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

When she was writing about TikTok, she wrote this is a real sentence in the English language. She proposed that uh TikTok is, quote, one of the best platforms for questioning people who can allow their algorithm to take them on a journey that could eventually lead them to a more authentic and joyful place. Like as a as a distillation of what the alg their algorithm could promise them on TikTok, their algorithm is going to lead them to a more authentic and joyful place.

SPEAKER_03 31:46

And I just think like that's that's really just like the algorithm as that's like the algorithm as like birth doula along with like familiar, like uh, you know, uh uh and all other things lead you a spirit guide. Hey, for now we're back at uh now we're back at AI as demons. There we go, good. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 32:11

I mean, so this my daughter is the one who really got me thinking about this because she has decided she will not use any platform that doesn't have a way to escape the algorithm, which means she's off most of them, both as a poster and as a consumer, if you will, because it and she has a great line um or great phrase about this. She says, the algorithm consistently catches you at your worst. It it never catches you at your best. It never like, and that's why that's an unbelievable quote from Rebecca. It's uh it's hard to believe someone wrote that and felt like they could just put it out there as a straightforward um kind of hope for what could happen for the algorithm because all of us know like these things do not help us pursue what we ourselves consider makes us happiest. That's that's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

I do find with algorithms just the very way that they're designed, they're designed to make you reactive and to diminish your capacity of response. So I think of the the ways that we have the capacity to respond, it has a lot to do with the the sort of hiatus between stimulus and what happens next. And so that can be that difference can be time, it can be the emotional space where we don't feel um people are squeezing in upon us, it can be the context where we're just in solitude and we can spend time reading alone. It can be that sense of uh the distance in time that exists between the person who has written and us reading. It can be a host of other things like that. And social media, the pace that it moves, the immediacy of it, the emotional intensity of it, all of these things rob us of that differentiation that enables us to respond rather than react. And so the more that we're bombarded with this sort of material, the more that we become uh people who are just within this plasma of direct connection with other people and constantly just bouncing off them, rather than actually being able we have the sort of collective uh feelings of like panic or collective anxiety or collective anger. There's not the ability to stand back and wrestle with our own selves and actually gain self-mastery. And it it seems to me that there's also a technological uh aspect to the shift from the internet as something that you go on to. You go on to the internet in the 1990s to surf the internet. You uh call downstairs and who's using the phone? I need to use the internet, and that experience is very different from the experience of the internet being ever-present. It's on your body, and you feel almost this phantom connection with your phone, or what of what we should think about as a mobile device. It's most of the time we're not using it as a phone, but there is this sense of direct connection with this object, and that object connecting me with a world that's ever-present, it's always in the background of my consciousness and never far from the surface. And that, it seems to me, is a very significant shift. Um, there's a sense in which every context is now connected to the internet as a result of the mobile phone. There's not the ability to get distance in the ways that we once could have done. And even when we're in solitude, it's right there.

SPEAKER_03 35:40

I'd be curious if there was like a longitudinal study of like big five personality trait kind of over time across a mass culture, if if everybody's just trending upwards on neuroticism or something like that, just as at it at a society-wide level, because you're always potentially always observed. There is no control group.

SPEAKER_02 36:00

Right. Yes, right. The Amish. The Amish, do the Amish count as a control group? You get a couple thousand Amish people, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:12

Could do Lancaster County and Chester County in Pennsylvania and see what you find.

SPEAKER_03 36:17

I mean, the control the control group really would be students like I I think of a couple of students of mine who have told me that you know that recently have gone off um Instagram or whatever it is, and because they'll ask, hey, where do we have the schedule? And like, oh well, we post it on this, or oh, I'm not on that. I'm not on Instagram anymore. That's fine. Okay, we we do have an email, we do send that out, and you just gotta get on the list. Um, but but who the control groups is essentially the hopefully increasingly large portion of the population that opts out, and then you you kind of see what happens long term. And I I suppose that's where we get to the to the proposals.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

The problem is that's a confound a confounded group because who had I mean, that's first of all, it's like two percent, I'm afraid to say, Derek. Maybe it's five percent of your students, but it's like if it's two percent of the population, I'd be I'd be shocked. And of course, the question is what was it in their environment and makeup that caused them to be willing to swim that much against the tit? Um I I do think, you know, uh, I don't know whether anyone listening to your podcast cares about like practical uh applications of things. I was I was actually gonna turn us there, Andy.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

So this is my yeah, go with it, go for it.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

