I'm sure I'm speaking to the choir, so to speak and pun intended, with this comment, but just this sort of liturgical behavior is what annoys me most about my own relationship with technology, and it is tied in with the sort of person I imagine myself to be versus the sort of person I enact, on a day to day, moment to moment basis.
When I have my cell phone in my pocket, for instance, as soon as I slip my hands in my pocket for anything at all, even to warm my hands, I pull my cell phone out and look at it. Oddly enough, I found myself doing this with a flip phone I used to carry as a less intrusive alternative to a smart phone. I would just find myself staring at the led screen reading the time on the back. The amount of psychic energy I put in to not looking at my cell phone borders on the ludicrous. And here's the thing for me - I find I get no real use out of the cell phone. My job doesn't depend on it. My children know to call on the landline if they need to reach me. I ended up with a cell phone originally because I had a flat tire on my bicycle, had not patches or tubes with me, and needed to call my wife. At that point in time, every place I went where I knew a payphone existed revealed a raw tangle of wires sticking out of the wall, as if a giant had strode ahead of me ripping each one violently from the wall. So, the cell phone is for emergencies. Because I was paying for it, and it could do things, I wanted to see what it could do, and so my attention was captured, and I ended up finding myself pulling it out of my pocket whenever I happened to touch it. At present, I am trying very hard to turn it on only when I have an emergency. It's been turned off, and in a desk drawer, (where granted, it's not really much help in event of an emergency), for about two weeks. Still it calls to me, even from the desk drawer, even with my bearing in mind that it does not serve any real need in my life. Why is that? Are there other things besides digital technologies that are like that?
My personal email is the same way. It's become a jungle. If I buy something online these days, even if it's not from Amazon, I find I've spawned a swarm of emails asking me if I will review the item. That feels like some sort of betrayal of my personal e-space in some way. That whole phenomenon, by the way, seems to have become much worse in the past year. Maybe it's just what I've bought recently. Amazon, as well, insists on letting me know everything about my order via email - that I've ordered something, that it's own the way, that's it's being delivered, that it has been delivered. You can't shut that off. My strategy is to put "check cell phone and check email" on the first and third Saturday of each month, so I'm not spending all the restful gaps in my workday deleting detritus from my personal email. My work email is bad enough. I have a ritual, though, of calling up my protonmail account as soon as I log in to the computer at work, just to see.... To see what, I'm not sure. Email, similar to the cell phone, does not serve much real, actual purpose in my life, though it does serve somewhat more than the cell phone. My backcountry permits from the park service are in there, a few other things, but it's not something I depend on daily.
Is it easy not to log in to my personal email as soon as I boot up my work computer? No, of course it's not easy. But again, my question is why? My daughter and I write letters back and forth. My son and my friends and other family members are tend to call on the landline. There is no there there, with email, yet I might check it ten to fifteen times a day simply to delete announcements from Amazon and solicitations to review items I've purchased online.
That definitely seems liturgical.
If I have any New Year's resolution for 2023, it will be to stick with the first and third Saturday checking of email and cell phone. I hope I can make that my liturgical habit and only check both things twenty-four times in the course of a year, rather than a similar number in the course of a day.
I make it a habit to turn off my phone entirely for one day every week. Usually this day is Sunday. I find it incredibly helpful in my quest to build good habits.
This made me think of Justin Whitmel Early's book "The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose For An Age of Distraction" — and I love the way he systematically lays of the various habits in a graphic: Some for loving God, some for loving neighbor. Some habits are ones of resistance, some habits embrace something good. Those were helpful frameworks to help re-wire some good habits (liturgies of our bodies) towards becoming people we actually want to be.
Thank your for writing this. Making sense of technology and habits as liturgy has been something I’ve been thinking about for a good year. I surprised myself one day by slowing down and seeing how much of my time is taken up looking at a screen, and how much I was missing in reality. The use of tech/social media is enchanting, quite literally. I appreciate your voice on these matters.
I found myself nodding in agreement to almost everything you wrote in this essay. Especially since, as a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the liturgy analogy made perfect sense to me.
