Digital Sabbath
keeping: the danger of Smartphones
It all starts
with God writing with His finger on two tables of stone saying that one should
not make images of anything in heaven or earth and then worship them. Is spending
75% of one’s free-time with a topic-interest involving the same images in
secular zones worship? Then Fox TV’s
anchor for the program “The Next Revolution”, Steve Hilton talked about
Smartphones and how they affect people. His article is online. He himself does
not have a smartphone but he has a company in Silicon Valley involved with it.
He says that they are designing the Smartphones in order to addict their users.
It is like cigarette companies doctoring the paper with chemicals to bring
addictive assistance to it. Like alcohol helping the drinker to take another
one. We are getting the drift. So Hilton had a
guest dr. Jean Twenge who shared about her latest book with the title: iGen:
Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up less Rebellious, More Tolerant,
Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. iGen? Internet
Generation = digimodernist = FDL = First Digital Language kids. They are the
millennials and those near it. Hilton also
wrote a book on the dangers of internet to show that “unsupervised internet
access is actually setting back the progress our society has made”. What does
it mean? He continues: “Just as we ban smoking and drinking for under 16,
because we want to shield young people from their harmful effect, we should do
the same for smartphones”. I know
firsthand what he is talking about: Our family attended church on Sabbath in
the city and while the pastor is preaching, a young boy, under 16 sat next to
his sister, his jacket hat pulled over his head, and continuously flash-flash
with the smartphone. Whether they prayed, whether they sang a song, whether
just preaching, his eyes are glued to the smartphone. But, like my
wife added later to me, also Hilton came to realize: “It’s about adults too”,
he said, she said. I agreed. Then Hilton
said something that should make our hair stand straight and stay up, as Guy
Hissam said in my class of undergrads way back in the seventees: “Sean Parker,
the founding president of Facebook, recently revealed something that is widely known within
Silicon Valley. And as the co-founder and CEO of a tech company myself, I hear it
all the time. The revelation? The aim of tech firms is to make their products ‘addictive.’” Addictive?
Adventists know what addictive is: ‘don’t read novels because they becloud the
mind and benumb the soul.’ Good Victorian period advice still relevant. Don’t
watch soap dramas, they are just using present everyday culture to convey the
agenda or drift of the scriptwriter and his/her team. Like Harry Potter’s
series, novels and films are nothing less than softcore-spiritualism. It is the
baby-steps into hardcore Satanism. It is Saul going into the cave to consult
the witch of Endor. And if you do not know what God’s opinion is about this,
please consult the Bible on this. Addiction. Google,
Facebook, Uber all tyring to create ways to spead knowledge, to boost people’s
income, to reach customers in affordable ways. All positive. But, said Hilton, Tech
evangelists need to accept the negative too. The principle
is: “You can’t turn the clock back and you can’t put the genie back in the
bottle” Hilton added. Hilton
continued: “Maybe not. But there are steps we can take to limit the social harm
caused by this industry, just like we do with others. And that brings us back
to Big Tobacco and the commercialization of addiction.” Then Steve
Hilton of Fox fame, said something that one cannot but follow all the way
through the paragraph: “It’s the
smartphone that has turned adults and children alike into tech-addicted
zombies, dumbly swiping and jabbing at their screens, oblivious to the world
around them. It’s the
smartphone that has trapped people in this constant, miserable hamster-wheel of
updates and notifications and self-destructive comparisons with friends and
celebrities, and the virtual demolition of any remaining barriers between work
and personal life. It’s the
smartphone that is responsible for one of the most depressing – and
increasingly ubiquitous – sights of the modern age: a family sitting together
but totally detached from one another, engaged with their screens rather than
the people closest to them. Of course many
companies now make smartphones. But it was the iPhone that first made them so
irresistibly addictive. Apple’s Steve Jobs, idolized by so many as a hero,
probably did more to undermine humanity than any other business leader in
history.” For years I saw
my Freshman undergrad presenting powerpoints pointing out how wonderful Steve
Jobs were, writing autobiographies about him. But here I heard with Hilton
something that resonates very well with me. Smartphones are killing us and destroying civilization. My wife and I
decided to stop using the smartphone every day continuously. So at 10 pm until
10 am, I am hiding the smartphones in the house, switched off. No more
flash-flash peeking onto the hand. What if the
mark of the beast is going to come by utilizing the hand and cognitive forehead
part of our brains with smartphone decisions and clicks? Unless you pay tribute
to the beast of Revelation 13 on issues like Sunday-keeping, willingness to
honor the papacy and more can be added, one cannot have access to the systems
and cannot transfer or withdraw money. All with the hand and head so closely
connected now. I do not think
there is any other generation in the past six thousand years that is so
connected with right-hand and eyes/head to a device in the hand than this
generation. They walk over the street, stand at a bus-station, train-station,
airport, church (as I mentioned), in class, outside class, yes, zombies walking
in a world of their own. Their world can collapse around them, they are focused.
“You shall not
make yourself any image of that which is in heaven or on earth or under the
earth, and you shall not worship them. . . . .” We need to come
back to the topic because that is what life is all about. It is not about this world
and what it offers, but about the world to come. We were not born to be like
this. For
Digimodernism, there are digital sins, digital divides, digital partitions,
digital barriers, digital crimes, digital discrimination, digital propaganda, digital
selling and all comes packaged as acceptable, beautiful, appearing “progressive”,
“advanced” but in essence, like Hilton said, degenerate all of us. The problem
with addicts of smartphones is that they are very “boxed” in their thinking.
Self is also in the box and they are oversensitive, distorted in perspectives
fooling themselves that they are “informed” and “at it”. To arrive at
data quicker than in previous centuries is not an advantage because you still
have to think what to do with the data. Relating to the data in the old days
meant a lot of background study in order to make your own independent decision,
but these days there are gutters and corridors channeling the reader into a
coordinated overdata so that acceptance of their prefixed decision making is
faster and easier than making the decision by oneself.
Dear God Smartphone is
interfering with our spiritual relationship with You. The tool is destroying
the inventor and tech is increasingly making people more lonely and drifted
from You. Help us to take digital Sabbaths. In Jesus Name. Amen.
Source: Steve Hilton,
(11th November 2017), “Steve Hilton: Smartphones have turned us into
tech-addicted zombies. Here’s why we should ban them for kids.” (Online).