Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age
Book Review
Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age
Felicia Wu Song (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 232pp.
When researching individualism’s putatively evangelical critics, I came across the work of Felicia Wu Song, an Anglican sociologist who has written quite a bit on the concept of “networked individualism.” What is “networked individualism”? Sociologists Anabel Quan-Haase and Lori McCay-Peet provide us with a helpful answer —
The core idea of the networked individualism concept is that society has moved away from being clustered in groups to individuals connected through loosely tied personal networks by means of digital technology.1
As you would suspect, this phenomenon has been seen by some scholars as being inherently value neutral, a mere change in how we “do life” that can be utilized positively or negatively, while others have viewed it either as the way forward for Western Civilization, or as the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.
As you also probably would suspect, Song has a negative view of networked individualism. She views the phenomenon as a “mirror of contemporary individualism” (in the physical world), which has been molded by consumerism. Song argues that
The success of social-networking sites also suggests that young Americans are comfortable approaching their personal relationships in the mode of consumer.2
What social media users are doing via technology reflects what they are doing IRL (i.e. In Real Life). Networked individualism has come about because contemporary individualism is a reality.
The idea that society is utilizing technology in an individualistic manner because it saturated with an individualistic understanding of the self is not new to Song,3 and finds its roots not in observation of the world around us, or from in-depth biblical and theological research and reflection, but the communitarian-fueled sociological and philosophical musings of thinkers like Robert N. Bellah and Charles Taylor. Whereas one can literally see the world embracing collectivism through its promotion of Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQIA+ movement, socialism, Dominionism, and “conservative” communitarianism, these ideologues sense the invisible boogeyman of individualism steering the world off of its axis and into oblivion, and take the time to warn us about our ensuing demise.
Restless Devices is one of those pseudo-prophetic oracles. In addition to warning that technology is undermining various traditional modes of socializing, Song warns that it is liturgically forming us, taking advantage of our need for fellowship with God and Christians. We were “created for communion” with God and other people, not through mediating devices but face-to-face communication. This ties into the title of the book (Restless Devices), as it alludes to St. Augustine’s famous opening prayer in his Confessions —
You move us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.
Song’s argument is not simply that technology companies willingly have taken — and are still taking advantage — of how we are neurologically and socially “wired,” but that they are also taking advantage of our desire for fellowship with God and people, and replacing it with a cheap and, therefore, unfulfilling substitute.
Song’s breakdown of how tech companies have willingly created devices and software that, in essence, hack our human “hardware,”4 our brain's reward system and making us tech addicts is information that has been made public by films like The Social Dilemma (2020), as well as countless articles written by concerned researchers, reporters, and tech experts. What she presents is not new to those of us who have kept up with the news and technological developments. In some ways, however, it is a helpful reminder that we need to be aware of how we are using technology, and the fact that there are many tech companies that want to use us by means of their tech.
Hacking Our Conscience
What is ironic, however, is that Song’s book is also a hacking exploit,5 taking advantage of the reader’s sensitive conscience and desire to love God and neighbor, in order to install the malware of mysticism, social justice, and collectivism in his mind. The book is divided into two main parts. The first explains the problematic situation we are facing in our current digital age; the second addresses our social and spiritual problems and how we might appropriately deal with them. While reading this latter portion of the book, the reader familiar with Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum's views on current iterations of personal tech6 might have a hard time differentiating the WEF's concerns from those of Song.
Like the WEF, Song views technology as being under-regulated, a breeding ground for extremist content (e.g. racism, white supremacism, etc) and “misinformation”/“disinformation.” She writes —
Deeply troubling is the digital’s role in furthering political polarization, extremism, Christian nationalism, and the entrenched systems of racism and sexism.
Song argues that the ability of tech to exacerbate political factionalism, extremism, and “entrenched systems of racism and sexism” is “equally disturbing” to “the harm wrought by digital addictions to pornography, gambling, and other vices.”