The need for more deliberate tech use became very clear to me in 2020. Having that strong conviction helped guide my decisions on how to reclaim my time and put tech in its proper place. I use a combination of tools which are mostly built into my iPhone: Downtime, App Limits, and Focus settings have helped a lot, as well as personal guidelines (no social media until after 3 pm, no browsing in bed, no phone in the bathroom). I will say that without the strong conviction, those tools wouldn't have been much help.
I have to admit that I wasn’t quite getting your point until l came to your explanation of Arendt’s theory of disembedding which has also been used by sociologists like Anthony Giddens to theorize technology and behaviour.
Giddens theory is defined simply as:
“A defining characteristic of late modernity is rapid social change and Giddens argues this is the result of two factors – disembedding and reflexivity.
Disembedding refers to our ability to interact with one another without having to make face-to-face contact. This is thanks to the beauty of the internet. With Facebook & Skype we can break down geographical barriers and connect with people all around the world.
Giddens also believes we are in a time where our behaviour is no longer defined by tradition values. Think of the common date. Back in the good ol’ days, a man would open the door for a lady, pull out her chair at the dinner table, always pay the full bill at a restuarant and never go for a kiss on the first date. Now, we are no longer defined by tradition which means we have to be reflexive. Does she look like the type that wants doors opened for her? If I insist on paying the bill, will she assume that I think she can’t afford it? She was touching my hand a lot at dinner, should I go for the kiss? We are constantly re-evaluating our ideas and actions as new information is provided – nothing is permanent.”
I cringe at the writer’s example but in fact it’s probably a good example as it indicates , in a sort of creepy way, how disembeddness and reflexivity can lead to anxiety. And a great example of the difference between action as reflex, without conscious thought and action after reflection.
I like the idea of a conscious liturgical practice or what I call a conscious mindfulness where we ask ourselves how technologies are undermining or driving our creativity, world view, habits etc. The two very pedestrian acts of push back that I’ve managed are my art practice - phone is shut off, door is closed and mind is focused on practice, as well as a rather mundane but pleasing act of getting rid of the electric toothbrush which I purchased in a moment of FOMO, and returning to a regular bristle brush.
Anyway, enough said. Thanks for another thought provoking essay Michael.
I want to just say that I have for sometime been thinking about anti-ritual.
Or the anti-liturgical stance.
I could pull a few quotes from this, (but just reread it). By anti-ritual, I don't mean a Luddite form of anti-technology, nor the step into some kind of a anarchic disorganization. I am thinking about both play, and serendipity as a practice. Yet by first identifying these routines that command attention from both our minds and our bodies. These liturgical habits. And not so much as resistance to them, as replacement for them.
One practice I use, walk into a library, perhaps to a section you are not familiar with, close your eyes and pick a book at random. Read said book.
I found myself tracking down the Lewis Mumford "magnificent bribe" quote you've used at times in the past. By the time I got to the bottom of this post, I started thinking it would make sense to frame these technological liturgies as those practices that train us to accept that bribe (and its requirements and blessings) as a religious liturgy trains us to receive the Word or the sacraments.
I’m interested in how many of our old practices of attention in some cases didn’t work very well: sitting at a desk for hours at a time, etc.?
I wonder if the flourishing of podcasts, audiobooks, and text to speech is that it allows us to fidget, walk about the room, do the dishes, go for a walk, and all the while remain engrossed in the book/podcast. I’ve found it makes me a better partner to my wife. I volunteer to make dinner so I can sink into my audiobook.
But the pro’s and con’s of this are obvious: The question is whether these new habits of listening (while brushing one’s teeth, etc.) end up displacing the musing that otherwise happened in these idle moments?
A recent habit is that my wife and I will go for walks while sharing the same pair of AirPods, each with one earpiece. Either of us can automatically pause the book by pulling out our earpiece to ask a question, make a comment about the book, which we do often and animatedly. (What form of dialogue is that?)
A bit late to the discussion here, but I want to recommend James K A Smith’s work. He’s using the same model of describing habits both secular and Christian in the language of liturgy. He’s done extensive academic work that has resulted in three books on the matter – I know the first one is “Desiring the Kingdom” but I forgot the rest. He’s also release a book for a more general audience called “You are what you love”. It’s not focused solely on technology, but is taking a more broader perspective of consumerism and contemporary culture.
