Thanks Shane. It's great to be back. When did you first realize you needed to write this book? What event or series of events in your life prompted

it? So in 2020, summer of 2020, I was sitting on my in-laws patio. I remember it pretty distinctly, and I finished Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows, what the Internet is doing to our brains. Published in 2010, I think a finalist for the Pulitzer, and ended that book and realized that if what Nicholas Carr had said in that book was true, then the theological implications were massive. I wasn't able to think of anybody that I knew in my theological tribe who was pointing this out. There was no conversation going specifically about the theological implications of what he was saying. I just stewed on that for several months and threw myself into reading to see if there was between Christian anthropology and media studies to see if what Carr had dug up was kind of thematically uniting some of this material. There was a coherent theological picture that could be brought out to bear, and there was. That led not so much to a feeling of, hey, I've got a really smart idea. I want to try to write a book and get it published and all that. It was more, hey, there are these other thinkers who have done a lot of work on this topic, but a lot of it is secular. The Christian thinking is kind of implying the implications, but they're not spilling it out. What if I took the work of Nicholas Carr, the work of Neil Postman, the work of Marshall McLuhan, and I made it talk to these Christian anthropological principles, would that maybe get the conversation going in the direction that I wanted it to go? That's kind of what led to the conversations and the skeleton of the book. I tell people there's really nothing uniquely insightful in this book to me. I'm not making this up. I didn't come up with this. This book is really resourcement, making what I believe to be a theologically and philosophically and experientially provable observation about media, making that speak to our theological categories in a way that I think is clarifying for a lot of people.

I think the best books are always a sort of exercise in connecting dots that are already out there. So authors feel like everybody should be able to look at those dots, those different books, those observations, those writers, those theologians in this case, and draw the connections and say, okay, here's how it all fits together and here's how it applies to this subject of the internet. But a lot of times those connections aren't as obvious as the author thinks they are. That's where the value of the book lies. It's in finding that lacuna, if you will, that needs to be filled up. In this case, it seems to me, if I may say so, that the lacuna here is this continued assumption and you deal with it in the book. You actually point this assumption out. Christians have this assumption that technology is inherently neutral and that we just decide how to use it either morally or immorally. In many ways, this whole book is a challenge to that assumption that technology is neutral. You actually say technology has a shape to it. It's got a moral character or a built-in set of assumptions that directs us toward a certain way of looking at the world. Can you explain that? Because I think many Christians will hear me say technology is neutral and go, yeah, right, that's correct.

Yeah, absolutely. The fundamental observation, I think, from Scripture is that, first of all, the created world has an intrinsic power. We were created from physical dust. We are created to inhabit a physical world. God is a God of reality and a God of embodiment. We are the C.S. Lewis quote that's actually a fake quote. You're not a body, you're a soul that has a body. That's not true. Logically, is that God created us with bodies. Aschatologically, there is embodiment at the beginning of our life, but at the end of time, right? We'll be in glorified bodies. The idea there is that we are intrinsically embodied people. The internet presents to many people as simply a new way to do something. Instead of going into the restaurant drive-through, instead of going to the movie rental place, you know, stream it. The tendency is to think that, well, the internet is simply expediting this process that's already happening. It's just kind of a new flavor or new style and a way to do it. But I think what the Bible would have us understand is that any kind of language habitat, and Nicholas Carr is who brings the language of kind of intellectual technology. By that he means the difference between a screwdriver and the difference between the internet is that the screwdriver doesn't actually change your thought patterns. The screwdriver doesn't actually give you kind of a new way to communicate and to learn the internet does. So the internet is an intellectual technology. So when you have an intellectual technology, the power of that intellectual technology to actually commend certain things to your soul is there. And it's there for it's there whether the result is good or the result is bad. So a jet engine, this is Marshall McLuhan's famous example in understanding media, the jet engine creates a world where you should be able to fly to the East Coast from the West Coast in just a number of hours. It creates the plausibility and the railroad did the same thing. It creates this plausibility of, yeah, you should be able to get to this place. Even if you live here, you should be able to go here in just a few hours. I'm nowhere in the book do I say that that's immoral or a problem, but it is a different kind of world. It shapes us in a particular way and it creates the sense of this is what life should be like. And so the internet is the same exact way. The internet is this technology and especially because it's an intellectual technology, the kind of world that it makes plausible is tied to our sense of who we are, of who God is, of what truth is and of the kind of people that we are and the kind of the way the world really is. So when we say technology is not neutral, that's not to say that technology is inherently immoral. We're simply saying that technology has a thumbprint and that thumbprint is left on every area of life because now there is no such thing and I think it's McLuhan who makes this point and maybe it's Postman, I can't remember. There is no such thing as a non-Ril road world. There is no such thing as a non-Jet airplane world. Like that kind of world is created. It's here. The logic of that is not going away. There's no such thing as a pre-internet world anymore. And so that's simply what I mean by the internet is not neutral.

