Book Review: Scrolling Ourselves to Death
In 1985, a man named Neil Postman wrote the seminal book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The summary of his book is that our culture is being changed for the worse by television. Television has given us distraction and entertainment and triviality…sweeping us away in a “sea of irrelevance”. Postman posited that our society would take on more of Brave New World shape - that we ultimately would give ourselves over not to tyrannical oppression and pain but that we would be controlled by the infliction of unending pleasure.
Some 40 years later, enter Scrolling Ourselves to Death - a collection of essays on how prophetic Amusing turned out to be. I’m grateful to my brother Kirk Bolton for gifting me both of these books in December. I highly recommend both of them to you - here I want to review Scrolling to pique your interest in the topic of digital life and its effects.
A prevailing theme of the book, edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa, is that none of our technology we use is neutral. It is doing something to us - it’s not just a tool we use. Social media, endless texts and messages, YouTube, and the rest are changing us and the call for the Church is to be countercultural in this realm.
The Church must answer this call - to be disrupters and be eye-to-eye, embodied proclaimers of the life-giving love of Jesus. We need to zoom out and see how technology’s dopamine hits are paralyzing multiple generations and then personally invite them to enjoy life abundant in Jesus.
One of my favorite lines in a chapter essay from Andrew Spencer is that the church should be “technology resistance fighters”. We lovingly provide the watching world the possibility of community that is not in technological bondage. On this, Spencer writes:
“A congregation that encourages using paper Bibles during services, discourages using phones during group gatherings, discusses the effects of innovative technologies, and holds one another accountable for social media use will be on the right track. Positive steps like these form loving resistance fighters.”
We intrinsically know that we are indeed scrolling ourselves to death and yet even the gates of TikTok, Facebook, ChatGPT, and X will not prevail against the Church. This book shows us how that is true.
Review by Jeff Jamison