The Church—Embodied and Empathetic: How to truly care despite digital conditions

There is a story of a prince who is sent off on a journey to Egypt in search of a pearl. However, when he arrives, he is given a cup of spiced wine that tastes of forgetfulness to his mission as well as his life. Forgetting all, the prince lives in ceaseless lust of ever fading desires until the King comes down from his kingdom to Egypt to remind him of his purpose. Together they find the pearl and return to their kingdom.

The Pearl: The light in people’s eyes. The Wine: Digital Technology.

With rampant acceptance, use and implementation of digital technology worldwide, the church must consider the effects of digital technology on the embodied community of believers present in a service as well as the messages spread to non believers.The fear of missing out, or FOMO as it is often referred, is the colloquialism to describe when an individual hears of a regretted missed event. More than just a category for not attending an event, the fear of missing out can also be applied to the ever anxious pursuit of the latest technology. When the church partakes in every trend of digital technology under the guise of “reaching people the way they will be reached” (the technological church's communications director), we miss out on facets of embodied reality—eye contact, empathetic listening, and full attention. While the ability to empathize is hindered with digital technology, it can be learned again through embodied community as reflected by the beauty of the incarnation.In a world that is increasingly online and digital, humanity becomes less human in a pursuit of the technological. This digital habituation changes humans. Surely, you might wonder, before the proliferation of digital technology mankind was not so altruistic? Correct—since the fall of man, humans have been, well, kind of the worst. We are tainted with sin. Yet, anyone who has lived through the digital shift and has witnessed the rise of the Internet as a mass medium can attest that something is different when comparing a pre-digital society to today. Welcome to the land of awkward elevator rides with several scrolling news feeds, averted eye gazes in conversations amidst multiple screens of conflicting interests, train cars of silent passengers plugged with ear buds, faces illuminated by 4.7 inch retina screens, and mediated lullabies of double tapped Instagram hearts. This is a technological society.While a digital shift has surely changed us in innumerable ways, let’s focus on three main points in regards to embodiment—fully present, and empathy—the ability to understand the feelings of another.In a digital society:

1. We are not comfortable looking one another in the eyes.
2. Our ability to pay attention is greatly hindered.
3. We are all narcissists.

Eye contact:

Under digital conditions, we are now used to being in front of screens for about 10 hours per day and we check our phones 150 times per day, so it makes sense that we are not comfortable giving eye contact—we are no longer used to it.Whether we are in the elevator, standing at the crosswalk, or waiting for the professor to begin class, it is not uncommon for eyes to be in downwardly cast into a screen at any free moment. In fact, it is becoming so normalized that it is more uncommon to not have a screen in one’s line of vision. We are no longer comfortable in the unstimulated moments of everyday life.This behavior, while seemingly innocent enough when present at the waiting crosswalk, reveals a more alarming habit which we are normalized to. What we are habituated under in digital conditions, we will continue repeating in our more intimate spheres. Sociologically, the behavior is becoming normalized. We see this normalization in “phubbing,” the compound of phone and snubbing, in which people are snubbed for a phone screen. Sound familiar? According to studies, the mere sight of a smartphone lowers cognitive ability, relational quality, trust, and empathy. This should be alarming since smartphones have become inseparable attachments—media as extensions of man. Smartphones wake us up in the morning, provide us with world news sandwiched between friends’ posts on our newsfeeds, accompany us to class, dictate who we talk to and when by interrupting conversation, and lull us to sleep with pictures of hotter-than-you robots. Our attention and our empathy is being robbed with ever present smartphones. Even brief eye contact has enough power to heighten empathy since they then have the sense of being drawn together. A child learns what is of value and how to empathize based on where her mother’s eyes look. Read here for more on the power of eye contact. According to The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain “A person who averts his or her eyes, especially while engaging in behavior designed to influence us, is almost always judged to be less trustworthy” (Cozolino 164). This is why salesman are instructed to keep eye contact and not wear sunglasses. If even salesmen are required to keep eye contact for business, should not the Christian in normal day to day activities also be exhibiting signs that they are aware and attune for the sake of being fully present in care? Or are we so fickle that we think this hunchback epidemic of looking down into our phones at any free moment is not an indicator that we look just like the world we have been placed in to be set apart?As the world becomes more digital, we become less able to live as humans. It is human to place a high value on intentional care for people, but it is machine to demand sound bite punch lines and become frustrated when someone does not deliver in the time that we require.With bright flashy screens to distract us, it’s harder to look someone in the eyes while they are speaking. I was recently out to dinner with friends, and while we were all comfortable speaking with one another without phones present, multiple times I caught my eyes as they had veered behind my friends’ heads to watch the television. The content of the laundry detergent commercial was banal at best, yet my eyes were somehow still attracted to the fully colored big movements on the screen.