A lot of what you do is reapply or update some of the insights that Neil Postman has in amusing ourselves to death, which is primarily about television, right, to this new medium of the internet. Could you kind of give us a crash course on what it is he does there because I've talked about and written about that book for a long time, but his insights about the way television changed the way people think are still underappreciated. And as you said, they're enormously applicable to the internet.

Absolutely. So I think amusing ourselves to death, one of the observations that he makes in that book that just kind of blew my mind and really kind of set me on the trajectory that ended up in the book was that television is as a production medium, it has to stage the world, right? So television, you have to have a set, you have to have lights, you have to have music. And this was Postman's complaint with TV news, right, that the idea that you're cheapening intellectual discourse, because you have to, as soon as you move on to TV, you have to make it a mode of entertainment. You have to keep the audience's attention with flashy little manipulations of their attention. But what Postman said was, so you stage the world on the production side of TV, when people watch that, they get a sense of how the world is supposed to look. And so in that way, TV restages the world. So example, if you can think of any kind of sitcom, Seinfeld really popularized the idea of like most of the scenes are going to take place in this one apartment with like the off screen bedroom and bathroom. And you can just think of the way that stage. Well, so someone watching Seinfeld or a sitcom like that, imagine someone watching that at like seven or nine years old, you are seeing what you think life actually looks like. You're seeing that on the television and you're saying, that's what life should look like. I should live in that kind of apartment. My friend should always be coming and going in that apartment. Life should feel this way. It should look this way. It should have that kind of vibe going for it. And so in that way, Postman says, TV restages the world. It gives us a sense that, hey, if we're being really serious and like not breaking it up with humor every 20 seconds, something's wrong. Why? Because that's what television does. If we're not kind of living in this super active kind of hive of, you know, always constantly joking with our friends and just kind of this carefree life, something's wrong. Why? Because that's what TV presents to us. TV restages the world showing us what life could be like and should be like as we immerse ourselves and its narratives.

So the internet now does something that's not the same as what TV does. But it's in many ways more immersive, more intensive. And this is where I think we need to really establish the premise of the book. I think this is, this will be eye opening for so many people. What is it that happens when we log into the internet? Let's say one of the big social media sites over the last few years, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, what assumptions are we buying into about the way the world is that are analogous to those assumptions that you buy into as you watch a, you know, a sitcom? And how do you know they're not true? So in other words, identify the lie that were the premise that we're accepting immediately without knowing it. That's a great question.

So imagine someone kind of discovering the internet for the first time and kind of like taking a tour of what it's like to be on social media. You know, whether this person has, you know, a great deal of real life experience or whether they're, you know, six, seven years old, this person discovers social media. How do people perceive them? How do people see them? Well, the answer is that people can only see or perceive them through the things they choose to share, right? Because on the internet, you only exist as content. That's what disembodiment means, right? If you and I are in the same room, then no matter, I could choose to say a lot. I could choose to say nothing, but I'm there in front of you. I can't hide. I can't hide who I am. I can't hide my body language. I can't hide a significant sense of who I am from you in that moment because we're both embodied together. And there's

no profile picture you're presenting to me. And there's no profile picture. I look over and I see your actual face, whether, you know, whether you're making a dashing winning expression like you want in your profile picture or you're just like sitting there drooling or something. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. It's the real me on social media. The situation is completely different. I can choose the best profile picture of me to take. I can edit it so that it looks like what I think, talk about restaging the world. I can change it to where it looks like how I think I should look like. And then whatever you know about me is entirely dependent on what I choose to share. If I tell you I'm having a hard day on social media, that's the kind of person I am that day to you. If I tell you that I am very accomplished and very productive that day, that's the type of person I am to you. I am controlling my self-revelation to you because I can mediate everything through this technology that's waiting on me to produce content. And so the lie there is really the fundamental lie of human existence. I'm God because what's true of God? God can only be known through self-revelation. You and I, we're not that way because people know us. We were, you and I were born to people before we chose to give ourselves to somebody else. We were given to someone with no voluntary power of our own. But God can only be known through what he chooses to share. And so the self-revelatory aspect of social media is in fact a digital liturgy that reinforces to us this sense of God-like control over who we are and over our relationships. And one way this manifests is in cancel culture. So I don't think cancel culture and the internet are the exact same thing. But I do think that if you have this God-like sense of I should be able to control how people perceive me through this technology, then it kind of reverts in the opposite direction as well. I should only be able to see that which I choose to see, that which will make me comfortable, that which will confirm the kind of person that I am. And if there's something on my screen, my literal screen or my screen of life, the kind of school that I'm at, the kind of institution that I'm at, the kind of job that I'm at, if there's something on my existential screen that I don't like, I should be able to close that window to mute that account to delete that thought. Because that's how I'm habituated. That's how the world has been restaged for me. So I think that's one big one that I talk about in the book and one that has continuing relevance for especially people of our generation.