Guest Blog Post from Jake Bier
Walt Mueller invites Jake Bier – CPYU Research Fellow and Assistant Pastor at Springton Lake Presbyterian Church, Newtown Square, PA – to take over his blog for the next 2 weeks. What follows is Part 1 of a blog from Jake. This content was adapted from a series of classes he taught at his church.
You may have noticed recently that something is different about the internet. While Christians have always needed to think critically about the internet, the digital landscape has drastically shifted over the past few years. As Christian parents and leaders, this shift calls for renewed awareness. Now, more than ever, we need to discern the times and think wisely about what the internet has become.
The World Wide Web
If you haven’t noticed, the internet has been taken over by influencers, content creators, and ads. To see what I mean, stop reading and go on your preferred social media app, either Facebook or Instagram. Scroll down the feed and see how many people you actually know in real life. When I did this, I counted fifty-five posts—nineteen ads and thirty-nine “suggestions”—between an old friend and somebody I knew from college. Fifty five posts! And this was on Facebook, which after MySpace was the original social network.
In the early days, apps like Facebook and Instagram were truly “social media”. They offered extensions of real life relationships in a digital space: a chance to connect with college roommates, distant relatives, and see what your friends were up to. But now, our feeds are filled with content from people whom we have never met or even heard of. They’re inescapable—in most cases, you can’t even opt out of recommendations. The big change came with the success of TikTok, which uses an algorithm to suggest more content you might like.
When it comes to the platforms and apps that students are using, this is even more true. By and large, they’re not following or interacting with their friends online. Teens today don’t really use Facebook, though some still use Instagram. The most popular are YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Discord—apps where you rarely bump into anyone you actually know in real life. Most teens don’t make posts, don’t leave comments, and just consume what other people have made.
Social media, it turns out, is not all that social anymore. The social element is gone, and the internet is now a completely different animal. For that reason, I think “social media” is an outdated term, and we need a new one. For a while I was using the term “the digital World”—as in, it’s another world that you step into—but now I think we’d be better off going back to a term from when the internet first began: the Web.
You might recall, the “www” on a website means “World Wide Web”, as in everything is connected via the internet. I think that term best describes what we experience when we go online. It’s a Web—not in the original sense, but in the sense that it has been designed to ensnare you. What is a spider web? It’s a trap. More and more, that’s what the internet is.
A lot of research has been done in this area and has come out publicly. You may have heard about or seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix, or the books The Shallows by Nicholas G. Carr, Jean Twenge’s iGen or Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. What this research exposed is the ways these social media apps have been engineered by experts to hook you in and catch your interest. They are designed to be addictive, and they use predatory strategies to capture your attention and steal your time. The longer you spend on the app, the more money they make. Then, while they have a captive audience, they feed you as many advertisements as they possibly can in order to get more of your money. That’s what these apps are—they’re traps.
Infinite Scroll = Black Hole
To give you an example of what I mean, consider the common format on a lot of these apps: the infinite scroll, or reels. This was the original design of TikTok, which has been copied onto Instagram, YouTube, and all the rest. On these apps, you’re presented with an infinite scrolling feed of content that you might enjoy. The longer you spend on any given post, the more the algorithm thinks you like that kind of thing and so it begins to recommend more of it.
Does this design remind you of anything? It’s a slot machine! You pull the lever and up the images go: not that one, not that one, yes! You hit the jackpot, you find something new—you watch this one, then pull the lever again. New content comes up, rinse and repeat. There’s always something new, something exciting, something to catch your eye and suck you back in.
The Web is a black hole, an infinite scroll of content for you to consume bit by bit. And as is true with any casino, the House always wins—the more time you spend on the app, the more money they make. Not every website is designed this way, but a lot of them are, and the more they resemble this form, the deadlier they become.
Given this design, it’s no surprise that so many people—teens and adults—are addicted. As research has shown, there is a very strong correlation between smartphone use and the mental health crisis. Loneliness, anxiety, depression—all these mental health issues (especially in teens) are strongly correlated with smartphone use.
But even if we are not addicted in that clinical sense, the shape of the Web has affected us all. We might call this digital discipleship: we’re influenced by the voices we hear and the videos we watch; we are catechized and shaped by the content we engage with. Even if the kind of content we are engaging with isn’t in of itself sinful or bad, we are still being shaped by it.
“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.” (Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation 199).
What We’re Really Dealing With
So this is what we’re dealing with. When we see things up close, we begin to understand that the problem of the Web is not really something we can think our way out of.
In my experience, that’s usually our response to issues of Technology and Media. We don’t want to be Luddites, and so we say that the internet is just a tool, and technology is neutral; it’s neither good nor bad. And so, the argument goes, it’s all just a matter of what you do with it—good or bad, right or wrong, sinful or not.
And so Christians spend a lot of time talking about discernment for media choices and about wisdom to decide which pieces of media to engage with or not, etc. We try to teach students to use discernment, and we give them all kinds of biblical principles about who to follow, what to watch, where to go, how to set screen limits, and so on. That’s the typical Christian approach to Technology.
But the assumption behind that approach is that, if only we have the right principles and if we exercise enough discernment, we can take advantage of everything the internet has to offer without being sucked in.
I don’t think that’s enough. Yes, the internet is a tool. But it’s not a tool in the same way that a hammer is a tool—it’s a completely different animal.
We live in a digital world. The Web is everywhere and it has its hooks in all of us. So yes, we need discernment and we need wisdom—but we also need new habits and new disciplines in order to curb the Web’s influence on our lives.
Scripture gives believers a high calling: “Do not conform to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:1-2). That transformation requires intentionality. It cannot happen if our thoughts are constantly hijacked by notifications, endless scrolling, and digital noise. We cannot renew our minds if they are perpetually distracted.
And this is not only about us. Our children are growing up in a world where the Web disciples them more than parents, Scripture, or the church. Their values, attention spans, and identities are being shaped in real time by algorithms designed to capture them and hold them. If we do not lead them with wisdom and clarity, somebody else will.
We are called to be salt and light (Mt 5:13-16), but salt loses its saltiness when it becomes indistinguishable. If we are just as distracted, just as dependent, and just as ensnared by the Web as the world is, we will lose our ability to witness.
And so we need more than good intentions. We need new ways of engaging with technology—new habits, disciplines, and boundaries that will help us maintain our attention, guard our hearts, and honor the Lord. We must learn to push back against the spirit of the age at least as much as it is pushing into us.
In the second part of this series, we’ll take a look at some of the disciplines we need to adopt in order to free ourselves from the Web.
Check back for Part 2.