Well, I I think it is kind of incumbent on anyone who's in any kind of leadership, honestly, to provide a non-algorithmically mediated way to participate in the things you do. I mean, so like what you said, Derek. Well, yeah, I mean, we put it on Instagram, but we have an email. Like, you should, if you run an organization for people of any age, you should have an email. People should not have to uh sell their data soul to Mark Zuckerberg to find out what's happening in your church. Like, it's just such a simple thing. Give the resistors a way to meaningfully participate in in your little small platoon that you're trying to build, because uh in the long run, they'll be better participants uh and and more fruitful. And uh you you don't want to be aiding and abetting them having to wade through 20 pieces of algorithmic stimulation to find out when Bible study is. So, just at a practical level, like let's make sure we give people a non-reactive channel to communicate, which are still available to us, at least for now. So, like let's use them while we have them and build them in a way.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

One challenge I think we have there is that it's when a new technology comes along and is adapted or adopted almost culture-wide, the things that you could formally enjoy without that technology increasingly require the use of that technology, even to the point that I mean this is particularly an issue for older people who need to use QR codes, who need to have mobile devices that just to do basic functions within society, to travel, to um enter particular event, go to particular events. And you might think also of the way that if uh a couple of kids in a school get mobile devices, that becomes the ecosystem for their sociality, for the sociality of their group. And if your child does not or is not allowed to get a mobile device, they are squeezed out of something that they'd formally enjoy without it. And so I think that the challenge that we have requires some sort of collective organization. There can't just be a um an individual response to these things. In part also because it's one thing to say I as an individual can resist some of the tendencies of social media, but I don't think as a culture the tendencies are resistible. Yes. On the culture-wide level, the tendencies I think are inexorable. And so either you have a very strong social-wide resistance and develop structures of coordination against them, or you just have a general tendency that has its effect with the wider population and a few people standing out as hermits or resistors in various forms.

SPEAKER_02 40:25

Yeah. Which really gets at my opening question answer very nicely.

SPEAKER_00 40:28

I was wondering if we're going to get to that question.

SPEAKER_02 40:30

Andy, I'm I'm intrigued to know your take on this. I mean, you you do you do have the hate uh proposal to ban cell phones in schools. And I'm just wondering like, how far would you take that? Like, are what sort of policies should pastors or uh heads of Christian schools, I think we actually probably have a lot of people who listen to this podcast who work in Christian high school. Responsibility for you know, who have responsibility for these sorts of things. Um, I'm just curious, what what sort of ecosystem level shifts could we aim at that would be constructive on some of these problems?

SPEAKER_00 41:14

I mean, I I have a pretty simple rubric. I really think uh in any formative community, the digital should be absolutely marginalized. So by formative community, I mean a place where we reasonably expect that it one of its principal purposes is to shape human beings into the kinds of persons that we all hope to be. And to me, the three primary formative communities are home, uh, church, and school. I don't mean those in any particular order. So the home is a place where not just children, but but everyone, uh, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles are shaped by playing certain roles together that you can't get shaped that way any other way. Uh school is the place where you're inducted into a particular cultural tradition, um, and if it's a religious school, uh at the same time into a the religious dimension of culture. And then church is where, of course, you meet uh, you know, God and Christ. Um, but also any religious community. I mean, I would extend this. I I think actually probably Muslims and Jews are are are ahead of us, perhaps. And uh I mean, there's this uh kind of interesting confounder that just came up recently. You can't study how Jews use uh cell phones because none of them will carry us a cell phone to synagogue. Even I mean, maybe some reform Jews do, but but like no one, no Jew carries a you know, all Christians bring their smart smartphones to church. Very few Jews do that, take it to synagogue because it's the violates the Sabbath in the most fundamental way. And um, so I I would say in school, uh there should be not basically nothing digital at the formative end of the work. Now, in the back on the back end, record keeping, uh, finance, uh, of course, uh you make use of those tools. But in education, in the classroom, in the sports team, zero uh for everybody, teachers as well. Um, same for uh at home.

SPEAKER_03 43:09

It's also a good prophylactic against AI uh encroachment on writing, but of course, of course.