I practice meditation and contemplation most mornings for around 45 minutes, and have gymnastics as a kind of embodied movement practice, and practice a kind of divine reading (or lectio divina) with Daoist and Zen texts. I also rely on a variety of iPhone features (the browser is basically permanently disabled) and a PC-app called Cold Turkey (which blocks YouTube, Reddit, etc.) to manage my relationship to technology.
Of course, as a knowledge worker, I'm still at the computer some 6-8 hours a day, so perhaps all my practices are something of an anxious hand-washing exercise.
All of this calls to mind an earlier post on The Convivial Society about the levels of virtue demanded of us by contemporary technologies.
Thank you for the pragmatic focus of your last two essays, getting us to think about how to counter-balance our fragmented and technology-trapped lives. And how interesting to compare it to a liturgy! I’m a practicing Buddhist,so my main methods / rituals are to meditate first thing in the morning and last thing at night, not to switch my devices on until after breakfast and off @10pm latest, to use a normal watch not a tracking device on my wrist and to prioritise live encounters and time outdoors in nature over screen based work as much as I can. Also to regularly go on longer retreats in places without Wi-Fi, alone or communally, to directly experience the relief of that - and to actively value slowness and not rush, allow pauses in between my activities and if possible focus on one thing / person / actual 3d paper book at a time. And maybe most importantly, to note and notice when I don’t manage to keep to those rules of thumb, and the flattening and draining effect that has on my body and mind. Having likeminded friends trying to do a similar thing definitely helps, in my experience.
One of my techno liturgies worth examining is wanting to share online content (eg videos, memes) in response to what someone else had shared.a kind of substitute for my own thoughts with something I like. In this case, I just can't resist this humorous video showing the liturgy of low church settings titled Contempervant: https://youtu.be/giM04ESUiGw
Really helped me see the embedded liturgy of churches is been a part of
I'm sure I'm speaking to the choir, so to speak and pun intended, with this comment, but just this sort of liturgical behavior is what annoys me most about my own relationship with technology, and it is tied in with the sort of person I imagine myself to be versus the sort of person I enact, on a day to day, moment to moment basis.
When I have my cell phone in my pocket, for instance, as soon as I slip my hands in my pocket for anything at all, even to warm my hands, I pull my cell phone out and look at it. Oddly enough, I found myself doing this with a flip phone I used to carry as a less intrusive alternative to a smart phone. I would just find myself staring at the led screen reading the time on the back. The amount of psychic energy I put in to not looking at my cell phone borders on the ludicrous. And here's the thing for me - I find I get no real use out of the cell phone. My job doesn't depend on it. My children know to call on the landline if they need to reach me. I ended up with a cell phone originally because I had a flat tire on my bicycle, had not patches or tubes with me, and needed to call my wife. At that point in time, every place I went where I knew a payphone existed revealed a raw tangle of wires sticking out of the wall, as if a giant had strode ahead of me ripping each one violently from the wall. So, the cell phone is for emergencies. Because I was paying for it, and it could do things, I wanted to see what it could do, and so my attention was captured, and I ended up finding myself pulling it out of my pocket whenever I happened to touch it. At present, I am trying very hard to turn it on only when I have an emergency. It's been turned off, and in a desk drawer, (where granted, it's not really much help in event of an emergency), for about two weeks. Still it calls to me, even from the desk drawer, even with my bearing in mind that it does not serve any real need in my life. Why is that? Are there other things besides digital technologies that are like that?
My personal email is the same way. It's become a jungle. If I buy something online these days, even if it's not from Amazon, I find I've spawned a swarm of emails asking me if I will review the item. That feels like some sort of betrayal of my personal e-space in some way. That whole phenomenon, by the way, seems to have become much worse in the past year. Maybe it's just what I've bought recently. Amazon, as well, insists on letting me know everything about my order via email - that I've ordered something, that it's own the way, that's it's being delivered, that it has been delivered. You can't shut that off. My strategy is to put "check cell phone and check email" on the first and third Saturday of each month, so I'm not spending all the restful gaps in my workday deleting detritus from my personal email. My work email is bad enough. I have a ritual, though, of calling up my protonmail account as soon as I log in to the computer at work, just to see.... To see what, I'm not sure. Email, similar to the cell phone, does not serve much real, actual purpose in my life, though it does serve somewhat more than the cell phone. My backcountry permits from the park service are in there, a few other things, but it's not something I depend on daily.