Attention:

Under digital conditions, our brains are more scattered and less attentive. This shows in our inability to listen, understand, and even to follow another’s eye gaze.We are not able to focus and give full attention for the amount of time we used to. While we may have heard the joke that a forgetful person has a worse attention span than a goldfish, it is more true than we might be joking about. A goldfish’s attention span is 9 seconds, but the human’s attention span is now only 8 seconds.Socrates said it best—technology will implant forgetfulness in our souls. The technology he spoke of was that of written instruments, yet the theme of externalization remains the same. In a Time.com article titled, How Social Media is Hurting Your Memory, the act of externalizing information, whether it is through social media or written on a piece of paper, is described as “transactive memory, or the way that we divide information between internal storage—what we decide to remember—and external storage, which is what we store elsewhere.”This effect of media on our brains is not new. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman reveals that the technology of the printing press permanently shaped public discourse: “The resonance of the lineal, analytical structure of print in particular, of expository prose could be felt everywhere.” Consider the 5 hour orations in the Lincoln and Douglas debates in comparison with the sound bite Twitter feeds between Trump and Clinton. Would today’s audience be able to sit still and actively engage in a debate of that length? Hint: if we get impatient with when a waiter takes longer than we expect, it probably means we would not last through a five hour back and forth debate.What—and who—are you paying attention to?In a TED talk titled, “Is Technology Killing Our Empathy?” Jacquelyn Quinones says our inability to empathize is linked to digital information overload. Quinones retells a story of Maya, who is a Syrian refugee with a story. Her story is one of being woken up in the middle of the night to strange sounds coming from out the window, where she sees her husband and 10 year old daughter shot by men stealing from her neighbors. To empathize, we must put ourselves in the story to feel a glimpse of Maya’s gut wrenching pain. Quinones says, “A story helps us feel through emotional empathy, lets us take someone else’s perspective through cognitive empathy, and urges us to act through compassionate empathy. This creates friendship.” Yet when you take a person and loop her in as a number in a statistical surplus, you disconnect. We are overwhelmed by the number of refugees not heard, clean water wells left to dig, and starving orphans yet to feed. It is no different with digital information overload: “We become statistically numb. The overload freezes our emotions and pulls us away from empathy. Because [social media] platforms are designed as broadcast systems where everybody is on display, all we are left with is social desirability bias. Hence doctored profiles, memes, selfies, like buttons. We are being dishonest to be liked. We are moving away from empathy toward narcissism.” For example, since this paper you are now reading is posted online with multiple embedded links, you are now subject to information overload. Wherever you are right now, you are most likely not able to pause your commitments to click on each link to read each article and watch each video clip. Perhaps you eyes scrolled over the content of this page to find out where the interesting points are located, and the length of the article to quickly assess if you are committed enough to actually read it. How many times have you already been digitally distracted while reading this page? 

Narcissism:

With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, we are all narcissists. Social media is not where one posts unattractive photos of themselves—there are even articles written to help confront your friend when they post ugly photos of you. This, plus our habits of altering our normal appearance to cheat perfection for the perfect selfie says much about the value we place on our self-propagated image. The first cult of personality as seen in the rise of the personal celebrity was made by the printing press. His controversial ideas, penetrating words and detailed portraits spread through Germany like wildfire. Who was this man? Martin Luther. The effect of seeing one’s own name in print was a event that need not be understated. Elizabeth Eisenstein writes, publicists "​put​ ​in​ ​their​ ​firm’s​ ​name,​ ​emblem,​ ​and​ ​shop​ ​address​ ​on​ ​the​ ​front​ ​page​ ​of​ ​their​ ​books. Indeed​ ​their​ ​use​ ​of​ ​title​ ​pages​ ​entailed​ ​a​ ​significant​ ​reversal​ ​of​ ​scribal​ ​procedures;​ ​they put​ ​themselves​ ​first.​ ​Scribal​ ​colophons​ ​had​ ​come​ ​last.​ ​They​ ​also​ ​extended​ ​their​ ​new promotional​ ​techniques​ ​to​ ​the​ ​authors​ ​and​ ​artists​ ​whose​ ​work​ ​they​ ​published,​ ​thus contributing​ ​to​ ​new​ ​forms​ ​of​ ​personal​ ​celebrity” (Eisenstein 146). Imagine what it would have been like to have lived through this shift. Whereas under manuscript conditions, you could maybe have your work written in one or a few copies, now you could have it mass produced thanks to the printing press. Your own words were suddenly important, your name was on the front page, and everyone in town held a copy of it. What started with the printing press has reached a more fuller fruition now in social media. With the tap of a screen, we can transmit our talking, moving, full color image to the entire globe. Every thought—banal or deeply considered—has the potential to be read by all of your 400 Facebook friends (or scrolled over, unless it is particularly sensational). Here we hear hints of McLuhan’s famous axiom, “the global village.” But are we truly being brought together?What is seen on the Facebook homepage is a reflection of what you recently searched for on Google, what Facebook friend you have been having conversations with, whose profile you have recently visited… essentially it is a reflection of you. In other words, if you have not sent any recent messages to Bob, been to Bob’s profile lately, or “liked” any of Bob’s posts, guess who does not show up on your newsfeed? Bob. It is like he does not exist, at least not in your social media stratosphere. Although social media promises connectivity, it is all a reflection of you (you—alone in the sea of people on the train, with colleagues at a meeting, or at a friends’ reunion dinner). In the book, Growing Down: Theology and Human Nature in the Virtual Age, author Jaco J. Hamman writes, “Measured to empathy, today’s college students show a decline of 40 percent compared to their peers thirty years ago. Research from the University of Michigan measured the ‘empathy concern’ of college students between 1979 and 2009 and discovered this significant decline” (Hamman 97-98). The research alludes to the likely contributor of declining empathy—the rise of personal technology devices used in everyday life.These three points have a common thread that should be of huge concern to the Christian—we are losing our ability to empathize. As believers in an incarnate, empathetic and attentive God, the church should have an issue with this. Yet more often, we seem to instead embrace the idea of a technological church on screen that can speak to the world in a language it knows best.However, the idea that the church can reach the world through the very technological techniques that has fragmented it makes one wonder of the efficacy of digital technology. Perhaps the very people we seek to unify actually become further scattered and disjointed when “reached” with digital technology.How can the church be wise about their technological implementation? First, the church must have a theology of technology. Does the church's technological choices line up with their theology of what the church is or who Christ is? Does the church’s anxious pursuit of the latest technology implemented in the Sunday service just so that younger church attendees feel welcomed actually line up with their theology?This can perhaps be better understood with a story. In the winter of 2005, I gathered up my allowance of crinkled up bills and Christmas gift cards and walked into Best Buy to purchase my first taste of a middle schooler’s individuality—an Apple iPod nano. With big eyes, I watched as the blue polo laden teenager unlocked the glass case of newly shipped black and white iPod nanos. In the car, I opened the clean white box to find my very own black, reflective and sleek device. I felt like I had made it. I—Rachel Armamentos—owned a name brand mp3 player right when it came out.For the longest time, I only had three songs on it (because I had no idea how to work the iTunes store), but I danced to those songs every Saturday morning as I vacuumed the floors and cleaned the mirrors of my parents’ home. Once I learned how to add my Hilary Duff CD to my iPod, my ears were opened up to a whole new world. For a year, I proudly showed that little device to everyone—the kids on the bus, my teachers during passing period, and my after school program. Then the second generation iPod nano came out. It came in black, silver, electric blue, hot pink, and lime green. I felt immediately less than those who had the colorful and updated version.This cycle lasted for years. As