“Tech Execs Require Nannies to Sign Contract Barring Screens,” was an article I introduced in a course I teach entitled “Reading, Writing & Inquiry.” The students were stunned to learn that Silicon Valley leaders do not allow their own children to view anything on screens during the day. Students astutely noted, “they must know something, we don’t.” In fact, Song’s purpose connects what Big Tech knows: “our contemporary digital lives are fundamentally shaping our imaginations and appetites about what it means to be human” (13). It stands to reason, then, that every college professor, every parent, pastor, social worker, I would argue, any person who works with people, should read Restless Devices. One feels the pathos of Felicia Wu Song as she expresses her personal decisions about digital communities. In Part One, Song displays a wholistic concern that screens have taken over our lives. In Part Two, a concerted effort is made to give a Christian response to the cultural issues. If there is one book that could provide an off-ramp from the digital highway, Restless Devices is it.
Essential ideas run through every page. There is no neutrality in any field of inquiry much less the technologies we handle (27). The origin of the internet and how we access the web is a powerful story Song tells well (28-30). She then connects the reader’s thinking to digitization’s dominance which create inherent structures that weave themselves through all cultural entities (31-32). Song suggests that the technologies have changed us. I would add we allow technologies to change us, so we don’t have to change ourselves. We bear responsibility for our choices (35). Song’s classes are introduced to practices designed to have students rethink “restrictions and limits” (37), since media can be like any other idolatry, demanding our attention, sacrifice, and obeisance (consider Deuteronomy 4:17-19).
In Western terms, obedience to the cultural gods includes consumerism, which allows our “emotions, thoughts, and relationships” to be “ground to a pulp” (45). We become what we buy. And we are seduced into believing we will be left behind if we do not have access to the most current media. Brain science demonstrates the impact of digital desires and the results those desires activate; it feels good, so we want more (47-51). Along the way, Song acquaints us with multiple resources that further our understanding: everything from books on media addiction and social disconnection to New Yorker and Axios essays on what electronic devices are doing to ourselves and our kids (52-61). One of Song’s greatest contributions is her constant questioning. Banks and lists of questions dot the book providing not only opportunity for personal introspection but educational application; Song uses these questions in her own classes (i.e., 60, 75, 87, 99, 123, 160). It is obvious to any educator that Song is a practitioner. Her multiple “experiments in praxis” throughout the book (62-63, 90-93, 147-49) are designed for students – for anyone – who want to break free from digital shackles. Our collective enslavement to “shadow industrialization” tends to “instrumentalize and reduce us as persons” (69). Here Song offers an important list of “drives” that could be used not only as future research but classroom assignments: drives to quantify, perform, reify, and control (71-84).
The oversized power of Big Tech begun in Part One (41) initializes Part Two (97-98) reminding us that those who manage the digital environment, do so intentionally. But here Song wants us to remember that we bear responsibility for our own identities. All the way through Part Two she focuses on The Church as community. She explains we believers need to return to our own rituals, assumptions, and commitments, not have them imposed on us (100-103). Here the author begins to give a broad theological view of anthropology (chapter five), liturgy (chapter six), soul formation (chapter seven), and faithful presence in our places (chapter eight). In all her writing Song gives a theological treatise leading to change of affections, culminating in explicit applications. Changing one’s liturgical practices could lead anyone from information to transformation.
One concern that runs through the book is the lack of footnotes for some entries. Often the references are listed properly at the bottom of any page where a person, idea, or quote is enumerated. But elsewhere (i.e., pages 21, 115, 122, 135, 150) perhaps it is the publisher’s desire for a book to cross from academic to popular spheres of influence which results in uneven attribution. Some theological statements could be refashioned. “Taking a leap of faith” (121) suggests a disconnect from the historical veracity of biblical belief. There is a lack of Scriptural rootedness that could have bolstered any of Song’s foci: Trinity, idolatry, or “principalities and powers” where a book is quoted rather than The Bible (136). Deeper biblical focus is suspended at times; the anecdote about boredom (157-60), for instance, could have been replaced by the Psalmist’s basis for “meditation,” or “reflection” in our modern parlance. Misgivings noted, however, could never outweigh the need for everyone to read this book.
Song’s easy style, her reader friendly approach, makes us sense the author is sitting across from us. Restless Devices is written in a popular approach with grounding in research that will attract both everyday people and academicians. Song acknowledges her bent toward cognition but is quick to say, “lived experience” is also an important pathway to knowledge (128) because she knows “our embodied behaviors . . . act on us” (131). Like any good Socratic teacher, Song asks the questions allowing us to come to conclusions on our own. Song’s last chapter is important for its title, “The Church as Counterliturgy.” Christians always lose when we try to beat the world at its own game. “Turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6) should be the result of how unbelievers see our actions. What is so winning about Restless Devices is that Felicia Wu Song has gone through the process of extricating herself from the tidal pull of cultural currents. Her honesty, her investigation, her praxis, her teaching the next generation, and her gentle approach – easily applied in and outside Christendom – is what draws us in to her exceptional work. If Silicon Valley elites know the power of screens, shouldn’t that tell us something? But perhaps, just perhaps, we should begin the spadework Restless Devices provides to plant seeds of change in us, our families, our churches, and our universities.
This review will appear in Christian Education Journal.
Restless devices: Recovering personhood, presence, and place in the digital age. By Felicia Wu Song. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021. 232 pp. $24. Softcover.
Review by Mark D. Eckel, President, The Comenius Institute, Indianapolis, IN; Professor of Leadership, Education and Discipleship, Capital Seminary and Graduate School, Lancaster, PA.