At Mere Orthodoxy, Matthew Schultz has written one of the most thorough and thoughtful reviews of my book Digital Liturgies that I’ve read yet. Book reviews are easy to do poorly and very difficult to do well, and Matthew demonstrates how consistently compelling a well-done review can be. I am thankful that my book can be associated with such a good piece of writing.
As for the content of the review, Matthew doesn’t hate the book—which is always a relief!—but he doesn’t particularly love it either. One of the things I most appreciate about the review is how clear its critique is. Matthew argues that, for all the helpful things I might say about the excesses of social media, I have fatally conflated some parts of the Internet with the whole, and in the process have dramatically overstated the Web’s formative power and dramatically understated our potential to get out from underneath it.
Here are three important paragraphs from the review:
Much of the important criticism James provides has to do with those aspects of the internet that involve interpersonal communication on social media apps or apps with gamified social interaction (such as some parts of YouTube). In the introduction, James speaks of the social internet as central to him and seemingly everyone else, and he treats the “internet, web, social media, and digital technology” as a concept cluster with the central idea of “the disembodied electronic environment that we enter through connected devices for the purpose of accessing information, relationships, and media that are not available to us in a physical format.” This distinction, while acceptable in theory, tends in practice to treat everything from text messages to online social media mobs as part of the same digital problem…
No one who spends 17 minutes online to research baking recipes is going to the internet because he loves baking recipes and just can’t stop looking at digitally curated lists of ingredients and oven instructions. No one who pays five online bills feels any great desire to look for another bill because he has built into his life a reflexive habit of sending money to faceless corporations. The “liturgies” and “narratives” of these actions—to the extent that such a framework even makes sense—do not bend the participant toward any particular end.
In these cases, the end is not the digital recipe or the electronic debt, but the use of these pieces of efficient information transfer to forward real life (“embodied”) purposes, such as loving a neighbor with a cream cheese pound cake or ensuring the hot water and electricity stay on. If these kinds of activities are making “life itself consumable and malleable in any way you desire,” it is in a way that is trivially true and hardly worth the alarm that accompanies a provocative phrase like “pornographically shaped.”
This is the heartbeat of Schultz’s disagreement with the book, which he applies later in the review while taking me to task for my lack of practical application. In other words, Schultz believes that I have set readers up for an impossible and pointless task. Because the Internet is not what I (and Nicholas Carr) say it is, Digital Liturgies does not actually equip Christians to extricate themselves from the real problems, but instead advances a defeatist narrative that simultaneously surrenders to the forces of addictive tech and gives believers a Sisyphean task of “being analog” in a world where this is literally impossible.
Schultz is correct that if we misidentify the Web in the way he suggests, then most of what we say in terms of resisting and pushing back its worst effects will be either impractical or just plain wrong. He’s also correct when he says that Christians need to think seriously about legislative efforts to punish technology companies for peddling addictive software. To the extent that I or anyone else believes that faithful Christianity in the digital age precludes working for public change, this is a tragic.
Nonetheless, I think Schultz gets a few things vitally wrong.
-I think Schultz misunderstands the distinction that I draw in Digital Liturgies between “the social Internet” and the Internet as a vehicle for all other networked activity. Schultz alleges that I unhelpfully conflate terms such as “the web,” “social media,” and “digital technology,” even though in many cases I am clearly referring to social media such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). If Schultz were to say interchangeability is unhelpful because we actually need to understand the nature of impersonal media consumption differently than, say, communication, this would be a stimulating point. But what Schultz actually says is that my use of these terms is unhelpful because things that are not social media (he uses the example of online recipes) are actually not guilty of the formative effects that I ascribe to the “Web.”
I think this is wrong, and I wonder if it reflects a deeper misunderstanding of the book’s argument about embodiment. To use Schultz’s illustration of a recipe: Of course, we would not say that a person consuming online pornography and a person looking at recipes online are engaging in the same activity (I clarify this point on page 141). Yet the ethos of endless curated creativity that infuses the online pornography industry also animates online recipes. For example, just in the same way that a person can search for (and usually find) a sexual act that is tailored for a particular kink, no matter how inhuman or degrading, so too a person with an Internet connection can find instructions online for creating something that is disconnected from either tradition (your grandmother’s cookbook) or experience (a professional cookbook).
