Technology · Part Four
Attention, Media, and Discernment
What we attend to forms us. These questions consider how social media and the news shape our attention, our discernment, and our witness, and what it takes to reorient our attention toward God.
- 01
How can Christians discern truth on social media?
The volume of information arriving through social media makes discernment difficult, because most reports are necessarily narrow and abbreviated by design. Christians must recognize that abbreviation is a structural feature of these platforms, not a bug, and that consuming abbreviated content without theological formation produces unreliable instincts. Discernment requires the slow, communal practices that form judgment—not just faster access to more information.
- 02
How Can Christians Exercise Discernment in Using and Adopting Technology?
Discernment begins with the recognition that every technology carries a theology—an implicit account of human flourishing—and requires testing those assumptions against Scripture and the character of Christ, with community accountability and a goal of redeeming rather than rejecting technology.
- 03
How Can Christians Be Sober-Minded About Digital Technology and Eschatology?
Sober-mindedness means interpreting current technological developments through patterns of recurring human ambition rather than mapping them onto a fixed end-times grid—recognizing echoes of Babel in each generation's tools while maintaining confidence in Christ's victory.
- 04
How Does Information Shape Governance—and Vice Versa?
James C. Scott's analysis in Seeing Like a State shows that governance requires abstracting persons into legible data points, which inevitably oversimplifies reality; as the map replaces the territory (Baudrillard), states become less capable of understanding the societies they purport to rule—and the Facebook Files show the same dynamic in corporate form.
- 05
How Do Algorithms Form Our Loves and Habits?
Algorithms are not neutral delivery mechanisms but formative environments. They train our attention, shape our desires, and reinforce specific habits of reaction — quietly cultivating a kind of person while we believe we are simply consuming content.
- 06
How do we reorient attention toward God's active presence in everyday life?
Attention isn't neutral. It involves selection and deselection. The attention economy is real, and a Christian who doesn't think carefully about attention has already conceded the field. Reorientation requires practices that retrain attention against the grain of the contemporary environment.
- 07
How should Christians interact on social media?
Social media is a conversation, and what Christians post reflects what is in their hearts. Christians who engage on social media should do so knowing the platform is designed for abbreviation rather than depth, with an awareness that how they engage is as much a witness as what they say. The same care for truth, neighbor, and gospel that governs other arenas of life should govern this one.
- 08
Is Technology Neutral, or Does It Carry a Theology?
No technology is neutral. Every device, platform, and system embodies assumptions about what is valuable, what it means to be human, and how the world should be ordered — assumptions Christians must learn to read and evaluate.
- 09
Should Churches Be on Social Media?
Yes, with discernment. Social media can extend a church's witness, teaching, and connection — but churches that adopt social media without reflection often absorb its formative pressures: optimizing for engagement, performing spiritual authenticity, and measuring faithfulness in metrics that have no theological warrant.
- 10
What Is Digital Sabbath, and Does It Actually Help?
Digital Sabbath is the deliberate practice of sustained disconnection from devices for the purpose of recovering attention, embodied presence, and orientation to God. It is not a magic fix, but it is one of the most accessible and immediately formative practices available to digitally saturated Christians.