Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age
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 digital ecosystems. 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. She then explores pathways of meaningful resistance that can be found in Christian tradition--especially counter-narratives about human worth, embodiment, relationality, and time--and 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.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate"Digital media has shaped our spiritual lives and churches in profound ways, yet we have few guides to navigate this new terrain. I have longed for a book like Restless Devices to be written. Felicia Wu Song compellingly examines the addictive qualities of digital media-its ubiquity and totalizing power. But her depth of expertise and profound Christian imagination allow her to go further than mere critique. She offers us practical hope in the 'counterliturgies' of the Christian faith. I highly recommend this powerful work of spiritual formation to all who seek to live humanely and faithfully in our digital age."
Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest and author of Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night
"I have been looking for this book for years. Dr. Song brings the top scholarship and the deepest Christian reflection to bear on the important spiritual topic of how we faithfully engage our devices. In this digital age, which requires new forms of moral and spiritual reflection, there are few topics that could be more relevant or more needed. This is a book I will read again and again."
Elaine Howard Ecklund, professor of sociology at Rice University and author of Why Science and Faith Need Each Other: Eight Shared Values That Move Us Beyond Fear