Several folks with whom I am friends on Facebook have shared this article about smartphones and their impact on individuals and society. This is a very detailed piece about this issue — one that is likely elicit emotional responses from any reader. For anyone who cares about any combination of faith, education, and technology (FaithEdTech), there are a number of points to unpack.
Sometime during this next week I will put together a larger post that shares my thoughts about this article and both the research I have reviewed as well as personal observations. However, I believe that this issue is far too complicated for any one of us to fully address. We need to talk, converse, and learn from each other because I believe that there is no way one person (especially myself) can make sense of what is going on in our world given the rapid pace of change in this digital age.
Feel free to begin discussing this article and its findings as a comment to this post. Here are a couple question prompts to begin the conversation:
- What is the spiritual impact of what is shared in the article?
- Is a generation truly being destroyed by smartphones? Why or why not?
- How do we as individuals and as a society when something is truly better or worse than before or simply different?
Here is another link to the full article:
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
FaithEdTech 
Appreciate your circumspect approach to this article. I saw it as well and my first thought was that with a few changes in the text we could have sent it back to 1953 when television first came on the scene as a household purchase. There are certainly some valid questions of mindful use raised by the article and I look forward to hearing more about what others are thinking on this topic. I am not ready to demonize the smartphone yet.
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I love your mention of “mindful use”. That will be a key theme in a response and post I am formulating.
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