Over the past eight years, I’ve read numerous books and articles about the way that screens and the social internet have changed us. My gateway into this literature was Jean Twenge’s iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us (Atria, 2017). As a university educator, I was concerned about the ways that screens were impacting my students—both in the classroom and in their lives outside the class.
But I wasn’t only concerned about the Gen Z students I was teaching. I was also concerned about adults. I was concerned about me.
As I read more and more on this topic, one book that was referenced again and again was Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010; 2nd ed. 2020). Carr’s book was an expansion of his much-discussed 2008 essay in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” When I finally read The Shallows, it encapsulated many of my concerns. The internet is hacking our brains, changing the way we think, making us all dumber and easier to manipulate—even as we accumulate more and more information. Furthermore, tech companies are exploiting the numbing and addictive powers of the internet to great profit. We aren’t merely consumers; we’re all lab rats.
Carr’s most recent book is Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (Norton, 2025). Carr opens his book with the story of a superbloom of poppies in 2019 that began as a remarkable display of botanical beauty. Then it went viral. As social media influencers descended upon the superbloom, their pictures capitalized on the natural splendor of the flowers, trivialized the awe provoked by the phenomenon, and, of course, provoked contentious and even contemptuous debate online.
Carr sees in the superbloom incident a metaphor for the modern history of communication technology. He writes,
We live today in a perpetual superbloom—not of flowers but of messages. Our phones have turned us into human transceivers, nodes on a communication network of unprecedented scope and speed. Whatever else we may be doing, we are always receiving and emitting signals, many of which we’re conscious of (words, images, sounds) and others of which we’re not (data on our location, behavior, mood). When we first hooked ourselves up to the network, we did so with excitement and optimism. Being connected to so much information and so many people was thrilling, and it seemed obvious that all those connections would broaden our minds, enlarge our sympathies, and make the world a nicer place. More communication would mean more understanding. It hasn’t turned out that way (p. 3).
Superbloom is a sobering history of modern communication technology. The narrative is fairly grim. With communication innovation has come the assumption of increased efficiencies and enhanced connections with other people. Sometimes, the latter has happened. In many ways, our lives are easier because of telephones, radios, televisions, email, artificial intelligence, etc. But it has come at a price.
Trust is eroded. Resentment is nurtured. Anxiety is heightened. Conspiracies capture our imaginations. Social contagions spread at the speed of a high-speed internet connection. It is more difficult to tell the difference between truths and lies. Many of us are simultaneously highly connected and socially isolated. We are addicts. Content is king. Our digital identity is our real identity.
Our cultural milieu both shapes and is shaped by these dynamics. Our laws are insufficient to rightly order our technological innovations. Bad actors of various sorts abound, whether they are totalitarian nations, criminal hackers, sexual predators, or social media trolls. In some ways, there is no more privacy, since so much of our personal information is accessible by whoever can crack the right codes. Yet in other ways, a disordered appeal to privacy offers a shield for some of the worst of the online world.
So, how do Christians faithfully navigate this communication superbloom? This is where Carr proves less helpful. He is a diagnostician. We also need some wise voices who offer helpful prescriptions. Let me recommend some.
I’ll begin with two non-Christians who, in God’s common grace, are especially helpful. I personally think Jonathan Haidt’s much-discussed The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) is arguable the most important book on this topic written since Carr wrote The Shallows. I also recommend Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (2019), which asks hard questions about the costs and benefits of our digital age.
Among Christian authors, Felicia Su Wong’s Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (2021) and Andy Crouch’s Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (2022) each address the question of authentic human flourishing in a digital age. Both are interdisciplinary discussions that are rooted in Christian thinking. They are great companion volumes to Haidt and Newport.
Do you really need to be on X or Meta? What about Instagram and Snapchat? Chris Martin has written a couple of books that address the dangers of what he calls the social internet: Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media (2022) and The Wolf in Their Pockets: 13 Ways the Social Internet Threatens the People You Lead (2023). The latter book is especially helpful for pastors and other ministry leaders.
Samuel James’s Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age (2023) gets to the heart of the matter—literally. James focuses on cultivating virtuous desires when it comes to our digital habits. Brett McCracken hits on similar themes in his helpful book The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World (2021). For each of these books, I recommend reading a chapter a day as part of your daily devotional time.
Finally, I’d recommend the newly published collection of essays Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age (2025), edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa. The contributors extend the arguments from Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) into the internet age. I was honored to contribute a chapter to Scrolling Ourselves to Death titled “‘Unfit to Remember’: The Theological Crisis of Digital-Age Memory Loss.”
Nathan Finn, Provost and Dean of the University Faculty at North Greenville University, is a historical and systematic theologian who writes and speaks widely on Baptist history and thought, leadership, and Christian higher education. He serves as a Research Fellow for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He frequently preaches and teaches for local churches, ministry leadership conferences, Bible conferences, and other similar events.
