Albert Mohler on Jeffery Zaslow’s WSJ article, “The Greatest Generation (of Networkers)“: “[This] article should be read by parents, pastors, teachers, and anyone who cares about the minds and souls of young people.” Mohler asks questions like:
How does this digital revolution effect the souls of young people who quite literally sleep with cellphones on the pillow, lest they miss a text message in the night? What space is left for the development of flesh-and-blood friendships? How are they related to people who do not have access to text messages? Is their communicative ability now limited to 140 characters in a burst?
Among young Christians, what space is left for the development of a devotional life? Do their lives contain any space for extended quiet and reflection, for prayer, or for reading anything longer than a text message?
But then he reflects on these same issues in his own life:
This is precisely where evangelical Christians need to invest serious thought and reflection. We should all be concerned when Steve Gallagher laments that these young people think they need constant access to social media the way they need oxygen for breathing.
Then again, maybe the real problem is much worse than Zaslow and Gallagher acknowledge. Is this phenomenon limited to the “hypersocialized” young? In the spirit of personal confession I must admit that I turn on my iPhone the moment the plane hits the tarmac on landing. I feel irresponsible if I do not post regular Twitter updates and check email and messages constantly. Colleagues, friends, and constituents expect “hypersocializing,” and they now range across the age spectrum.
There is no going back — at least not in terms of retreat. The social universe is a fact of life, and a missiological challenge for the Christian church. We are all Facebookers now.
The hypersocialized generation of teenagers and young adults needs to learn limits. Parents must provide those limits for their children and encourage them in older offspring. Educators and executives cannot ignore the challenge, but there is as yet no mechanism for determining proper balance in a world growing more hypersocialized by the day.
We are all looking for someone to figure this out and find the responsible boundaries. When this happens, let’s hope they send a text message to the rest of us.
