Six Dangers of Technology … (continued)
2. Skimming vs. Reading. At best, Internet users skim text rather than read it. In fact, “skimming” is now the dominant metaphor for reading. Though words are a crucial part of the online experience, they bow before the gods of visual and audio media (Challies, The Next Story, 59).
a) Email: How do you read an email? You glance quickly through it to find the main point. If it is more than a few paragraphs, you quickly scroll down, skimming to find the main points. 
Men who receive a lot of emails oftentimes simply ignore any email that is longer than three paragraphs.
b) Kindle: In my experience, I read much faster on a screen than in a normal book. The screen lets me adjust the page width to what my eyes can capture in a glance, tempting me to speed read at a furious rate. That’s good for devouring a book rapidly, bad for thoughtful digestion of its content.
Spurgeon: Little learning and much pride comes of hasty reading (Lectures to My Students, 177).
My suspicion is that people who do their quiet times on their cell phones don’t read their cell phone screens the same way they read a printed Bible. Reading on a screen is almost invariably done by means of skimming.
3. Inability to Focus. An unguarded use of technology creates an inability to focus. Challies: Our brains actually change in response to new technologies. The brain of a person raised in the age of print, a person who learned from books and who read books in time of leisure or study, has a brain that is markedly different from a person who has learned primarily from images or who has watched videos in times of leisure or study (44).
There are two changes:
a) Memory. We can now know less than ever before. We don’t have to know everything; we just need to know where and how to find it (150). It is no longer necessary to remember where key passages are. Our search program will find it in a 6 second. But one wonders if this is sometimes a detriment to our overall Bible knowledge, not just an aid.
b) Focus. The digital explosion has even changed the way the adult brain functions. It has placed many of us into what has been described as a state of continuous partial attention …. While we sit at our desks working on a report [or sermon] we are also monitoring our mobile phones and our instant messaging accounts, giving partial attention to a host of different media. As we do so, we keep our brains in a constant state of heightened stress, damaging 
our ability to devote ourselves to extended periods of thoughtful reflection and contemplation. After some time, our brains begin to crave this constant communication, finding peace in little else (45, Point: Uncontrolled technology allows you to do more things, less well).
4. Interruption
a) Beeps: Beeps tell me that I am needed elsewhere. And far too often, I obey and answer the call
…. I had to silence the torrent of beeps in my life so I could focus, at least for a time, and work undistracted from interruptions. …. Immediately, I notice that the loss of my digital technologies had slowed the pace of my life (Challies, 115).
b) Cell phones: When we understand that cellular phones were introduced to keep businessmen in touch with the office while they were away from it … we will not marvel that our mobile phones tend to do just that—to keep us in touch when we would rather escape. The phone is simply doing what it was created to do (62).
Many of us no longer have a personal home phone and a work cell phone—we have a single device that does it all. When this is the case, we cannot be surprised when we receive work calls at home and personal calls at work …. The purpose of a multifunction device like the iPhone
… is to stop its owner whenever and wherever he is in order to pull him from one thing to the next. As soon as he takes a call, it provides him with a reminder from his calendar; and when he responds to that reminder, he receives an e-mail; and when he replies to the e-mail, he receives a text message. And so it goes, from one distraction to the next. This is exactly what the iPhone is meant to do. And it does it well. (120)
Amidst all of the chatter we have forgotten that we do not need to communicate all the time. Is it possible that constantly communicating with others is not always good …? Remember one of our key insights into technology: a technology wears its benefits on its sleeve—but the drawbacks are buried deep within. …. for a growing number of people, the need to be in constant communication is so powerful that they cannot even turn off their cell phones in order to sit through a movie [or a church service!]. (74)
5. Distraction. The myth of multitasking: Multitasking is actually a misnomer. While we think we are multitasking, we are actually task switching, doing a little bit of one thing and then doing a little bit of another …. [One study has found that] “people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50 percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them separately, completing one before starting the other.”
Meanwhile, if we surround ourselves by too many stimuli, we force our brains into a state of continuous partial attention, a state in which we keep tabs on everything without giving focused attention to anything …. “people may place their brains in a heightened state of stress
…. they exist in a sense of constant crisis …. Once people get used to this state, they tend to thrive on the perpetual connectivity. It feeds their egos and sense of self-worth, and it becomes irresistible.” (Challies, 125)
Point: The task switching encouraged by digital technology often causes us to work less effectively, the exact opposite of what we expect.
Observation: Do you work shorter hours than you did before computers and smart phones? Not likely. Where has all the time you saved gone? In most cases, right back to your gadgets. Take control of your technology, employing its benefits, but refusing to be dominated by it.
– David De Bruyn, Professor of Church History, Shepherds’ Seminary Africa