soon as I updated my device, a newer, better, faster version outdated me. I felt anxious in my pursuit to keep up. How often does the church feel the need to update their socials, install the new projector, upgrade the microphones, a create a new sermon bumper? With hope in these devices as the answer to better connection, we lost sight in an incarnate Christ in embodied community.Aldous Huxley wrote of a dark narrative in which he suggested the answer to a digitally disjointed society was chaos, and ultimately, suicide. The biblical narrative, however, offers a truer answer—Jesus Christ incarnate. By transmitting the gospel of an incarnate Christ through a discarnate medium, are we offering a way to a truer reality? Surviving the Technological Society: The Layman’s Guide to Media Ecology includes an interview with Eric Brende who says “media” comes from ‘In medias-res’ [which] is Latin for ‘the middle of things.’ What is supposed to be connecting you actually becomes a barrier instead of a conduit” It is a small slice of full face to face contact. Instead of mediating a message, what would it look like to show up in person when possible?I am not unaware that there are time and space barriers to physical presence. It would be fantastic to be with someone in person! Consider the couple in a long distance relationship who communicate through FaceTime—of course they would agree that to be together is better. I am, however, calling attention to the ever growing resistance of communing in person through embodied community, and rather a growing apathetic stance of distance. In other words, if we can be separate, why would we be together? In the documentary “Digital Nation,” Douglas Rushkoff uncovers large companies whose massive headquarters are now just empty hallways. Their employees are at home, conducting virtual reality meetings through Second Life, an online virtual game world. To cut down on costs of flights and accommodations, business trips are made in the comfort of employees own homes. Which was greater: the cost of flights, or the cost of alienating a community? This matter of efficiency and accommodation has seeped through to the church, too. Consider the elements of physically being in the church building on a Sunday morning: the elderly woman’s flowery perfume resonates in your nostrils as she hobbles past and you think to ask her story, the sticky fingers of the baby held behind you curiously pulls at your hair, and a small smile breaks out on your face as you are reminded of the value of that little giggling life. These facets of church are only present in person, and they remind you of your present reality. With advancing technology that requires our absence, how long will it be until the church's pews are empty, too?But online, the church is something that has the embedded bias of clicking through “boring parts,” texting your friends for their lunch plans (your pastor can’t see you through the screen, so why not?). Being next to one another in service instead of opting out and listening in from your couch means something. In Christianity Today, Dr. Read Mercer Schuchardt claims “For churchgoers to perceive value, churches have to maintain the scarcity of the once-a-week, in-real-life sermon experience. When pastors push their sermons far and wide via podcast, they unintentionally devalue the message they have worked hard to create and communicate. They remove the sermon from the time, context, and body of the liturgy where it belongs.”The church of disembodiment leads to the church of apathy, and of acedia. When we begin to exemplify something other than what we believe, we exhibit a different lived theology. For example, if I believe that God manifested Himself in flesh through Christ (which I do believe), I therefore believe that Christ is both the medium and the message. However, if I communicate through disembodied mediums, I portray a lived theology separate from what I say I believe. What do I believe, then?Disembodiment means a separation of mind from matter. Schuchardt attributes disembodiment to technique in Surviving the Technological Society: “One of the ultimate demonic effects of technique is that it separates the mind from the body or the spirit from the body in the way that God put them together and by disconnecting body and spirit, we are literally out of joint with ourselves and we don’t know who we are, where we are going, or why we are here.”Disembodiment looks like this: You are all alone in your dark room with only the screen of your smartphone to light your eyes. Here, you upload a posed and filtered picture from your day to the eyes of your transglobal Facebook community in the hopes that they will show their affirmation with a click of the ‘like’ button. You are here. They are there. Yet, they see your image, there? You are disembodied.At this application, it is argued that the apostle Paul was disembodied in his letters written to different people and communities. To a degree, this is true. Paul extended his thoughts through the technology of the alphabet to form words on paper with ink, which were then delivered to a different group of people. His medium of communication disembodied him, yet it was to the extent that was a thoroughfare to reality. In the Epistles, Paul writes things like “I long to be with you… I will be with you soon… greet this person” (see Romans 1:11, Philippians 1:8, 2 Timothy 1:4 for example) There is always a point of actual human contact to come. In his disembodiment, he was not attempting to appear wholly in the scripted medium, unlike what we do through social media. Inherent within Snapchat, for example, is the bias of a