Is it easy not to log in to my personal email as soon as I boot up my work computer? No, of course it's not easy. But again, my question is why? My daughter and I write letters back and forth. My son and my friends and other family members are tend to call on the landline. There is no there there, with email, yet I might check it ten to fifteen times a day simply to delete announcements from Amazon and solicitations to review items I've purchased online.
That definitely seems liturgical.
If I have any New Year's resolution for 2023, it will be to stick with the first and third Saturday checking of email and cell phone. I hope I can make that my liturgical habit and only check both things twenty-four times in the course of a year, rather than a similar number in the course of a day.
Oh God, deliver me from encroaching instantaneity lest I lose sight of intimations of eternity. Amen.
I make it a habit to turn off my phone entirely for one day every week. Usually this day is Sunday. I find it incredibly helpful in my quest to build good habits.
This made me think of Justin Whitmel Early's book "The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose For An Age of Distraction" — and I love the way he systematically lays of the various habits in a graphic: Some for loving God, some for loving neighbor. Some habits are ones of resistance, some habits embrace something good. Those were helpful frameworks to help re-wire some good habits (liturgies of our bodies) towards becoming people we actually want to be.
Thank your for writing this. Making sense of technology and habits as liturgy has been something I’ve been thinking about for a good year. I surprised myself one day by slowing down and seeing how much of my time is taken up looking at a screen, and how much I was missing in reality. The use of tech/social media is enchanting, quite literally. I appreciate your voice on these matters.
“…the person who finds themselves handling their smartphone as others might their rosary beads.“ Ah, bloody good
I found myself nodding in agreement to almost everything you wrote in this essay. Especially since, as a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the liturgy analogy made perfect sense to me.
The need for more deliberate tech use became very clear to me in 2020. Having that strong conviction helped guide my decisions on how to reclaim my time and put tech in its proper place. I use a combination of tools which are mostly built into my iPhone: Downtime, App Limits, and Focus settings have helped a lot, as well as personal guidelines (no social media until after 3 pm, no browsing in bed, no phone in the bathroom). I will say that without the strong conviction, those tools wouldn't have been much help.
Just dropping in here to say that Felicia Wu Song's _Restless Devices_ is really good on a lot of these questions, from a Christian perspective.
I have to admit that I wasn’t quite getting your point until l came to your explanation of Arendt’s theory of disembedding which has also been used by sociologists like Anthony Giddens to theorize technology and behaviour.
Giddens theory is defined simply as:
“A defining characteristic of late modernity is rapid social change and Giddens argues this is the result of two factors – disembedding and reflexivity.
Disembedding refers to our ability to interact with one another without having to make face-to-face contact. This is thanks to the beauty of the internet. With Facebook & Skype we can break down geographical barriers and connect with people all around the world.
Giddens also believes we are in a time where our behaviour is no longer defined by tradition values. Think of the common date. Back in the good ol’ days, a man would open the door for a lady, pull out her chair at the dinner table, always pay the full bill at a restuarant and never go for a kiss on the first date. Now, we are no longer defined by tradition which means we have to be reflexive. Does she look like the type that wants doors opened for her? If I insist on paying the bill, will she assume that I think she can’t afford it? She was touching my hand a lot at dinner, should I go for the kiss? We are constantly re-evaluating our ideas and actions as new information is provided – nothing is permanent.”
I cringe at the writer’s example but in fact it’s probably a good example as it indicates , in a sort of creepy way, how disembeddness and reflexivity can lead to anxiety. And a great example of the difference between action as reflex, without conscious thought and action after reflection.
I like the idea of a conscious liturgical practice or what I call a conscious mindfulness where we ask ourselves how technologies are undermining or driving our creativity, world view, habits etc. The two very pedestrian acts of push back that I’ve managed are my art practice - phone is shut off, door is closed and mind is focused on practice, as well as a rather mundane but pleasing act of getting rid of the electric toothbrush which I purchased in a moment of FOMO, and returning to a regular bristle brush.