Like Trueman and the World Economic Forum,7 Song believes that we, under the influence of our “modern” age of “individualism” have an incorrect anthropology. Regarding Christians in particular, Song argues that “our tech problem is at root a fundamental problem of identity, a mistaken theological anthropology.” Her criticism is, as one would also expect, virtually identical to that of the communitarians. She writes —
Philosophers like Charles Taylor have laid out historical accounts of the massive transformation in personal identity that has taken place in Western civilization. They argue that the sources of identity have shifted from external transcendent sources to internal subjective sources of the individual. Put simply we used to define ourselves in relation to something outside ourselves. Now, we turn inward. Sociologists pick up from here and keep advancing the ball by examining how the local community has declined as an orienting factor to contemporary individuals. Americans today understand “community” in terms of multiple networks of friends, contacts, and acquaintances that span time and place—but which orient around the self.
[…]
If it is the case that secular liturgies are practices that possess power because we engage in them together, then Christians need to find a way to engage in bodily counterliturgies together. Given the social dimensions of contemporary digital media and apps, and given the ways that norms and etiquette work on us as social animals who seek belonging, one of my main assertions is that—while personal acts of technological self-discipline and restraint are essential to cultivating effective counterliturgies—it will ultimately be the communal effort in counterliturgies that proves effective and sustainable.8
We live in a culture and society that is structured to presume that our technological practices ought to be privatized, regarded as a matter of individual discretion. But does it really need to be this way? Given the social reciprocity that is built into so many of our contemporary digital experiences, I would submit that our digital practices do not need to be—and ought not be—reduced to matters of personal discretion.9 Individuals and individual families do not need to be the sole arbiters of how a device or app is used in their life together. Instead, when set within the framework of understanding our digital practices as the work of the people,10 it is wholly possible (and even recommended) that groups of friends, family members, church communities, and work organizations sit down to discuss and come to a shared understanding of how digital practices will enter into all of its existing dynamics. Indeed, what would it look like if these groups actually came to an agreement and promised each other to collectively commit to not subjecting each other to the fears of FOMO, but chose to engage in alternative counterliturgical practices that encourage a compassionate view of each other’s limitations and vulnerabilities? As embattled human beings entangled in a complex digital system, can we care and serve each other enough to sacrifice efficiency and convenience in order to more intentionally cultivate habits that yield the known rewards of shared presence and whole-hearted attention?11
It is the community which shapes the individual, for good or for evil. Thus, the solution is to formulate, along with the community, a counter-liturgy which will serve to diminish, if not remove entirely, the problems she details in her book — racism, sexism, political extremism, etc.
Unlike Trueman who identifies as Reformed, Song’s thinking is clearly linked to her theological liberalism which teaches —
The good news of Christianity is that it is a religion about “going through.” Unlike what many presume, it is not a religion that offers a formula of escape in exchange for good works or sacrifices. Instead, it promises the presence of a God, the creator of the universe, who subjected himself to human suffering of the worst kind on our behalf, and he did not withdraw his hand but went through death and undid its power by overcoming it. The good news is that it is this God who loves us and will be with us.
[…]
Indeed, throughout Jesus’ life and ministry, we see that at the heart of Christianity is a steadfast promise that God will come and be with us, and his very presence is what gives us hope and helps us through. Jesus’ ministry not only involved teachings but powerfully featured a willingness to commune with the physically sick and disabled, those who were considered ritually unclean and socially marginalized. Jesus chose to care for people through the physicality of intervention, knowing that their bodily healing would enable them to be communally restored, establishing them with full social standing, and bringing great rejoicing in so many people’s hearts.