deceiving displacement, as a pixelated moving image of me are complemented with my digitized voice. This is a tri-sensory manipulation in which viewers are starting to believe the machine can be a place of reality. This cannot be true reality, however, as this is not even true humanity.So, what does all of this mean for empathy?The medium of our conversation may be hindering us from a truer empathy. Digital communication technology promises connection, but it delivers a kind of separation. We are better together.With social media, there is clear bias of quantity over quality. You might have hundreds of Facebook friends, but how many of them would you consider as actual friends (here is a key qualification: will they show up in person when you need?) In a similar way, though the technological mega-church wants to bring the Christian message to as many as possible, how accessible is the Pastor after a Sunday service? If he ghosts out during closing worship, he may be more of a celebrity than a shepherd of his flock. For the satellite church, the pastor disappears when the screen turns black. Who leads them now? The church is becoming more and more disembodied, which is making us less able to empathize.The man who disembodies himself does not understand how to empathize with others as he retreats away from true community and true presence. Matter matters. We are not gnostics.Should it not cause concern that in Saudi Arabia, the AI robot, Sophia, has human rights that women do not have? Should it not cause concern that man is making machine more and more human, and making himself more and more machine?Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation and professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology writes based on conversations she has with… people. Her research includes conversations with a middle school dean on students’ friendship patterns, a recently divorced father who wants a fuller relationship with his distant young daughter, and an elderly woman in a nursing home who has been given a robot baby seal to soothe the loss of a child.Turkle writes of these face-to-face conversations she has in her research of the lack of empathy, and her findings show digital apparatus impede upon people’s ability to interact interpersonally. One family she spoke with noticed their son’s increase of canceling plans, and that these excuses were almost exclusively delivered behind a screen. The family implemented a less mediated policy for cancellations. If their always connected son wanted to cancel a dinner with his grandparents, for example, he could no longer send an email to cancel. He must show up face-to-face or call and hear his grandfather’s vocal response. The family found that there were much less cancellations once this rule was in place because once the person trying to cancel sees and hears that their presence is expected and will be missed. In sum, the son learned his actions do in fact affect others.Author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr writes “The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion” (Carr 211). For example, the clock was originally created by monks to regulate their prayer times. It is not difficult to see how far we have taken the original usage. This technology alone has reshaped cultures and societies all over the world. We wake when the clock wakes us, eat when the clock tells us, plan meetings around the clock, and stare longingly at the clock’s ticking hands, waiting for its instruction that the class is finished. This is a full sensory dis-ordering.In the book of Hebrews, we see Jesus as an empathetic high priest:  “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:14) (emphasis mine).Following the opening metaphor, if we are in a ceaseless lust of digital technology, we will forget our purpose, our humanity, and our reality. Although readers are more comfortable with a conclusion of a call to “be smarter with how you use your technology,” I am not sure that we are able to wisely make that decision, especially since “our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.” Media is not neutral—therefore our stance should not be, either. A plethora of articles and books written on this topic conclude with the call to be “smart about our smartphones” This answer is passé, at best. We are to be caring, fully present, and embodied. If like McLuhan famously said the “medium is the message,” Christ incarnate in flesh is the medium, which is ultimately the message. However, by avoiding eye contact for another screen, a Christian’s message becomes inward focused, narcissistic and unempathetic. Instead, we should be looking up and into one another’s eyes to communicate the hope that we have. If we cannot even see one another out of our own selfishness, we create patterns, which are our liturgies. Our practiced theology becomes a digital one. Christ came in flesh, yet we constantly posit ourselves on the screen. Church, we are not disembodied. We are to be embodied and empathetic. BibliographyArmamentos, Rachel and Brock Lockenour. Surviving the Technological Society: The Layman’s Guide to Media Ecology. Senior Capstone Project. Moody Bible Institute. May 2018.Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton, 2011.Cozolino, Louis J. The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain. W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1983.Hamman, Jaco J. Growing Down: Theology and Human Nature in the Virtual Age. Baylor University Press, 2017.Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin Books, 2005.Schuchardt, Read Mercer. “How Podcasting Hurts Preaching.” Christianity Today, 5 Jan. 2018