October 27, 2015
By Eddie Pipkin
In an expansive essay in a recent New York Times Sunday Review, “Stop Googling and Let’s Talk,” (a preview of her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age), professor and author Sherry Turkle shares her research and conclusions in the field of online connectivity and how it affects human relationships. Specifically, she writes about the impact that smartphones have on face-to-face conversations. As you might expect, the news is not good.
She begins the essay with this observation:
College students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, “elsewhere.’
The advent of the smartphone and 24-hour connectivity has impacted ministry in hundreds of ways. It is changing the ways we connect to congregations; it is changing the expectations of parishioners; it is changing the way we relate to one another. A friend and I recently shared a conversation about the way ubiquitous smartphones have changed youth ministry and increasingly even children’s ministry. Way back in the 90s, if you had a bus breakdown, you had plenty of time to manage the story (and attendant drama) before it got back to parents, but these days there are Instagram photos of the youth group stranded on the side of the interstate before you’ve even diagnosed the proble