Corcoran Austbarr
Mount St. Mary’s university Professor of Philosophy Joshua Hochschild recently published an essay for “Sed Contra,” a publication of the Thomistic Institute, entitled “How is my iPhone Changing Me?: Neuroscience and Thomistic Psychology”. Hochschild is a speaker for the Thomistic Institute’s “Campus Chapters” program in which students at different universities invite Christian speakers to conferences to explore the Christian intellectual tradition.
In his essay, Hochschild discusses the ways in which social media affects us, aiming to illuminate its dangers, opportunities and how awareness of all of this allows us to be disciplined, understand our souls and practice virtue intentionally. He wants the essay to be “spiritually beneficial” to its readers.
Hochschild aimed to make clear that it's not incidental how many smartphone users find their devices to be powerful and difficult to give up; distracting. In fact, he says, “They really were designed to distract us and manipulate us,” directing our attention away from things that are important for us to attend to.
The internet makes us become “shallow thinkers,” says Nicholas Carr, American journalist and writer whom Hochschild quotes. Our concentration, capacity to remember, and ability to contemplate are put at risk with the overconsumption of social media; the effects of this “new epidemic of distraction,” a weakness of our civilization, says too quoted Andrew Sullivan, British American author. This, Sullivan asserts, is a “threat to our souls.”
Hochschild agrees, and something imperative he asks us to realize is that “[social media] is very carefully designed to be so attractive that it overwhelms your decision-making powers, and you might need to take certain steps to reassert your own discipline in using it.” Moderation is possible, and social media is not evil, but due to its predatory and algorithmic nature, caution is a necessity, less it seduces us and changes who we are.
In “The Screwtape Letters”, a novel by British writer C.S. Lewis, an experienced demon writes letters to a less experienced demon advising him on how to better tempt his target. Tempt. Hochschild points out how demons cannot directly interfere with our will and intellect, but like the algorithm, “they mislead and confuse, they distort our perceptions, they lead our attention astray.” Further, he quotes Aquinas himself, who wrote, “The devil is called the kindler of thoughts, inasmuch as he incites to thought, by the desire of the things thought of, by way of persuasion, by rousing the passions.” Hochschild sees too many similarities to the algorithm's goal.
However, despite the soul-seeking nature of the internet, Hochschild proposes two weapons against its unwholesome desire: the cultivation of virtue and intentional living. He writes, “we can begin to protect ourselves from the tempting distractions of technology by asking about it and recognizing it for what it is; by wondering about our nature and remembering who we are; we can go for a walk or read a book; we can philosophize and pray.”
We have control over our will and attention. We can see this sort of addiction as a societal problem and help each other “[learn] how not to see things so [we] can find the diamonds in the rough.” Arm ourselves with the “spiritual armor” of virtue to protect the memory, intellect and will that the algorithm wants to manipulate.
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