Anyway, enough said. Thanks for another thought provoking essay Michael.
I want to just say that I have for sometime been thinking about anti-ritual.
Or the anti-liturgical stance.
I could pull a few quotes from this, (but just reread it). By anti-ritual, I don't mean a Luddite form of anti-technology, nor the step into some kind of a anarchic disorganization. I am thinking about both play, and serendipity as a practice. Yet by first identifying these routines that command attention from both our minds and our bodies. These liturgical habits. And not so much as resistance to them, as replacement for them.
One practice I use, walk into a library, perhaps to a section you are not familiar with, close your eyes and pick a book at random. Read said book.
I found myself tracking down the Lewis Mumford "magnificent bribe" quote you've used at times in the past. By the time I got to the bottom of this post, I started thinking it would make sense to frame these technological liturgies as those practices that train us to accept that bribe (and its requirements and blessings) as a religious liturgy trains us to receive the Word or the sacraments.
(p.s. the quote is referenced here: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/human-interests-and-technological#details. The portions I remembered of it were maddeningly Google-resistant, although misattributing it didn't help matters either.)
I’m interested in how many of our old practices of attention in some cases didn’t work very well: sitting at a desk for hours at a time, etc.?
I wonder if the flourishing of podcasts, audiobooks, and text to speech is that it allows us to fidget, walk about the room, do the dishes, go for a walk, and all the while remain engrossed in the book/podcast. I’ve found it makes me a better partner to my wife. I volunteer to make dinner so I can sink into my audiobook.
But the pro’s and con’s of this are obvious: The question is whether these new habits of listening (while brushing one’s teeth, etc.) end up displacing the musing that otherwise happened in these idle moments?
A recent habit is that my wife and I will go for walks while sharing the same pair of AirPods, each with one earpiece. Either of us can automatically pause the book by pulling out our earpiece to ask a question, make a comment about the book, which we do often and animatedly. (What form of dialogue is that?)
A bit late to the discussion here, but I want to recommend James K A Smith’s work. He’s using the same model of describing habits both secular and Christian in the language of liturgy. He’s done extensive academic work that has resulted in three books on the matter – I know the first one is “Desiring the Kingdom” but I forgot the rest. He’s also release a book for a more general audience called “You are what you love”. It’s not focused solely on technology, but is taking a more broader perspective of consumerism and contemporary culture.
I practice meditation and contemplation most mornings for around 45 minutes, and have gymnastics as a kind of embodied movement practice, and practice a kind of divine reading (or lectio divina) with Daoist and Zen texts. I also rely on a variety of iPhone features (the browser is basically permanently disabled) and a PC-app called Cold Turkey (which blocks YouTube, Reddit, etc.) to manage my relationship to technology.
Of course, as a knowledge worker, I'm still at the computer some 6-8 hours a day, so perhaps all my practices are something of an anxious hand-washing exercise.
All of this calls to mind an earlier post on The Convivial Society about the levels of virtue demanded of us by contemporary technologies.
Thank you for the pragmatic focus of your last two essays, getting us to think about how to counter-balance our fragmented and technology-trapped lives. And how interesting to compare it to a liturgy! I’m a practicing Buddhist,so my main methods / rituals are to meditate first thing in the morning and last thing at night, not to switch my devices on until after breakfast and off @10pm latest, to use a normal watch not a tracking device on my wrist and to prioritise live encounters and time outdoors in nature over screen based work as much as I can. Also to regularly go on longer retreats in places without Wi-Fi, alone or communally, to directly experience the relief of that - and to actively value slowness and not rush, allow pauses in between my activities and if possible focus on one thing / person / actual 3d paper book at a time. And maybe most importantly, to note and notice when I don’t manage to keep to those rules of thumb, and the flattening and draining effect that has on my body and mind. Having likeminded friends trying to do a similar thing definitely helps, in my experience.
One of my techno liturgies worth examining is wanting to share online content (eg videos, memes) in response to what someone else had shared.a kind of substitute for my own thoughts with something I like. In this case, I just can't resist this humorous video showing the liturgy of low church settings titled Contempervant: https://youtu.be/giM04ESUiGw
Really helped me see the embedded liturgy of churches is been a part of