Breaking The Digital Spell

When the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook knew that Instagram was toxic and harmful to teen girls, it lit up a firestorm greater than any of the other stories the Journal would break in it’s “Facebook Files” series. Nick Clegg, VP of Global Affairs, recently went on to CNN to discuss the Journal’s report and revealed that Instagram would be rolling out several features that will help curb Instagram’s harmful impact on tee...

The Bible gives us a framework for understanding and navigating a world dominated by social media: Christians are to live as faithfully obedient exiles in the midst of Digital Babylon. This is the claim we explored on the prior episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, and we ended the episode open to pushback or objections to this idea. In this bonus episode, Austin sits down with Jacob Cates, executive pastor of Redeemer Christian C...

The Babylonian exile is arguably the most important event in the history of the Old Testament. Israel's long descent into apostasy ends with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, and the people of God are forcibly relocated to a pagan nation that they did not want to live in. But the Babylonian exile is more than just a date and time in history - it is a framework, used by New Testament writers and by Christians for mill...

Media literacy is the biggest gaping hole in our discipleship. We can feel its effects in our churches and our lives in the same way we can feel the effects of poor financial stewardship or failing marriages in our churches. Plenty of courses and programs exist for churches to address financial literacy and building healthy marriages, but what about for media literacy? The problem has festered for so long feels so overwhelming; it&...

When 2020 began, none of us factored in the possibility of a pandemic being the defining reality of our year. Our plans and predictions for the world were thrown into chaos, and our sense of "normal" upended overnight as we embraced a strong sense of uncertainty about our future. But how "normal" was our pre-pandemic "normal"? What exactly did Covid-19 change, and how lasting are those changes? How should we...

Our love for the technology and media in our lives has left us held under a spell that leads us to believe there is nothing worth seeing or experiencing beyond the screen in front of our face. On the season finale of Breaking the Digital Spell, we look at what it means to live our lives with the digital spell broken.

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We live in a world defined by the Internet and the technology and media it has created. How does this change the way we think about God and the way we love our neighbor? “In Conclusions, Part Two”, we come full circle as the season begins to come to a close.

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No matter how much we might use television or the Internet to escape the real world, the screen size and location always leaves a little bit of the real world in our peripheral vision. VR takes that peripheral vision away and replaces it will a full digital world that could offer us what our real life can’t. 

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Smartphones are incredible useful. They’re also incredibly distracting. They can help us manage our lives and distract us from our lives at the same time. How does this change the way we think about God?

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Produced by Austin Gravley and Andrew...

Earlier this week we looked at social media's impact on us by offering us a limitless amount of content to consume. That content often gets nasty around election seasons - is there anything we can do to mitigate that nastiness and survive the toxicity of social media during election season? In this BONUS episode of Breaking The Digital Spell, we look at three practical ways to help us get through the ugliness of online politics...

Social media promises the ability to consume an endless amount of content thanks to timelines, algorithms, and a whole host of other technological forces designed to keep us up-to-date, informed, and connected with everything going on in the world. There is more content uploaded each day than our minds can comprehend -just how much of this can we consume each day without experiencing any negative effects?

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We've spent the past several episodes talking about the social and intellectual environments - the mediums - created by new technology and media. But what about the machines themselves? What role do they have to do with this? What about the digital text we now consume as a result of these machines? Is there a difference between reading digital text and reading printed text? If there is, what impact does that have on us - on soc...

How did television and the Internet change the way we think about God? In this episode, we come to some conclusions, and one of these conclusions paves the way for the digitally driven world we live in today. 

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Produced by Austin Gravley and ...

When the Internet became readily available and adopted in the 90s, we had no idea what changes it would bring to our world. In many ways, we are still trying to fully asses the scope of that change even to this present day as the Internet continues to evolve and change. Even in the early days of the Internet, however, one thing was clear: our idea of "community" would never be the same again. 

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"If the delivery is not the same, then the message, quite likely, is not the same. And if the context in which the message is experienced is altogether different from what it was in Jesus’ time, we may assume that its social and psychological meaning is different as well.” - Neil Postman.

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How do you read a book? How do you watch television? How we engage a medium tells us what that medium values - and when it comes to television, it values something completely foreign to the world before it: discourse not through words, but through images. 

This episode was originally released on August 27th, 2018. 

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How have changes in technology and media changed the way we think about God? In order to answer this, we must go back to the beginning, and in the beginning...were words. 

This episode was originally released on September 3rd, 2018. 

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In thinking about technology and media, its hard to know where to start when considering their effects on our lives. In this episode, we look at three general responses to technology - optimism, pessimism, and ambiguity - and how these responses can help us make sense of the good, bad, and ugly of technology and media. T

he New York Times article about Amazon: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big...