2025: Rejecting Brain Rot
Toward a more embodied and human way of lifeFollowing the data, observing personal experience, and developing another vision for human flourishing can get us a step closer to a fuller, intentional life.
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Are Phones to Blame for a Spiritual Crisis?
Technology is often impersonal magic. It makes things easy, but erodes personal formationPhones block access to spiritual depth. That’s what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his newest bestseller The Anxious Generation. The frenetic, distractible nature of the screen-based existence most of us live in every day is eroding our ability to pursue meaning, transcending values, and empathy for other people. Haidt was recently joined in conversation by Andy Crouch, a Christian author who has written extensively on technology and culture in books like The Tech-Wise Family and The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. “My life is full of convenience,” Crouch writes in the latter title mentioned. It is full of transaction, at its best a mutually beneficial exchange of value, a kind of arm’s-length benign use Read More ›
Smartphone: The “Experience Blocker”
Experience is the key to emotional development and a fully human lifeSmartphones are distracting and addicting, but according to Jonathan Haidt, and supported by our common experience, they can also keep us from a basic ingredient of human life: Experience. Sometimes I wonder if the worst aspect of the “dopamine culture,” as culture critic Ted Gioia calls it, is not that we no longer have the attention spans to focus on our work, but that we no longer seem able to enjoy activities that aren’t based on screens. Simple pleasures like a good meal, meant to savor and digest at a slow pace, or going through a rich and complicated novel that yields real insight and literary joy, or even kissing an actual person in an affectionate way are all “old-school” Read More ›
The Smartphone is the Enemy of Learning
Digital devices are hijacking kids' ability to concentrate in the classroomHow can students be expected to read and study or engage in discussions when educators are competing with TikTok videos and Instagram in the classroom?
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Facebook and Instagram Allegedly Hook Youngsters with Dopamine Triggering Tactics
If parents don’t want their children addicted to stimuli and behaviors in the same manner as to drugs or tobacco, then parents need to protect their kids.
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New Report: Parents, Don’t Give Your Kids Smartphones
This has become a national health crisis.Haidt writes in The Atlantic that smartphones ought to be banned from schools because “they impede learning, stunt relationships, and lessen belonging.”
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AI is Closer Than You Think
Most of us carry powerful AI in our pockets every single daySometimes AI seems a bit of a niche idea, relegated to dystopian prophecies or sentient robots. But AI is much more pervasive and influential in our present world in more ways than we might assume. Oxford mathematician John Lennox reminds us in this recent podcast episode that our society teems with AI. Lennox commented, Now, the final example I would give you is the fact that we’re all involved in AI. That is any of us who own a smartphone, it’s tracking us all the time. What many of us don’t realize is that, for example, we make a purchase at Amazon. A few days later, we’ll get a pop-up saying, people that bought this book were interested in that Read More ›
New Article Compares Big Tech to “Big Tobacco” of the ’70s
Like smoking in the 1970s — known to be dangerous yet poorly regulated — Big Tech is harming kids today yet is met with little intervention or pushbackIn a new article from Deseret News, Brad Wilcox and Riley Peterson equate Big Tech to “Big Tobacco.” They argue that the online world has the same dangers and negative effects as other drugs, and go on to cite alarming mental health data to back up their claims. Similar to how smoking was found to be dangerous in the 1970s and yet poorly regulated by the government, Big Tech is harming kids today yet is met with little intervention or pushback. They start with a powerful analogical anecdote, writing, Imagine if a man in a white panel van pulled up in your neighborhood and began enticing teens to look at pictures and videos featuring drug use, pornography and a range Read More ›
Your smartphone will disappear, says AT&T CTO
New 5G computing will introduce an era of ever smarter wearable devices, according to Andre FuetschFuetsch asks us to think of 3G (2001) and 4G (2010) internet as the difference between a junior high school rock band and a high school rock band: “The high school band is a lot louder and a lot faster.” And 5G? “It is a 40-piece orchestra. A wide spectrum of abilities but tight structure and control.”
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The Prof Banned Phones in Class. What Happened?
Not a walkout. No riots. No revolution. Some insights though, that match up with other researchEssentially, the user keeps the phone but must leave the venue to unlock it. Barring a reasonable excuse, that might be like excusing oneself to go outside to smoke.
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The Smartest Phone Is Silent in Class
While academics debate smartphones’ effect on teens, some hard facts begin to emergeWhat if we focus on something more easily measurable than emotional well-being?: grades. There seems to be a growing consensus that students get better grades when separated from smartphones in learning environments.
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Quell the Cell and Kids Do Well?
That sounds simplistic but it worked at a girls’ school in New ZealandHigh goals, discipline and, perhaps most critically, a ban on cellphones, have seen St Joseph’s Maori Girls College reach the top 10 for University Entrance in this year’s high-school league tables, the NZ Herald reports.
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