To prepare our children for a life that will likely involve vast amounts of time on the internet, we have to warn them about what is addictive and destructive. No one begins a practice and hopes to end up enslaved by it. The nature of addiction is a voluntary surrender to more and more mastery by a pleasure some habit. Therefore, we have to point out the danger before they walk into it.
On the internet, that addiction is the pleasure of novelty. The web offers a non-stop array of links to click, messages to check, apps to open, likes and comments to view. The architecture of the web is built upon our love of the new and the alluring. Films such as The Social Dilemma have well-documented how much of this was designed by those familiar with brain chemistry and psychology. The addiction to social media and to the web in general is no accident. It is a design feature that enriches some as it enslaves others.
In the meantime, not only does an addiction to continual checking of our phones or apps grow, but something is lost. That loss is the brain’s ability to focus without distraction. The habit of needing the dopamine hit for checking email or WhatsApp or some other notification literally trains our brains to want that “relief” after just minutes of concentration. We think we are just “multi-tasking”, but we are actually addicted to distraction.
That means we do less real reading, and more skimming. We do less intensive study, and more superficial scanning. We become more drawn to the visual than the textual, less tolerant of dense text and extended argument. We struggle to do deep work.
In short, we become worse and worse at something the Bible requires: meditation and imagination. Meditation is the ability to pursue one thought and consider it from all points of view, gaining insights and applications. Imagination is the ability to see more than just visual images, but to see beyond and behind life, seeing the meaning of things and how they are connected. Imagination is not dealing with fanciful and unreal things, but with true reality. True reality is not found in the mere visual. “For we walk by faith, not by sight”. Christian imagination enables us to experience hoped-for things as substantial, and things not seen as if they are evidentially present (Hebrews 11:1).
Biblical imagination actually prioritises words over images. It focuses on the meaning of words, particularly God’s Words. It considers carefully God’s analogies in Scripture, to understand the nature of reality. Immersed in those realities, it can see life as it really is.
By contrast, a person saturated with the eye-candy of the Internet is blunting his imagination. He seldom has to focus, concentrate, or think deeply on meaning, because he is always stuffed with the sugary fast-food of videos and images from the web.
Philosophers and psychologists tell us that those pleasures that are most immediate are always the most addictive. The immediacy of the internet’s visual offerings completely overwhelm a child’s senses. Cultivating meaningful imagination by reading literature, learning poems, listening and playing music, will seem to them by contrast like chewing steak that is too tough.
If your allow your child’s diet to be all the sugar of Disney, Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram, etc., you will have a hard time getting them to eat the meat of God’s Word. Addiction to distraction destroys imagination.