SPEAKER_00 43:17

And uh and I I don't like the word ban because it it sounds like, well, uh, you know, should we ban video games? I mean, first of all, our society is not going to ban video games. This is a bigger industry than Hollywood. They're not gonna get banned. But should they be present in formative environments? No. I don't think this is even a, it's not even a hard question uh from the on the merits of the case. Like there's just no, there's literally zero evidence that having anything glowing in a school increases educational outcomes for anyone. There's the OECD studied this uh quite a bit. This was one of the few uh pieces of data I could cite back when people were initially asking me that question of data because the OECD had been studying. And these are all developed economies, so right, they're roughly rich world kind of countries. Um, but they have kind of interestingly different educational systems and therefore different choices about technology. And what I found is not not a strong negative effect on learning, by the way, just null effect. Like uh it just doesn't matter, except they're incredibly expensive to maintain. And this was before the distraction layer uh came in of uh of personal devices. Um, so if you're an educator, like I'm uh at the at the sort of top level of generality, there is no evidence all those screens in your school are doing anything for the outcomes you care about. And if you're a Christian educator, I guarantee you there is not a shred of evidence that the net effect is beneficial for the outcomes your school uh uh allegedly exists to serve. So then the only questions become rhetorical and tactical of how do you persuade the parents? Because the reason kids have phones is prime the reason they're given phones is not to solve kids' problems, it's to solve parents' problems. And uh you've got to help the parents see that this will actually solve more problems than it or that this will that the current setting creates more problems than it solves and help them solve the problems they were trying to solve by giving their kid a phone.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

I do wonder when you say that it doesn't help really solve any of the issues that we care about in education. It seems to me that maybe object to that, that's one of the things that people are looking for from these devices, these uh various forms of um uh technological access, they they think this is the world that uh their kids are going to be entering into. This is their social world, this is the world of work. They're going to one way or another be spending much of their life working with AI, they're going to be spending much of their time on social media, they're going to be spending much of their time working with the glowing screens of devices, whatever it is, and if they are not prepared for that world, then they are not prepared for the so-called real world. How can we present an argument that that may not be the real world? And if you're preparing your kids for that, you're not preparing them to be true, um rising to their full stature as human beings.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

Right. So uh first of all, let me qualify one thing I said. I I do think at in secondary education, that is uh high high school, uh, there's absolutely a place for the instrumental qualities of computational devices. That is, um I I talk a lot uh in my last book, for example, about the difference between devices and instruments, and and I define an instrument as a technological thing that is used to deeply extend and form human beings, like a musical instrument or a scientific instrument. And a lot of scientific instruments, of course, have digital interfaces and there are screens that go with them. And if your kid is doing a chemistry experiment and the best way to collect the data is with a you know PC-based or a smartphone-based interface, fine, have those in the chemistry lab. I have no problem with that. Um I just don't want them substituting for formation. And and instruments don't substitute for formation, they actually extend formation. That's that's what makes them instruments. So to the extent that these devices can be used instrumentally, uh at the appropriate age, bring them on. Now, I think before secondary school, there's more important things to happen in school than anything a screen can do. But but later on, they're great. Now, the question of, hey, look, we're all entering a virtual world. It's it is the real world for for everybody. It's the real the economy is happening on it, work is happening on it. I I guess I just think it's just not that hard to learn. There's nothing complicated about these things. They're all they're all designed with these incredible affordances to make it very straightforward. It's this is not like computer literacy of the 1990s where you had to learn like the DOS command line in order to save a file. Like, you know, I and by the way, I'd much rather kids actually learn computer programming. Like, for goodness sakes, learn Python. You know, I would love for uh high schoolers certainly to be learning that. It's part of learning to think mathematically, actually. Um, but uh, but the idea that the sort of social presentation layer of uh, you know, uh I'm I you know we use all kinds of tools in at Praxis where I work, uh Asana and Excel and Google everything. And, you know, uh, you can if you're if you've been educated, seriously educated, you can learn that in an afternoon. Like it's just not complicated. It's not a thing you have to teach in school. It's training, it's it's just job training. You'll learn it in your onboarding on day one at the law firm. I I just don't buy the idea that there's some set of competencies that we have to disrupt the formation of persons to like channel them into this way of relating that that we call the social world. Uh like you'll you'll figure out Slack when you're 23 years old and you get put in a workplace that uses it. I promise. And you'll be better at it and use it in a healthier way if you did if you weren't on you know social media from the day you lied about your age at age 11 and got a Facebook account.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

So that is that's a great word to end on, Andy.

SPEAKER_00 49:19

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go check my Slack messages. That's a non-formative workplace. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 49:27

That's exactly right. This has been a very provocative conversation. Thank you, Andy, for your time. We are, if you still have a few more minutes, three more minutes, we're gonna ask you one more question for our patron supporters. And it's gonna be a spicy one. So if you do want to join the merry band and get access to that, you can do so at merefidelity.com. We do hope that this conversation has been constructive and provocative for you and that you have been edified by it. We're grateful for your time and attention. And rate us and review us on iTunes. We love to hear from listeners. Send us a note if you found something that you liked or disagreed with. Drop us a line through merefidelity.com. We do read all of our mail. We are going to be back in the weeks to come with other conversations about the word of God and the world we live in. Until then, though, this has been Mere Fidelity.