The fact that the two activities are not morally equivalent is a given; but the question is whether the technology itself, and the plausibility structure it necessarily creates, is capable of distinguishing between these two. There are many people who use online recipes who don’t watch online pornography, but there is no such thing as an Internet of recipes that isn’t also an Internet of smut. And it’s not really that hard to imagine how a person who habitually consults the Web for instructions in how to build something exactly calculated to fit their personal taste might start to extend that habit in other directions—such as religion (the podcast pastor?), politics, and yes, sex.
-I actually think Schultz overstates the degree to which the Web as a whole can be thought of as anything other than social media. Consider the way that even recipe websites almost universally now have social media integration for one-click sharing to your profile. The fact that most social media websites do not have a similar button saying “Share a recipe” suggests that on the contemporary Web, information orbits around social, rather than the reverse.
Moreover, I don’t think Schultz gives enough thought to the possibility that things that don’t feel like social media— “email, financial services, shopping, tourism, watching TV or movies, video or conference calls, music, or job hunting”—are actually very much participating in the spirit of it. Cal Newport has done extensive work on the topic of email and how the Web’s values of distraction and faux-urgency have hijacked information work. Schultz’s mention of “shopping” is curious, given that I devote a section of the book to the way in which the customer review symbolizes the relocation of epistemic authority away from established knowledge and toward atomized experiences. And certainly, the revolution in how we consume entertainment is glaring evidence of the liturgical effect of technology. There are thousands of videos on YouTube where you can watch someone else watch a movie. A couple dozen such videos would be a whimsical curiosity; an industry of such videos strongly suggests that Western culture’s baseline definition of friendship has changed.
-The limitations of Schultz’s essay are most clear, I think, when he writes:
My suggestion is to drop the language of liturgies, the valence of which depends on too many subjective factors and experiences, especially generational shifts. Rather, we should simply treat social media as part of that larger constellation of addictive free market products scholar and historian David T. Courtwright has called “limbic capitalism.” These are industries and products such as fast food, drugs, and gambling that try to maximize profit by locking into the pleasure centers of our brain. Treating social media as a continuation of older technologies and practices rather than sui generis probably requires modifying or heavily abandoning Carr’s framework and those sections of Digital Liturgies that leverage it, but this is a much better fit given what we know of the activities and incentives of the technology companies developing and pushing social media services.
This is a seriously understated view of the role of digital technology in modern society, bordering on naivete. A moment’s consideration should reveal that fast food, drugs, and gambling, while obviously addictive in some of the ways that the Web is, do not constitute the new infrastructure on which education, human relationships, and civil participation are being built. Comparing the Web to fast food is a non-starter; schools are not migrating to McDonalds for instruction, nor are entire churches being founded that meet only at the drive-thru. Understanding the Web’s power as simply the continuation of addictive vices drastically misconstrues the role the Web plays in modern societies today, and consequently, drastically misconstrues the urgency of interrogating its inner logic and spiritual orientation. The work of Nicholas Carr, Neil Postman, Adam Alter, Byung-Chul Han, and others is needed right now precisely because the Web is what Carr refers to as an “intellectual technology:” a technology that reaches deep into the power of language and cognition to become part of how we understand ourselves and the world at large.
I realized early on in the writing process that the language of “liturgies” might miss the mark for some readers. There’s nothing divinely inspired about it. It is quite possible that it is the wrong metaphor for the digital, that it obscures more than it illuminates, and that future thinkers should abandon it. But regardless of what we choose to call this digital commons we inhabit, the fact remains that we are different kinds of people because of it: different kinds of thinkers, different kinds of friends, different kinds of citizens. The more ambient our connectivity has become, the stronger and more obvious its effects have been, particularly on the mental health of kids and teens. But what if these effects happen, not because kids and teens are singularly vulnerable, but because these technologies are singularly powerful? If that’s the case, we should expect to see a modern world—politically, sexually, philosophically—that resembles very much the logic of the computer. We should expect to see a society of individuals, increasingly unable to connect without the protection of a screen. We should expect to see institutions weakened by the demands for curated reality and those whose instincts expect the power to delete whatever is disliked. We should expect to see ideas treated with superficiality, reactivity labeled as courage, and quiet reflection called apathy.
And I think that’s exactly what we see.
Total empathy with you! Having just had to start a peer-reviewed manuscript I rather know the feeling! Keep on writing the truth! Well done!
I'm glad to see you address Schultz’s critiques. It is both helpful and informative.