"Scrolling Ourselves to Death" - Book Review

I read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” years ago. His point, back in the 1980s and 1990s, was about the way we have become an entertainment culture, where television and televised news media, have sucked the life out of our ability to have healthy discussions, process news, and reason. I was delighted that Crossway has just recently pulled together a team of thinkers who are not anti-technology, but want to help fellow Christians think through technology – especially in the areas of multiple media venues, AI, cyber-space, etc. “Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age,” is a 256-page softback edited by Brett McCracken, an author and senior editor for the Gospel Coalition, along with Ivan Mesa, editorial director for the Gospel Coalition. This highly readable book is “intended to get you thinking about technology…showing how technology is changing the way we think” (pg. 11). This material is clearly for the digital natives (Millennials and GenZers – those who grew up with the internet and smartphones). But also, those of us who are digital immigrants (Boomers and older GenXers – who came from a land and time before there was even a dial-up internet connection), have much to gain here as well.

The chapter contributors cover a wide spectrum of academics, editors, pastors, and more: Collin Hansen, Read Mercer Schuchardt, Joe Carter, Jen Pollock Michel, Hans Madueme, Samuel D. James, Nathan A. Finn, Jay Y. Kim, Patrick Miller, Keith Plummer, Thaddeus Williams, G. Shane Morris, Andrew Spencer. Each writer brings a unique perspective into the discussion from different angles. The variety ensured that there was never a dull moment as I worked through each chapter.

The book could have become a “Technology-is-utopia” panegyric, or it could have swung to the other extreme and been a dark and dismal dystopian diatribe. Instead, each author, interacting with Neil Postman’s works from the 20th Century, brings Postman’s analysis into the 21st Century, and works through his warnings and evaluations with fresh eyes. There is analysis of what is being done to us, the behind-the-scenes intentions (gathering audiences by dopamine addiction who can be sold to advertisers), and the way it changes our views and understandings of God, self and what it means to be human.

But all the way through are remedies and ways of resistance – not a “rage against the machine” kind of defiance. Rather, Christian maturity and soberminded types of resistance. One of the main ways to stand our ground, as shown by multiple contributors in these pages, is personal presence in people’s lives and flesh-and-blood congregations worshiping and serving together. In the snazzy way that Read Mercer Schuchardt puts it (drawing from Jacques Ellul), L’existence, c’est resistance! – Existence is resistance (pg. 185)! Or Andrew Spencer’s deliberative declaration, “Widespread resistance to technological dominion can happen only when robust communities with strong social fabrics enable that resistance…Christian communities have the resources to resist the negative influences of technology and break the self-reinforcing feedback loops a tech-saturated society creates. We have the gospel’s hope to guide us beyond the utopic technological visions of our day” (pg. 206).

My copy of this book is underlined, dog-eared, and ruffled all the way through. Many of the conclusions are conclusions I have been aiming at and pointing to for years (See my books, “Gnostic Trends in the Local Church,” “Our Heads on Straight: Sober-mindedness – a Forgotten Christian Virtue,” and “Beyond Outrage: Vetting Media to Increase Sensibility and Stability”). I could fill this book review with a bushel of quotations from “Scrolling Ourselves to Death” that would ring your bells and possibly bring you to tears. But I will leave things here.

If you’ve begun to despair over how “the algorithm serves us what we crave, not necessarily what we need for spiritual nourishment” (Hansen, pg. 102); or if you have finally seen how the disembodied cyber-world has brought us to conclude that our “bodies don’t define us; our desires do” (Michel, pg. 53), then here is some help! This is a must-read-must-discuss book for church leaders of all stripes, Christians, parents, and all who are beginning to sense this thing is about to race beyond our restraining reach and turn back around on us and consume us. I strongly recommend you grab hold of a copy of “Scrolling Ourselves to Death” yesterday! Okay, that was a bit melodramatic, but you get the urgent point.