But overall cyberspace (and hardly anyone calls it this any more) has diminished community if one means by that embodied relationships bound by troth, friendship, citizenship, and physical proximity. People practice an “absent presence” constantly as they talk on cell phones while checking out at the supermarket or at Starbucks, as they send text messages during classes instead of attending to teachers and students, as they play video games instead of getting to know their spouses and children. One could go on.

This seems very perceptive in light of what I see on the Net today: “The soul in cyberspace may easily habituate itself to browsing, data-surfing, and skimming in exchange for analysis, reflection, and discourse.” Is there something inherent in the digital medium that leads us to browse, to skim, to reject real analysis, reflection and discourse? Is there anything we can do about it or is this just the nature of the beast?

I think I covered the problem above. What we can do about it is to create engaged classrooms, discussions, church services, and reflective reading of significant texts, especially the Bible. This means putting aside multi-tasking and immersing oneself in propositional communication of various forms. One illuminating exercise I require of my students is to abstain from one major electronic medium for ten days. This reorients their awareness and shows them the possibilities for unmediated communication—and for silence.

As I understand it, the ultimate purpose of your book was to try to understand how this medium of cyberspace shaped us, our families, our churches, our nations, our world. In the front of the book I jotted this, my one big takeaway from the book: “Christians are specially equipped to think rightly about technology.” Is this the case? What do Christians stand to lose if we do not understand the effects of technology in each of these areas? What do we stand to gain?

As recipients of salvation by God’s grace in Christ, we can gain a proper relationship to God and a proper perspective on God’s world. But this is not automatic. Sadly, for many reasons, Christians are often the least reflective people about technologies. Our populism and pragmatism get the best of us and we fail to step back and ask the more philosophical and theological questions of our technologies. Yet Christians should ask God to grant them wisdom to discern God’s kingdom purposes for technologies. If we fail to gain discernment, the result is simply worldliness: we engage technologies in ways that undermine virtue, make us less sensitive to good, evil, and God himself. These are no small perils. See Romans 12:1-2; I John 2:15-17; Hebrews 5:11-14.