I posted this before, but the insatiable Blogger monsters swallowed it up. Last Thursday, the Word on Fire blog posted the second part of our interview concerning the recent Vatican blogger meeting. Here is a snippet:
Word on Fire: What are some practical tips for avoiding the frenetic quality that can characterize online communication and can be overwhelming to participants?
Brandon Vogt: In his important book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr reveals how the Internet—and its associated new media—is fundamentally a medium of distraction. In fact, modern neuroscience shows how online activity physically rewires our brains to make us more adept at skimming, browsing, and surface-level engagement. And it doesn’t help that every time we open our Internet browser we become crushed under the avalanche of information overload.
So to the extent that we swim in this digital flow, we conform to its excited, distracted pace.
Obviously, this has profound spiritual ramifications. Our religion is grounded in practices like prayer, contemplation, and adoration—things that require our full attention and focus. This directly clashes with Internet culture.
So what’s a Christian to do? How can we begin to counter the Internet’s incessant distraction and information overload?
Head over to the Word on Fire blog to read the rest of the interview!
(And if you missed it, you can find the first part of the interview here.)