[…]
This empowering force of the triune God’s presence and solidarity continues to be evident in the lives of contemporary saints. Consider the testimonies of black American Christians who found strength to endure unspeakable adversity after encountering Jesus’ presence. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, theologian James Cone powerfully recounts how it was the voice of Jesus that enabled the mother of Emmett Till, Mamie Till Bradley, to find the courage to expose herself to further terror in her life by deciding to show the mutilated face of her dead son in an open casket funeral so that the world could bear witness to the horrific effect of white supremacy.2 Similarly, it was the voice of Jesus that gave Martin Luther King Jr. courage to press on in his efforts to seek civil rights for the African American community when he was regularly harassed by phone calls threatening to kill not only him but his wife and daughters. In both of these stories, the power to speak truth and persistently pursue justice over their own security was possible only because they had each heard Jesus assure them to press on. Their fear was taken away because they had been visited by the One who despite his innocence and because of his obedience to God, endured the horror of public humiliation, physical torture, and death through crucifixion, the first-century Roman Empire’s version of lynching. Bradley and King had encountered the very presence of Jesus, whose life experience expressed solidarity with their suffering, and were consequently empowered to do the impossible.12
Song’s false gospel not only rests on the work of liberation theologians like James Cone, but also on the work of mystics like Richard Rohr who, in contradiction to the teaching of Scripture, describes faith as a “constant undoing.”
Concluding Remarks
While I don’t recommend this book as a helpful tool for Christians seeking to engage more thoughtfully with our current digital age, I do recommend it for those who wish to see how crafty writers will play on our softened consciences, often making very good points about our failures as Christians, only to then infect us with theological and anthropological malware in the form of a false anthropology, ethic, and gospel.
While it is bad for Christians to be enslaved to any compulsive behavior, addiction, or vice, it is worse for us to embrace falsehoods as a therapeutic for our sinful behavior. Our consciences will not be helped by such measures; they will be hardened against the truth. Turning the guilt ridden Christian toward behavior modification via communitarianism, as well as toward a “gospel” of “God helps the oppressed” will either help him buckle under the weight of his unaddressed guilt or embolden him in his self-righteous pursuit of covering his guilt with liturgical fig leaves.
—h.
“The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory Networked Individualism”, Wiley Online Library, Dec 4, 2017, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118430873.est0713.
“Social Media Sites: Mirrors of Contemporary Individualism,” in Culture Issue 2.1 (Spring: 2008), 4.
The actual term used by philosophers of mind and scientists is “wetware.”
A hacking exploit is “a program, or piece of code, designed to find and take advantage of a security flaw or vulnerability in an application or computer system, typically for malicious purposes such as installing malware. An exploit is not malware itself, but rather it is a method used by cybercriminals to deliver malware” (Source).
Regarding Trueman’s belief that our current understanding of the self is individualistic and, therefore, destructive see his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution (Crossway: 2020) and my series of articles critiquing it,beginning here —
Regarding the WEF’s views, Klaus Schwab’s words in The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2016) are representative —
Individuals used to identify their lives most closely with a place, an ethnic group, a particular culture or even a language. The advent of online engagement and increased exposure to ideas from other cultures mean that identities are now more fungible than previously. (78)
From a broad societal standpoint, one of the greatest (and most observable) effects of digitization is the emergence of the “me-centred” society – a process of individuation and emergence of new forms of belonging and community. Contrary to the past, the notion of belonging to a community today is more defined by personal projects and individual values and interests rather than by space (the local community), work and family. (88)
The democratic power of digital media means it can also be used by nonstate actors, particularly communities with harmful intentions to spread propaganda and to mobilize followers in favour of extremist causes…(89)
The fourth industrial revolution is not only changing what we do but also who we are. The impact it will have on us as individuals is manifold, affecting our identity and its many related facets.
…I wonder, as many psychologists and social scientists do, how the inexorable integration of technology in our lives will impact our notion of identity and whether it could diminish some of our quintessential human capacities such as self-reflection, empathy and compassion. (92)
The mind-boggling innovations triggered by the fourth industrial revolution, from biotechnology to AI, are redefining what it means to be human. (93)
…if technology is one of the possible reasons why we are moving towards a me-centred society, it is an absolute necessity that we rebalance this trend towards a focus on the self with a pervasive sense of common purpose. We are all in this together and risk being unable to tackle the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution and reap the full benefits of the fourth industrial revolution unless we collectively develop a sense of shared purpose. (101)
Emphasis added.
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