Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age

by Felicia Wu Song

Publisher:

IVP Academic

, 2021

Overview

We’re being formed by our devices. Today’s digital technologies are designed to captivate our attention and encroach on our boundaries, shaping how we relate to time and space, to ourselves and others, even to God. Our natural longing for relationship makes us vulnerable to the “industrializing” effects of social media. While we enjoy the benefits of digital tech, many of us feel troubled with its power and exhausted by its demands for permanent connectivity. Yet even as we grow disenchanted, attempting to resist the digital “powers that be” might seem like a losing battle.

Sociologist Felicia Wu Song has spent years considering the personal and collective dynamics of living in digital ecosystems. In this book she combines psychological, neurological, and sociological insights with theological reflection to explore two major questions:

• What kind of people are we becoming with personal technologies in hand?
• And who do we really want to be?

Song unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age, including the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems that drive our habits and their subtle yet pervasive effects. She then explores pathways of meaningful resistance that can be found in Christian tradition, especially counter-narratives about human worth, embodiment, relationality, and time. Considering digital practices through the lens of “liturgy” and formation, she offers practical experiments for individual and communal change.

In our current digital ecologies, small behavioral shifts are not enough to give us freedom. We need a sober and motivating vision of our prospects to help us imagine what kind of life we hope to live—and how we can get there.

Key Features

• Unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age
• Examines the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems
• Explores pathways of meaningful resistance that can be found in Christian tradition

Contents

• Introduction: Confessions
• Being at Altitude: Understanding the Digital Ecology
• The Terms of Agreement: What Digital Media Companies Have Known All Along
• The Industrialization of You and Me
• The Good News
• Settling for Connection When Created for Communion: A Theological Anthropology
• Digital Practices as (Secular) Liturgy
• Reimagining Time and Attention: Soul Formation in a Culture of Productivity
• Embodied and Embedded: Transforming Sites of Faithful Presence and Sacred Spaces
• The Church as Counter-Liturgy: Alternative Futures of Faith Communities

Top Highlights

“While we are so grateful and even love so much of what we get from our digital technologies, we often feel frustrated, harassed, and exhausted by them. And we don’t know what to do about it.” (Page 4)

“Katy Perry lamented in Cosmopolitan magazine, ‘I wish there was a thing like Shabbat … a worldwide day where we’re not on our phones … an actual day of real rest.’” (Page 8)

“But Turkle points out that it can also serve as a crutch when we grow to become people incapable of solitude, fearful of being alone with ourselves, and prone to turning to our screens and away from our immediate surroundings whenever we feel awkward, bored, or anxious.” (Page 21)

“What we need most is a realistic and motivating vision of our circumstances that helps us imagine what kind of life we are hoping to live and how it is we can get there.” (Page 12)

“These disciplines and practices are only sustainable when practiced not as an individual but together in community” (Page 13)

Product Details

• Title: Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age
• Author: Felicia Wu Song
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2021
• Logos Release Date: 2021
• Pages: 216
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Technology › Religious aspects--Christianity; Digital media › Religious aspects--Christianity; Liturgics
• ISBNs: 9780830851140, 9780830851133, 0830851143, 0830851135
• Resource ID: LLS:RSTLSSDVCSDGTLG
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T02:48:48Z

About Felicia Wu Song

Felicia Wu Song (PhD, University of Virginia) is a cultural sociologist of media and digital technologies, currently serving as professor of sociology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. Her publications include Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together and articles in such scholarly journals as Gender & Society and Information, Communication & Society.